President Eisgruber suggested in his latest President’s Page that the rise in cheating might have to do with the growing income inequalities in a competitive, winner-take-all society. In my experience as a middle school and elementary school teacher, there is another key factor in cheating’s rise: the growing disconnect between students and what they learn in school.
This disconnect is a result of the current trend in middle schools, elementary schools, and even kindergartens to pump students full of abstract, intellectual knowledge at a time when they have not yet formed a living relationship with the subjects they study. Rather than being guided to appreciate oak trees and ferns, third-graders read in textbooks about the inputs and outputs of photosynthesis. Before they have listened to a fairy tale or played in a sandbox, kindergartners are taught math facts and phonemes. And by middle school, testing and computers have completed the divorce of young people from the marvelous real world that lies behind all school subjects.
When school subjects become abstractions and everyone around you is “racing to the top,” cheating can seem like a logical choice.