Holden Caulfield never tires of calling people phonies. In “Catcher in the Rye,” high school is “full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a g****** Cadillac some day … and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little g****** cliques.”
For my high school students, as for Holden, “fake” and “phony” were bad; “genuine” and “real” were good. Yet those same students who loathed “fakery” didn’t think there was anything wrong with occasionally cheating on homework or tests. Recent studies have shown that students have a different attitude toward cheating and “collaboration” than in the past. They have become used to group tasks in school, but ultimately students are responsible for their own learning, aren’t they? Tests are rarely supposed to be collaborative efforts.
The Internet has made collaboration, even when it’s not sanctioned, easy. When students are supposed to look up a series of definitions for a class, sometimes one student will construct a Facebook page asking students to contribute a definition each — thereby saving time. The rationale is that they will still learn the terms, just spend less time looking all of them up. Fake or real? At Oakton High School, that collaboration was frowned upon. But students told me in confidence that they didn’t see anything wrong with it. Yes, there was the “lie” of pretending to do all the work when really only doing a fraction of it. But learning still took place. “Why ruin a perfectly good Sunday looking up terms when you can copy them from Facebook?” one student explained.
Some are proud of their ability to fake their way through a class or series of classes. Buying term papers is easy. When I Googled “Holden Caulfield” and “phony,” a five-paragraph theme on the use of the word in “Catcher in the Rye” appeared on the first page of my search — free.
Not only can students fake their ways through assignments and papers, they can now buy degrees from places that are proud to be fake. Today I received an e-mail from a company that makes “superior” fake degrees.
I thought it must be a joke, but the fakery was real. For as little as $230, anyone can buy a degree. My B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, along with corresponding transcripts, can be purchased in the “3 degrees + 3 transcripts” category for $850. (It will, however, not be an official Columbia University transcript.) Fake degrees are nothing new, but since when have those companies taken “an enormous pride in our quality”? Does pride trump the work necessary to earn a degree legitimately? If it’s all right to buy a term paper, is it equally all right to buy a Ph.D.?
If high school students’ definitions of cheating are shifting, we need to find a way to reconcile our support of classroom collaboration with our condemnation of “cheating” and buying of degrees and papers. We need to draw the line between what’s real and “phony” before all education is fakery.
What kids are reading
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre, data from libraries and data from booksellers. The following list comes from Patty Campbell, a librarian who has written about teen reading.
The top 10 young adult novels of all time
1. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
2. “The Outsiders” by S. E. Hinton
3. “The Contender” by Robert Lipsyte
4. “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok
5. “The Pigman” by Paul Zindel
6. “Go Ask Alice” by Beatrice Sparks
7. “Deathwatch” by Robb White
8. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier
9. “Forever” by Judy Blume
10. “Killing Mr. Griffin” by Lois Duncan
