"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
