Automaton Zombies - Real Life Idiocracy

Wanted: Innovative, creative, critical thinking individuals who can think outside the box to make decisions about the future of our world, and enhance our company portfolio.

That is the cry from all major corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Wall Street and yes, even Walmart. Unfortunately, academia is offering them nothing more than zombie drones who think the same way, dress the same way, act and talk the same way. Where are the Einsteins, Bells, Fords, Wright Brothers, and Edisons of the world? No red blooded American Beer connoisseur would forgive us if we didn't mention Robert Portner, the inventor of the beer refrigeration system, and original air conditioning system in America.  

Are we losing our future inventors? Have we lost the ability to think critically?

Instead of inspiring the next Edison or Portner, we are creating dummy drones who are lazy, worthless and who have no ability to use common sense or think critically. Our schools are no longer encouraging free-thinking individuals, instead they're assigned to group project time. You know the drill, teacher asks you to rearrange desks into pods, and you latch onto those who actively participate and do their own work. Then the teacher places that one individual in your group. You know, the one who moans, is easily distracted and who lays their head down when the teacher isn't looking.  He is perfectly content allowing others to shoulder the load. You are sick of having to carry all the weight. When did collaboration turn into someone else doing all the thinking for you?

Now remember, the teacher has certain expectations.  You're thrust into a group activity, and the idea is to make a collaborative effort of many parts that will create a greater synthesis. But have you been taught how to achieve this collaborative effort?  The teacher then instructs you to each submit your final papers to TurnItIn as a decency check - the first signal of distrust to the student. This message of distrust is accompanied by a patterned syllabus or classroom goal, expecting students and groups to reach similar conclusions in thought as those that came before them. But this very pattern of thought is conducive to repeated inquiry, not original thought. Much like a scientific inquiry thrives on replication, the teacher encourages reaching the same destination of thought. For the instructor to expect the student to inherently know when to collaborate and when to be original, when to copy the thought pattern that came before them and when to think outside the box, is a form of gross negligence of training on the part of the teacher and institution.

Today, the future of critical thinking within our school system is slipping away at great speed. Students are no longer encouraged to be creative in their academic writing; instead they are encouraged to paraphrase or quote from some other academic peer-reviewed journal or article. They're no longer allowed to express their feelings, give a personal opinion or thought regarding a subject matter or issue. Instead of being praised for originality, they're stunned and lose points for thinking outside the box. This loss will impact not only our children's future, but every aspect of their lives, their community, and the business world.

Although students are encouraged to conduct research for a project or a paper, they are expected to synthesize that research into an original product. How many times can a student regurgitate the same information without sounding as though they're repeating someone else's work?  Creative writing together with critical thinking is no longer the focus of the student. They no longer focus their creativity into original thought, but into producing a product that does not arouse suspicion. Suspicion breeds accusation. Accusation breeds isolation. And isolation bred in an environment known for an emphasis on collaboration is counter-productive.

Schools should stop accusing and start teaching, without relying on a piece of software to do their work for them. Utilizing technology is great, but what about the human factor of instilling creative writing, creative thought and most importantly, creative critical thinking? Instead, students feel as though they’re participating in a witch hunt perpetuated by an instructor who lacks the ability to educate properly.   As we have laid out in this series, legal fights place a burden on the school and the student, pitting them against one another. Has technology merely created a climate of despair and abuse among students?  When we force students to continually use technology, instead of their brain, they will only think inside the box rather than outside it. Where is the creativity or critical thinking in our future leaders?

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” – Allen Ginsberg

Is this what we want from our universities: a system that tells the student not to think outside the box – to simply know how to color within the lines? An educational incubator that starves students of freedom of thought without reproach or vulnerability? The true visionaries could be tripped up by a correlating document they never knew existed. Similarities in language and purpose breed conformity to the papers of the past. Students are given the message not to get caught (whether guilty or not) over the message that pure, original thought will be appreciated and vindicated. The school no longer has the back of the ‘guilty’ student. And a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ system can only be producing the worst type of debased offender possible right into areas where we may need them the most: government, journalism, and the business world.

The END of Free Thinking (as we know it)

"Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?"

                                                            D.H. Lawrence - the Phoenix

What are you willing to become? Lawrence wrote the poem "Phoenix" at the turn of the century, when the world seemed to be tilting toward collectivism and he feared individual thinking was being erased from the conscience mind. Was he right? Have we become a society where free thinking has been thrown out the window for something else?

In today's world, students no longer trust their teachers or instructors because they no longer effectively guide them through the minefield of accusation that is public education. The lack of trust goes both ways.

Teachers who no longer trust their students utilize a plagiarism detection system, known as TurnItIn.com, to further humiliate their students into obedience. Each student is required to submit each essay, term paper, and original work to this growing parasite of copyright violation and career vulnerability database. Maybe if the teacher taught the proper way to write a paper, the need for such a program would not exist. As we have pointed out, throughout this series, when a student is falsely accused, that student’s only recourse is to drop the class, avoid the professor, or appeal to be exempt from having to submit their work to a system that is dangerous to their security at worst, and infringes on their original thought at best.

