Liars, Cheaters, and Thieves

Article date: 12.02.08

By John C. Dvorak

The Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics released a survey saying that today's kids are becoming completely unethical in every way. Fully 40 percent thought that you cannot succeed […] without lying, cheating, or stealing. I think this number is a little high, but I can see how many kids could feel that way, when they look around and see so many successful people who are found out to be dishonest.

The problem stems in part from the lack of controls in an increasingly laissez-faire business environment, where monopolistic and anti-consumer methodologies are encouraged. […]

Now, in defense of this next generation, perhaps ethics have changed. Should we redefine "cheating," for example? Stealing from a store is a bad sign of things to come, that's for sure. But when it comes to cheating on a test or lifting things from the Internet, I've never been convinced that this has been approached correctly.

For one thing, the days of the closed-book test should have ended years ago. In today's world you don't get anywhere by memorizing the birthdates of Abe Lincoln or Christopher Columbus. It proves nothing to know this information. And most of the information that kids have traditionally scribbled on their hands or now text message about is actually trivia.

For most subjects outside of math or physics, it would be hard to cheat if tests were properly designed and more thoughtful.

Now here's the kicker: I argue that given the way things are designed within the school systems today (and this has been the case for decades), cheating is encouraged. In fact, in some instances, cheating is demanded. Furthermore, what's the typical punishment? A slap on the wrist and the subtle message, "if you're going to cheat, don't get caught!"

In fact, children in school are trained to cheat better and better over time. Want to stop cheating in classroom testing? Put the kids in a supervised room of cubicles where they cannot see each other—and put a cell-phone jammer in the room. There would be no cheating. If there were any concern whatsoever about rampant cheating (as there should be), then every school in the country would have one of these rooms for testing.

Plagiarism is also being handled incorrectly. The Internet should be a tool for helping students write papers. Children should be encouraged to rip text from sources and put it into their papers. But it should all be accounted for with simple citations. Lift whatever you want and tell the teacher where it came from, then comment on it—just as a blog post would. I'd even encourage kids to buy term papers online and add them to their own papers, with a critique of the bought item. "In this paper, which is sold on the Internet to students for $2, the author claims that the war was planned in secret. This contradicts the account cited in Wikipedia…." Or whatever.

This type of thoughtful and detailed exercise of public documents would get an "F" in today's school system, when in fact the student will have learned more from the exercise than he would have from trying to synthesize a textbook and two lectures on the topic.

And let's take modern education to the next level. Why are today's students forced to perform with 19th-century methodologies? Why do they have to write essays at all? Why can't they produce a PowerPoint presentation? Or create a video? Or a podcast?

When some student actually produces a multimedia report, she ends up on the 6 o'clock news as some sort of interesting freak. The teachers never know what to make of the presentation, and it's back to writing thoughtful essays that are seldom thoughtful and rarely worth reading.

The result is cheating, and this in itself may be fostering the other behaviors. […] There's something wrong with this picture, and I for one would like to know what it is.