A colleague of mine, a kindergarten teacher, has an arch and winning way of describing bad or questionable behavior or just plain stupidity by people who should know better. Using the language and tone of her classroom, she will point out how someone “is making a bad choice.”
It seems lots of people, as Ms. Pearson would say, are making bad choices. A national survey of nearly 30,000 high school students shows that 30 percent admit to stealing from a store in the past year, while two-thirds have cheated on a test. Against the available evidence, “93 percent were satisfied with their personal ethics and character,” as Joanne Jacobs notes.
Boston Herald columnist Michael Graham says as Americans, we’re not shocked by the survey results because “it’s impossible to be shocked without first being judgmental. And in contemporary America, the only remaining universal sin is to declare anyone else’s behavior sinful.”
When the bullets fly in Dorchester or the blood spills at Wal-Mart, we crank up the Great American Excuse Machine and let fly: Dorchester is violent because of poverty. Scared Americans trample each other at Wal-Mart because of the terrible “Bush economy.” Our kids cheat because academic standards are too high, etc., etc.
“Here’s an idea,” says Graham. “Let’s try holding someone responsible for his own actions for a change. It wouldn’t be a shock. It would be a revolution.”
Maybe fewer of us would make bad choices.
Part of the problem is the belief that the basis of morality is personal choice. This is the end state of radical individualism and moral relativism.
Hold people personally responsible for what? Choice theory doesn’t offer a standard, other than some sort of cost/benefit analysis of the effects of a choice on the self.
So what’s wrong with cheating?
In my experience, few educators can any longer articulate a clear and coherent argument against it. Or if they can, they would never dream of doing so out loud and in public. They will try to make it a matter of “respect” or “tolerance” which are the only moral terms they have left to work with. Goodness has been debunked and dethroned, and only self interest remains.
The idea of what’s wrong with cheating is interesting. But how about what IS cheating? When otherwise thoughtful people insist that a command of facts and background knowledge is unimportant in the Age of Google, what’s the difference between going online to look up what year the War of 1812 was fought, and downloading an entire term paper about it? Isn’t information literacy, and the ability to synthesize and manipulate information the goal? Is the real task writing the paper? Or having the discernment to judge three different papers on the same subject as good, better, best — and submit the best one?
Mind you, I don’t believe this for a second. But I can certainly imagine someone making this argument and meaning it.