A Moral Squid Game of Modern Pedagogy: The Insidious Impact of Competitive Selection on Character

31-01-2026

Competing for a job, alongside peers (known or unknown), to secure a seat is a guilt-ridden activity. Traditional selfhood can feel like a kind of Faustian bargain within while struggling to secure the seat. You don't know which person is more in need of it, especially when living in a region of market saturation and unemployment. Still, you have to desensitize yourself and try your best to qualify, regardless of the insidious psychic changes occurring within. This struggle can be categorized into exterior efforts as well as internal dynamics of wanting or desiring.

The whole process of professional recruitment is a moral dilemma. Ground realities force your inner self to want to secure the seat at all costs; some people may take relatively normalized illegal channels for this purpose, while others may undergo merely a psychological change due to existentially felt desires to be selected. On the other hand, moral conscience remains, voicing a latent feeling that these inner changes are making you morally corrupt, as per the ideals of a beautified virtuous character.

This disparity is inherent in the working dynamics of modern pedagogy because it systematically categorizes and discriminates competitors under the banner of merit or grading. The law of the jungle, famously known as "survival of the fittest," is the soul of modern pedagogy, unlike traditional pedagogy, whose substantial purpose was moral in nature. Modern pedagogy delinks education from knowledge and links education to financial necessities; therefore, subjects formulated in modern systems inculcate a narrow conception of human beings.

Modern educational systems systematically institutionalize instincts traditionally subject to taming. Competitive psychology in the worldly sphere is grounded in an egoistic disposition. Meanwhile, moral selfhood constitutes itself through winning others at the cost of your own self, but the modern predicament entraps you to lose yourself at the cost of the other. This is the paradox of the self. The substantiality of the self depends on the negation of the self for the Other/other. Negation here is not a radical phenomenon; rather, its connotation resembles the aesthetization of morality.

Self-centeredness is the root evil for the soul; it snatches it from its roots, and rootlessness makes it a morsel of nothingness in a state of being alive. It is a modern enterprise of dehumanization. If someone cannot resonate with this moral dilemma, it means dehumanization has occurred.

و اللہ اعلم