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.
