speaking of cheating.......
BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #000609 - 6/9/2000
Cheating Lessons: Are We Rearing Moral Dunces?
Potomac, Maryland, is known for its multimillion-
dollar estates and highly-ranked elementary school --
considered one of the best in the country.
But a few days ago, Potomac became known for
something else: One of the worst cheating scandals in
recent memory. Only, it wasn't the students who were
cheating: It was a teacher and the school's
principal.
The whole sordid story exposes how in secular America
we've lost the basis for ethics.
It turns out that when students took a state
achievement test last month, a fifth-grade teacher
and the school's principal pointed out wrong answers
and urged kids to "try again." The students were
given far longer to complete the tests than the rules
allowed. Some were even called back later and told to
change their answers.
Parents were outraged when they found out. As one
parent put it, for kids "to see their principal and
teachers helping them [cheat] . . sends a horrible
message."
The students were getting a moral education, all
right, but the wrong kind. But who's surprised?
Instead of teaching kids what constitutes good
character, many teachers today are encouraging kids
to discover their own values. It's the dangerous idea
that all values are equal. In fact, the only time the
curriculum is directive is when it involves trendy
causes like environmentalism or feminism.
What educators don't seem to understand is that
virtue is not a matter of social causes. It's a
matter of the soul, and that's where moral education
has to begin.
The point was beautifully illustrated a few years ago
in a story told by philosophy professor Christina
Hoff Sommers. Sommers had published an article urging
ethics teachers to focus as much on private virtue as
they do on public ethics -- to teach things like
personal honesty, decency, and responsibility.
One of Sommers's colleagues, an ethics professor,
scoffed at this argument: "You're not going to have
moral people," the colleague insisted, "until you
have moral institutions." And she told Sommers that
she planned to continue talking about social issues
like women's rights, gay rights, and protecting the
rain forests.
By the end of the semester, however, Sommers'
colleague was singing a different tune. To her shock,
more than half the students in her ethics course had
cheated on a take-home exam. Sheepishly, she told
Sommers, "I'd like to borrow a copy of that article
you wrote on ethics without virtue."
This professor learned the hard way that we can deal
with the moral malaise in American life only when we
begin to cultivate personal virtue.
That's a lesson that some of the kids in Potomac
appear to have learned already. After taking their
tests, they had the moral maturity to tell their
parents that their teacher and principal had asked
them to cheat. It seems their parents had taught them
that cheating is wrong. Well, good for them!
Plato said that order in society depends on the order
in the individual human soul. When even school
principals can't tell right from wrong, maybe it's
time to bring that ancient dictum back.
For the best way to avoid rearing a generation of
moral dunces is to teach our kids -- and their teachers
-- that there are absolute standards of right and wrong.
And cheating is always wrong, no matter who tells you
to do it.
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