Cheating, stealing liars

Our own informal survey of colleagues teaching first year students at university level found that they almost unanimously complained about an increase in students’ plagiarising, cheating, and being disrespectful towards both lecturers and general staff. In one first year social ethics unit over half of a class of 200 cheated in an online test - an ethics test! If students are arriving at university with little or no ethics awareness, one can only assume they are not receiving the required knowledge and experience from either high school or home.

Attempts have been made to address these problems through the implementation of codes of conduct and other similar programs in high schools. Although it has always been the case that schools have operated under a system of rules and regulations that dictate to students exactly what is and isn’t allowed, the recent influx of technological leisure pursuits has created a gap in many directories of school rules.

Many schools have developed a code of conduct for students as a way of connecting appropriate behaviour with a school’s mission statement (for example, Education Queensland, 2004; St Peters Lutheran College, 2004 (pdf file 103KB)). However, such measures are external to the student, mostly seeking compliance and offering relevant sanctions for non-compliance. They do not address the N-generation dichotomy between real and virtual selves. Students need to learn to think through issues of rightness and wrongness as they appear in every aspect of their lives (rather than simply accepting what others have told them to do in situations of authority rule) if they are to be able to transfer their knowledge of right and wrong across situations - from school and home to leisure and workplace activities, for example. However, our research has found that few schools are equipped to assist students to critically analyse ethically challenging situations, or to appreciate the depth of moral issues.

Having said this, educators have acknowledged the need for raised consciousness of ethical concepts, and several attempts have been made to create programs that address this need. The most well-known program forms part of a program developed in 1985 in the US by Matthew Lipman, called Philosophy for Children. The ethics portion of the program focuses on a story about “Lisa”, who encounters a number of ethical issues, which students are encouraged to discuss and analyse according to a workbook developed as part of the overall program. “Lisa” asks all the interesting questions to which children are interested in finding the answers. However, the program is somewhat outdated and lacking in contemporary appeal, not to mention also lacking many of the dilemmas that have arisen through our modern technological advances among other things.

Another American educator, Anthony Tiatorio, has developed a more recent ethics workbook for students, based on a journey through the history of ideas. Tiatorio guides students through The Book of the Dead, the Bible and Christianity, ancient Greece, Islam, eastern philosophy, and the enlightenment, towards modern notions of public ethics and the rule of law. The book, which is downloadable from the Internet, is a good resource for students of ethics, but is quite long and rather intense, given the age of the readership.

Apart from these, there are no comprehensive ethics programs for young people, and certainly little in the way of inspiring, interactive, challenging methods for teaching ethics at the middle or high school level. There is a desperate need, therefore, to provide a more contemporary ethics education for young people, one that appeals to, and makes use of, their love of new technologies.

One recent attempt to address the dearth has been developed by a group of academics and educators in Brisbane (including the author), who are working on a program to design and implement an interactive multimedia online ethics program for use by students across a range of grades in both primary and high school.

The program draws on the concept of multiple intelligences within a technological framework to bring the issues to students through a variety of learning styles. Such methods include, for example, engaging students in story-telling and creative writing; in critical analysis of issues and arguments using logic and mind games; through three-dimensional imagery and concept-mapping; through dance, drama and physical games; through music; through observations of, and interactions with, the natural world; and through debate, mediation and journal-writing. Such an approach is highly suited to the teaching and learning of ethics because it focuses on the context of learning in a digital age and on the ability on individuals to identify novel solutions to practical problems encountered in everyday life.

The intention is not to provide students with a pre-conceived set of answers to ethical questions, but rather to guide them through issues and assist them to think critically about moral concepts and ethical situations. Psychological research shows that young people begin to internalise values and principles sometime after year 5, allowing them to self-regulate their behaviour according to whatever values and principles they were socialised into. High school students, and in particular, middle school students (years 6-9) are therefore particularly well placed to be invited to explore their values and beliefs in a way that will develop their higher order thinking and problem solving skills. The Brisbane program will provide the vehicle for such activity, within a context that has “N-Generation” appeal.