There is an article by Jeremy Meyer in today's Denver Post that just knocked my socks off. The article cites a survey of 24,000 U.S. students at 70 high schools. The survey shows that 95% of students admit that they have "participated in some form of cheating, whether tests, plagiarism, or copying homework! The conducter of the survey said the students justified their cheating.
The article goes on to say that some "educational psychologists" (here we go again) say that they "fear high-stakes tests and grade-point averages that determine college acceptance are leading students to cheat." Okay, secular psychologists, by that line of reasoning, then does that mean that there should be no high standards that we expect the little darlings to strive for? The article cites yet another study that concludes that "cheating in high school is a significant predictor of lying and cheating across a wide range of adult situations." We needed a study for this conclusion?
As soon as I finished reading this article I sat down with my sons. I told them that we expect them to try hard, but that if they try their hardest and do their homework to prepare, and still do not achieve a high score, we will be proud of them anyway for preparing and trying hard. Greg told me that he did not know how to proceed once with a math problem, so he just wrote in "blah, blah, blah" on the answer sheet to that particular problem.
I showed the boys the Denver Post article, where it says if you convince yourself that it is okay to cheat on one thing, then you are likely to cheat in other areas of your life, too. I told them that there is a solution: that God is always with us, always willing to forgive us, and if we learn to trust God, He will show us how to behave properly in any situation. I warned them that they might have to keep on asking God to forgive them, because it is just our human nature to keep making the same mistakes over and over. If they finally learn to just let go of behaviors that are not working well for them, and trust God to show them a better way, He will always be willing to do that.
I asked Greg if he knew of a better solution to that math problem. He said, "I could just leave it blank, and then tell the teacher that I don't understand how to do that problem." I agreed with Greg that his idea was a good one, but I also know of our sinful nature, and that we need to keep asking forgiveness and learn to trust God to show us The Way.
2 comments:
Wow Bob you certainly handled that the proper way. But you know in defense of these cheating kids, when as a collective we look the other way because oh let's say it's just about sex, we send a message that young people hear louder and clearer than perhaps we intended. BTW tell Greg wish I had thought of that one, ha.
Everyday conundrums bother me: if everyone is cheating, how are we supposed to compete? Maybe the solution is: we are not supposed to compete with THAT, but rather with ourselves -- i.e. compete with our best selves to see how close we can come to our best effort, or to see how close we can come to excellence, or to see how close we can come to God's Perfection.
Another school thing bothers me: lets say you are coaching high school basketball, and your players cannot draw a high percentage of rightful charging calls w/o also doing some flopping for the visual benefit of the referee who is calling the game. What to do? Is the game a "refereed game" in which the referee is part of the game, and in which drawing referee calls is part of being skilled at playing the game? Or, is the game analogous to life, and the referee analogous to a law enforcement officer, and the conduct of the players analogous to making virtuous vs. unvirtuous decisions? What if your team has a chance to win a state championship, but, realistically, will not win the state championship unless the players are skilled at helping the referee to see the charging violations being committed against them? What if your football team has a chance to win the state championship, yet cannot realistically do so unless the offensive linemen commit whatever type of holding which the referees typically allow, yet which strict rule book interpretation does not? What if it's the state championship baseball game, and the winning run is called safe at home to secure the victory, yet the runner knows, in his heart, that he was actually tagged out by the catcher and that the umpire missed the call? What, if anything, to do? What are the ethical implications? What if the runner knows he had a couple of strikes called on him earlier which ought have been called balls? What if the runner knows that, earlier in the game, he was called out at second base when he was actually safe?
These are, for me, tough questions. I am not confident about understanding the righteous answers. It is surely just as bad to allow a misguided sense of duty to generate in one a failure to compete as vigorously as possible. What a waste that would be. What a waste of potential, of lifeforce, of available vigor, or potential joy and sense of accomplishment. Wasting such is surely just as bad, if not worse, than committing run of the mill selfish deception. Wasting such must be it's own form of deception.
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