Parents escort their children to school with a singular obsession: results. Not learning, not character, not competence—results. The grade, the mean score, the ranking. The certificate that can be paraded at family gatherings and splashed across social media timelines. In this fixation, an uncomfortable truth is quietly buried: very few parents genuinely care whether those results are honest, earned, or meaningful. What matters is the appearance of success. The rest is inconvenient detail.
This obsession has turned schooling into a theatre of deception. Schools are pressured to produce impressive outcomes at all costs. Teachers are pushed to “deliver grades” rather than build understanding. Learners are coached to pass exams instead of being taught to think. Parents, fully aware that shortcuts are being taken, often look the other way. Some even demand it. As long as the report card glitters, consciences are dulled and questions postponed.
The danger of this mindset lies in its short-term comfort and long-term cruelty. Artificial success feels good—briefly. A top grade earned through inflated assessments, leaked exams, excessive coaching, or outright cheating offers instant gratification. It reassures parents that their sacrifices have paid off and convinces learners that they are exceptional. But this comfort is deceptive. It is built on sand, and sand never holds.
The reckoning comes later, and it comes mercilessly. When learners transition to universities and colleges—spaces less forgiving, less controlled, and far less willing to manufacture success—the illusion collapses. Suddenly, the learner who topped their class struggles to write a coherent academic paper. The student with straight As cannot analyse a basic problem independently. The once-celebrated high achiever is unable to cope without spoon-feeding.
One parent tells the story in hushed tones. His daughter posted straight As in secondary school and earned admission to a prestigious public university. The family celebrated; convinced they had raised a prodigy. Within the first semester, reality struck. She failed two core units and barely passed the rest. She could not follow lectures, panicked when asked to write independent coursework, and had no grasp of academic referencing. Eventually, she admitted that throughout high school, most assignments had been corrected in advance or heavily guided. She had never truly stood on her own academically. The grades had lied. By second year, her confidence was shattered, and dropping out felt like a real option.
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This is the “can of worms” parents pretend not to see while it is being sealed. University lecturers encounter students who cannot read critically, reason logically, or apply knowledge beyond rehearsed formats. Employers complain of graduates who hold degrees but lack basic workplace skills. Remedial classes mushroom in higher institutions, quietly correcting failures that should never have passed for excellence.
In another case, a first-year engineering lecturer shared his frustration after discovering that several students admitted with strong mathematics grades could not perform basic algebra without calculators. One student, who had scored an A- in mathematics, failed a simple diagnostic test designed to assess foundational skills. When questioned, he admitted his secondary school specialised in “exam prediction”—drilling likely questions and marking schemes rather than teaching concepts. Faced with unfamiliar problems that demanded reasoning, he was completely lost. The lecturer observed that the student was not lazy; he was a casualty of a system that rewarded memorisation and shortcuts while punishing genuine understanding.
The tragedy is not that learners struggle; struggle is part of learning. The tragedy is that they were lied to—systematically and repeatedly. They were told they were competent when they were not. They were promoted without mastering basics. They were praised for performance rather than progress. By the time reality intervenes, the psychological damage is already done. Confidence crumbles. Anxiety rises. Some drop out. Others drift through university disillusioned and unprepared for life beyond the classroom.
Parents are not innocent bystanders in this crisis. Many are active participants. They reward grades, not effort. They compare children, not growth. They demand explanations for a B but celebrate an A without asking how it was achieved. Some confront teachers aggressively when marks dip but fall silent when suspicious improvements appear overnight. In doing so, they send a clear message: results matter more than integrity.
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Schools, too, have capitulated. In a climate of fierce competition and public ranking, institutions are tempted to polish numbers rather than nurture minds. Marketing brochures boast of mean scores while ignoring learning gaps. Weak learners are drilled to survive exams, not supported to understand. Education becomes transactional: parents pay, schools deliver grades, and learners pass through largely unchallenged.
The cost of this collective dishonesty is national. A country cannot build its future on certificates that do not reflect competence. When universities become repair workshops for basic skills, their mission is undermined. When graduates enter the workforce unprepared, productivity suffers. When integrity is sacrificed early, corruption finds fertile ground later. What begins as harmless grade inflation ends as a crisis of credibility.
Ironically, the parents who chase results the hardest are often the loudest critics when the system finally exposes their children. They blame universities for being too demanding, lecturers for being unfair, and curricula for being irrelevant. Rarely do they look back and ask whether the foundations were ever solid. Rarely do they acknowledge their role in creating the monster they now fear.
True education is slower, messier, and less glamorous than manufactured success. It involves struggle, failure, correction, and growth. It requires patience from parents, professionalism from teachers, and honesty from institutions. It demands that we value competence over comparison and integrity over instant applause. This path may not always produce headline-grabbing results, but it produces resilient, capable learners who can survive beyond the classroom.
The uncomfortable truth is this: deception always expires. No learner outruns reality forever. Universities and colleges merely pull back the curtain that basic education carefully drew. When that happens, the applause dies, the grades lose meaning, and what remains is ability—or the painful absence of it.
If parents truly care about their children’s future, they must abandon the shallow worship of results and demand real learning. Otherwise, they will keep celebrating illusions today and mourning failures tomorrow, wondering how a child who “did so well” ended up so unprepared. The answer has always been there, hidden beneath the glitter of dishonest success.
By Hillary Muhalya
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