There is more concern given the 1% of students who are gaming the system, using the work and words of others to advance their grade, and pulling the wool over the teacher’s eyes. The teacher, mired in pride of not being duped, would rather tell 100% of their students of their blatant lack of trust in the hopes of scaring the 1% of rogue students onto the path of the straight and narrow. As seen in this series, the implications of an expectation of a potential student violation is often more violating to teacher-student trust than the mere existence of plagiarism  in the first place.

 Chris Lloyd '06, chairman of the Honor Committee, said the implementation of anti-plagiarizing software at Princeton would not violate students' rights.

"We don't have an Honor Code in which professors trust students blindly," Lloyd said. "Professors trust students to proctor each other. If professors don't have oversight over what a student is doing in their room, it seems a reasonable means to see if work is a student's own.” 

There seems to be so much anxiety over what may be produced in the student’s bedroom, that little attention or concern is given their future capability of what will be produced in the boardroom. The ultimate goal of any university is to release upon the business world a person who has the ability to think and make proper decisions that will help keep our economic engine running. But in reality, the only product being produced in today's schools and universities is a human monkey-wrench that will be thrown into an already effective and efficient machine.  

The ability to think freely has been stymied by the very institution to which is required to teach creative thinking - our school system. With the use of TurnItIn, we are producing the very thing we disdain: a nation of non-thinking, mindless automatons capable of producing exactly what the professor (or boss) wants them to produce, requiring countless hours of oversight and hand-holding. The student is no longer capable of individual thought, for exercising thought brings risk. These risks require a student to feel emotion, compassion or even love. These risks are not acceptable in a world filled with distrust, hate and a lack of compassion for another human being – what we call ‘the real world.’ 

When a student leaves school and enters the business world, they mirror what their boss wants in order to gain favor with said boss – even if the boss might be wrong in his or her thinking, resulting in the company being shut down, job losses, economic destruction of the community, etc. Like the boss who doesn't know how to think for themselves, the professors, having already determined their own brilliance of thought and mind, are only capable of arriving at a specific point. They then expect each student to arrive at that same point or theory merely to feed the overinflated ego of said professor! The teacher no longer wants to see what the student may think, but wants their own thinking confirmed by a multitude of “good students,” each arriving at the same conclusion and analysis, but somehow doing do in a way that doesn’t flag the plagiarism detector. Is this free thinking, or is it a pattern of group thinking?

This pattern simply cannot sustain itself.

With the use of a program, such as how TurnItIn will continue to grow and grow with additional papers and products, all coming to similar conclusions with different words, the ability to think freely will diminish in just a few years. Future students will try and try to phrase words together to attain the goals of the same patterned syllabi, yet without effectively being able to avoid correlation. Students are already growing discouraged, as there is no way to re-pattern the same thought without using words and phrases that have been previously recorded somewhere. There is no way for the student to glean through millions of entries, but the computer program can. And students will increasing become victims to the very mechanism that is designed to protect them and allow them to grow in thought and mind – they will either stand before ethics committees decrying their innocence, or simply choose to avoid the system that produces more plagiarists than poets. The future looks bleak, does it not?

Students are trying, but are increasingly having to do more explanation of character than defense of original research. Their purposes and goals are suspect, when they are merely trying to navigate the minefield set up by an untrusting populace. When the professor has already abdicated their role of instructing the student to greater academic relevance, even when the student plagiarized for convenience or by malicious intent, the end of free thinking has permeated its will to the highest level - shirking academic protection and inspiration to excellence.

What do you expect? It is not permitted us neither to write, nor to speak, nor even to think.  If we speak, it is easy to interpret our words, and still easier our writings. In sum, since no one can condemn us to an auto da fé for our secret thoughts, they threaten us with eternal burning by the order of God Himself, if we don't think like the Jacobins. They have persuaded the government that if we were to have common sense, the whole state would be in flames, and that the nation would become the most miserable on earth. –Voltaire, ‘Freedom of Thought’

A government or school thrives by forcing all its denizens into the prescribed pattern of thought. Is this not Communism at its best? But who can really regulate thought? Isn’t the mere attempt at regulating thought rife with failure from the start? And what would the business climate think of an army of mindless automatons about to be released, resumes in hand, unto their shores of innovation and creativity? How can a citizenry be innovative and creative when their schools have cut funding to all creative classes such as music, art and creative writing? These very classes teach a student to use their creative mind to think outside the box and eventually solve complex problems in an individualized way.

Enter GroupThink.

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.  

When free thinking is erased, cancelled and made nothing, as Lawrence said, what will we have left? Like-minded individuals who are replicable in the business world who are not capable of thinking for themselves, coming up with great ideas or writing prose worthy of a noble peace prize? Instead, we are left with mindless zombies ready to follow the word of every pundit, irresponsible journalist, politician or leader who says what they have been programmed to follow.  Automated zombies coming to a place near you. You reap what you sow!

 Invited co-author of this article, Sean McGowan is published author, a teacher of Civics and American History, as well as a Chaplain.

NEXT: Critical Thinking Disappears