Every morning, the gates open and the campus begins to breathe. Corridors fill with hurried footsteps. The canteen stirs before the first lecture. Students settle beneath old trees, greet familiar faces, continue conversations left unfinished the previous day, and slowly disperse towards their classrooms. From a distance, it is a reassuring picture—a thriving institution where young minds gather with a shared purpose: to learn.

But appearances, especially in education, can be profoundly deceptive.Ask students why they came that morning and the first answer is almost instinctive: to attend classes, to study, to build a future. Stay with the question a little longer, however, and a different answer quietly emerges. They came because their attendance has fallen to seventy-three percent. Dropping below seventy-five may cost them their examination eligibility. They came, quite simply, to protect a number.

That number has acquired extraordinary significance. Many students know their attendance percentage with greater certainty than they remember yesterday’s lecture. This is not because attendance matters to them more than learning. It is because the institution has taught them that it does.Every institution reveals its priorities not by what it proclaims, but by what it consistently rewards. We speak of curiosity, critical thinking and intellectual growth as education’s highest ambitions. Yet the consequences attached to attendance are immediate, measurable and unavoidable, while learning remains difficult to recognise and even harder to quantify. Faced with that imbalance, students respond exactly as any rational person would: they begin paying closest attention to the thing that carries the........

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