Irvine511 said:
the reason most kids cheat in school, i think, is not necessarily because they're lazy, but because they know that they are being judged by a set of highly arbitrary markers. it's insanely difficult to get into college these days, something i don't think people over 40 truly appreciate until it comes time for their children to apply. and the more you understand how the process works -- GPA, SATs, clubs/sports/music -- and you've been taught that college acceptance is the be-all, end-all summation of your childhood (and that important sticker on the car), then the process of learning takes a backseat to the accumulation of various "points" that will make you more attractive to an admissions committee.
it's also vastly easier to cheat than it was 20 years ago. i bet you 20 years ago if you'd all had the same tools as kids today do, you'd have just as many people cheating as today.
I agree that it's easier (plagiarism, which I typically encounter multiple times per semester--and not just from my undergrads--comes to mind), but I'm a bit confused as to what you're suggesting about the (im?)morality of it by referring to it in tandem with downloading. In the latter case there's often sincere disagreement about what does and doesn't qualify as theft, even setting aside the "record companies are greedy" rationalizations (which often seem to be acknowledging that it's theft, but arguing that in context theft isn't always wrong, depending on the behavior of the party being "deprived" through theft). But cheating is a bit less of a gray area, is it not? What room for disagreement would there be as to whether sneaking answers for a test into the classroom, or presenting work lifted from some article online as your own, is outside the bounds of the expected teacher-student relationship?
Incidentally, the growth of the "publish or perish" imperative has similarly given rise to increased "cheating" among academics...falsifying one's CV with references to nonexistent publications, plagiarizing the work of colleagues (sometimes with their consent--"swapping"), etc., to the point that many universities now employ quite a few people just to track down things like this. So I'm not sure the perceived significance of "process" necessarily increases with age--not in any across-the-board way, anyhow. On paper maybe, I can appreciate the argument that your average cheating student finds it easy enough to justify their means according to their ends (GPA), because after all your average student doesn't plan to become a teacher, so they have little sense of stake in the mutual integrity of that relationship. But in practice it seems that even those who do plan to teach are nowadays more likely to manipulate that "process," and that unfortunately, this trend continues on into their professional lives as scholars. Which unless we academics are an exceptionally corrupt lot
, makes me wonder what sort of analogous manipulations my cheating students who continue on into business, politics, law, etc. might be committing. I'm not saying some of them won't ultimately "snap out of it," so to speak...but for those that do, I'm skeptical whether aging is really the catalyst. Perhaps it's that they feel less judged by arbitrary markers? Plenty of careers offer those in abundance, though, and practically any authority figure can be reframed as merely an obstacle to your getting what you need, want or deserve.
Now whether all this adds up to solid evidence of some *general* decline in moral integrity, I don't know. But I do very much see it as a serious problem and a threat to the value of learning, the increases in ease and incentives for cheating notwithstanding. I can be sympathetic to the pressures my students who cheat are under without on the one hand saying "Well they'll grow up eventually, it's no big deal so I'm letting it slide," or on the other, "This is hopeless. They're so gutted that nothing I can say will get through to them, so I'll just give them an F and skip the consultation." (I do have colleagues who do both.) I know not all of them will listen or care, but I feel like I owe it to them and to my profession, not to mention the people whose lives they'll affect in the future, to try.
as for downloading ... i think this is actually a poor example of stealing. one thing kids today have a lot more of is information, and the more information you have the tougher it is to live by broad pinciples because exceptions and distinctions start to pop up all over the place. when you realize that it costs only pennies to manufacture a CD, and then HMV turns around and tries to get you to buy it at $18.99, and only 3 tracks are any good anyway, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for a massive record company and an insanely overpaid artist if you get those 3 good tracks over Kazaa.
I don't know that that many artists are insanely overpaid, but at any rate, is sympathy really the appropriate criterion for determining if it's wrong or not?
The disagreement about whether making mixes, especially from stuff you already own in hard copy, constitutes any kind of theft I can understand--in part because by the time I was a teenager, making mixes on cassette (CD burners came later obviously, though CDs were around) was commonplace, and not something it occured to anyone I knew to see as wrong, especially since the commercial availability of singles was so paltry at the time. I did then though, and still do, have reservations about swapping recordings of whole albums--you tape Black Flag for me, I'll tape Sonic Youth for you--because once you get a large-scale dynamic of that going, then quite a few less albums are being sold relative to the number of people who are availing themselves of what, in theory, you're supposed to buy the album to enjoy. I find it hard not to conclude that that has serious potential to hurt artists in the big picture. Now admittedly the market is less album-oriented these days; on the other hand, obviously singles are much more readily available commercially, so I'm inclined to think the same logic still holds, and if anything applies more now to mixes than it did in the past. But considering the example my "generation" has set in this regard (if 30-somethings constitute a separate generation; I think perhaps, technologically speaking, we do) I'll grant this makes it a bit harder for me to deny the existence of a gray area in good conscience.
I do agree though that anecdotal examples of young people who think it's no big deal to steal from Wal-Mart (thank you Abbie Hoffman???) make a poor basis for broad generalizations about moral decline, and that you have to take the nature and scope of the relevant temptations *and disincentives* into account if you're going to point to an increase in violations (in which case stats would be helpful) as evidence for a general decline in "moral fiber." When I managed a (chain) bookstore in grad school (we also sold music and video) "internal shrink," as we called it, was a significant problem, and there were various policies (bag checks, no merchandise allowed in employee-only areas, etc.) in place to combat it, some of which occasionally raised hackles. The standard explanation given to managers of why these policies were necessary was "Don't give good people a reason to do bad things," which could be taken as condescending, but I did appreciate the thinking behind it. And it
was my experience with the employees I had to fire for stealing that most of them had started with something small and then, almost compulsively, gotten into helping themselves to more. None of them ever tried to tell
me it wasn't a big deal, though...I think because as someone they knew and worked with, it was harder for them to project abstract "stealing-from-the-thieves" type rationalizations onto my place in it all. Similarly, I've never had a student caught plagiarizing try to tell me it's OK because they need a good GPA. If people don't fundamentally have faith in "the system" and act accordingly, then it's only a question of time before someone else bites back, and that's when the depth of your belief in the legitimacy of what you're doing will
really matter.
