Homeschool your kids so they learn to cheat, writes Penelope Trunk on her homeschooling blog. What schools call cheating — getting the right answer from others — is “effective workplace behavior” and a valuable skill, she argues.
Some 85 percent of students admit to cheating, Trunk writes.
. . . Stuyvesant, a New York City magnet school that’s harder to get into than Harvard, had an incredibly organized cheating system that rivals best practices for productivity types in Fortune 500 organizations.
. . . What made Stuyvesant’s cheating system so effective was that everybody had a certain topic that they would be expert on, and everyone else knew how to get the answers from that person.
That’s a great workplace skill, and you do kids a disservice by training them to think that it’s improper behavior.
Compared to their elders, Generation Y is “incredibly productive because they’re great collaborators.”
In the age of information, sharing information rules the day, and there’s no longer a place for a Lone Ranger at the office who works independently of everyone else. Today’s business world is too complicated and too networked for people to work so independently as to not be getting information from other people.
Teachers have been pushing collaborative work on projects and peer tutoring for many years now. Collaborative work on tests is another matter.
Does Trunk have a point?