Cheaters Never Prosper

An alarming study caught my eye earlier this week. It seems that in the last year 30 percent of U. S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a study done by the Josephson Institute, a Los Angeles based ethics institute.

While educators are noting that the increased pressure to succeed as well as the array of ways in which to achieve this success (not all of them "legal"), have contributed to this alarming trend, I think that there is no excuse for this behavior. OK, life is competitive and OK, there are lots of essays for sale on the Internet, but that does not make it right to plagiarize in order to go to the head of the class.

For one thing, think of the additional burden this places on already over-burdened teachers. Not only do they have to invent new, creative and fast-paced ways to grab the attention of their students, they now must monitor their work to make sure it is their own. Not only do they have to grade papers, they have to police them.

For another, what is the lesson learned by those who get away with it. That they can because a purchased paper makes it past a teacher who may have simply been too tired to check the Internet for variations? And what ever happened to doing the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do?

Perhaps most telling is the implication that we need to teach our kids ethics--that they simply do not know right from wrong--or worse yet that they do and still choose wrong over right.

When it comes to the honor system, I used to tell my kids it was the same thing as traffic lights. No one is watching you all the time to make sure you don't run red lights. Just imagine what would happen if everyone decided not to follow the rules of the road. Chaos. Injury. Confusion. And surely fatalities.

I think the same thing applies to ethics for life. Just because no one is watching does not mean that it is OK to break the rules because the same consequences apply.

And no, I don't agree with one educator who advocated changing the system. "We have to create situations where it's easy for kids to do the right things," he said. "We need to create classrooms where learning takes on more improtance than having the right answer."

On the contrary. I think we need to make it incredibly challenging for kids--to put them in situations where its tough to make the choice to do the right thing--and then to punish those who don't in significant and meaningful ways. Because hopefully if they realize its their own fault, they will only do it once.