Oh the Times! Oh the Customs!

Over the past few months a disturbing and world-shattering fact has been brought to my attention, rocking my naive soul, and destroying much of the faith I had had in my peers. This fact is that a lot of people cheat. As a member of the Honor Council and as a pretty intuitive person, I knew that people cheated, but I could never imagine the extent to which cheating appears to be prevalent in American society: I had friends at Governor's School, supposedly the home of our academically most talented, admit to cheating, I've overheard students at my school outright talk about cheating, and I've had friends tell me that "everybody cheats". Everybody does not cheat. But, beneath the obvious issues inherent in a person willing to cheat lies problems in American society, especially Middle and Upper-Middle class American society.
Something is wrong when American children feel that they have to cheat to succeed; something is wrong when Yale students admit to taking attention-enhancing drugs in order to handle their workload; something is wrong when even our best and brightest, people I met at Governor's School, approach cheating as just another fact of life. I do not cheat and I have stellar grades, but even if I didn't, I would never cheat. And I would never cheat for one very simple reason: CHEATING IS WRONG. Period.
But let's approach this problem from a more "entire woods" instead of "individual tree" angle. Something must be desperately wrong with our society if cheating is an understood, albeit rarely discussed, fact of life in modern American high school. I think I know what that wrong is - and it is our materialistic culture that has taken to defining success in dollars, car options, technology, labels, and square footage. Our culture says that one is only valued if one can afford these things, and the way to afford these things is to make a lot of money by getting a good job by going to an Ivy League school by making good grades. It doesn't expressly say cheat to get there, but it doesn't say don't cheat. Furthermore, it doesn't leave room for the student who just isn't that bright, nor does it recognize other paths to success. Indeed, the majority of its advice on integrity seems to be that of don't get caught. I could list a thousand examples of what I have written above, but I'm tired, and by no means do I mean to impugn capitalism as the cause of all of society's woes (though I'm starting to think it just may be), but I really just want to make my readers think - the next time you start to cheat, think: is this really what I've been reduced to?

taylor