Education Philosophy-T o Cheat or Not to Cheat

[FVoehl@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/21/99 7:29:46 AM, invenia@guate.net wrote:

<<Or for example, schools should help students to learn how to learn, but 
instead they're making students learn how to learn by heart or how to be 
good cheaters>>

Cynthia raises an excellent point which was recently addressed in a US News 
And World Report article *The Cheating Game* (11/22/99, pp. 55). According to 
a recent poll, 84% of college students believe that they need to cheat to get 
ahead in the world today and 90% believe that cheaters never pay the price.  
While crib sheets and copying answers is nothing new, what has changed now is 
the scope of the problem--technology that opens up new avenues to cheat and 
the students boldness and erosion of conscience at every level of education.

Academic fraud has never been easier.  Sissella Bok, author of *Lying:  Moral 
Choice in Public and Private Life* believes that the heart of the problem 
lies in the fact that people are very confused by *what is meant by 
cheating.*  For example, when does taking information off the internet 
constitute research and when is it plagiarism?  Where does collaboration end 
and collusion begin?  The rules, or operational definitions, are just not 
very clear, especially in an age that stresses teamwork.  The result is a 
widespread epidemic of homework copying and a proliferation of six-grade 
science projects that are so sophisticated that the obvious stamp of parental 
involvement is accepted and commonplace.

Myron Tribus summed it up perfectly the other day in a post to me with a 
quote that I will use here:  *You can sum it up this way:  We don't know what 
do with our children after we have protected them from the things that made 
us strong.* 
Parents who complete the bulk of their children's work often frustrate those 
with a more hands-off approach, as Myron suggests.  I call this the *Pinewood 
Derby Syndrome* when fathers are putting a fair share of the toothpicks into 
styroform for soap-box derby cars and unduly meddle in science projects.  The 
pressure is on because these fathers know that if they don't participate, 
then their children will lose because other fathers are helping their 
children. 

One of the reasons that I respected Dr. Deming's approach to education so 
much was he believed in, and taught about ethics in education and ethics in 
life.  Forget about SoPK if we don't first teach about ethics.  Maybe that is 
what he meant in his systems of knowledge and psychology.

Frank Voehl (FVoehl@aol.com)
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