If teachers are so ready to call students cheating a problem that needs to be solved, why don't we look closely at what students' and parents' incentives are to cheat... and then remove those incentives?
After all, isn't the goal of the education system to... educate? Not score them based on their utility to their future corporate masters (which is, in and of itself, classist and often racist)?
(To be clear, I'm not blaming you or your teacher friends for the systemic problems of education. I realize that decision was made far above them in the government food chain. Instead, I'm proposing that there's a different problem to solve than students cheating.)
Maybe this isn't the right time to suggest fundamental changes (since we're all trying to cope with a pandemic every day and it's hella stressful), but I think we need to really think about how we're trying to educate our youth.
One problem is lack of imagination into alternative systems.
An established mechanism is hard to challenge, even when bad.
Something to drive the point home: companies could have culturally developed in the same way as schools.
Managers and bosses could continuously maintain grades on report performance. And they would forbid developers from looking up information on Stack Overflow because that is cheating. But since some employees do it, they could have added that same spyware to ensure they don’t do it.
The reason why this would be culturally wrong, is the same reason that it is currently wrong in schools.
Ultimately, I think you're (and, by extension, your teacher friends) are presupposing the frame.
Why do we try to educate students within a framework where cheating has any practical meaning?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-le...
I've written about related topics in longer form: https://soatok.blog/2020/08/21/a-few-missing-lessons-from-am...
If teachers are so ready to call students cheating a problem that needs to be solved, why don't we look closely at what students' and parents' incentives are to cheat... and then remove those incentives?
After all, isn't the goal of the education system to... educate? Not score them based on their utility to their future corporate masters (which is, in and of itself, classist and often racist)?
(To be clear, I'm not blaming you or your teacher friends for the systemic problems of education. I realize that decision was made far above them in the government food chain. Instead, I'm proposing that there's a different problem to solve than students cheating.)
Maybe this isn't the right time to suggest fundamental changes (since we're all trying to cope with a pandemic every day and it's hella stressful), but I think we need to really think about how we're trying to educate our youth.