Is it possible for an entire nation to be so obsessed with university degrees that a set of lies turns into a national news story? The following story is so bizarre, it was necessary to turn it into an ethical discussion.
USA Today’s “Newser” staff (John Johnson, June 21, 2015) put together the following piece from several stories. We will review the interesting highlights of the case and then jump off into our own ethical waters.
There is a very prestigious high school in Virginia by the name of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The best of the best go to this school and the students like to play a little game where they see how many Ivy schools and other prestigious institutions will accept them.
Now imagine that you had a child in this high school; as a parent, you would be naturally proud of your child’s accomplishments. However, also imagine that you live in another country, and that your English is at best, basic. Let’s ratchet it up a little and say that the country you live in is even more obsessed with degrees and credentials than your daughter! We will call the country, South Korea.
Your daughter tells you and her close friends that she was accepted both at Harvard and Stanford and the two schools were fighting so hard over her that they agreed to split her education! In fact, your daughter sends you acceptance letters from several Ivy schools and her teachers saying how wonderful she is and how much they admire her. If that were not enough, she forged a letter presumably from Mark Zuckerberg praising her as a genius.
Her parents turned around and told the South Korean news outlets of her intellectual feats. Korea officially named her “Genius Girl.” It was a short earned accolade. Her story was quickly dismissed as lies by Harvard and Stanford; her classmates refused to believe her and Zuckerberg was never so much aware of the craziness.
To his great credit, the father wrote an apology to the South Korean media:
“I am deeply repentant that I failed to watch properly over how painful and difficult a situation the child has been in so far and that I even aggravated and enlarged her suffering.”
He took ownership for his part in the charade.
Where the joke stops
What was it that drove this young woman to so outrageously lie? Was she was so afraid to fail, so afraid to admit to her parents that she was just “another student,” that a carefully crafted web of deceit had to be created?
It is easy to mock this student, her parents and her country. She perpetrated a shameful set of lies. We might all laugh at her stories and the gullibility of her parents. However, we might also examine our own shortcomings and the degree to which we are failing our own students.
We have blogged on this topic before, but here in the U.S., academic fraud is at an all-time high, especially at prestigious schools. Cheating is rampant. We can blame all kinds of influences for this rise in fraud except the obvious: children are not being taught right from wrong. Maybe because many parents have ceased to be parents.
In the United States, we have the cultural phenomena of helicopter parents and overzealous soccer parents who fail to understand the wisdom of creating boundaries for themselves so that their children can grow into young adults.
For example, there are parents who have the nerve of showing up at their children’s job interviews. They cannot possibly comprehend that the way we grow in life is to face adversity. Not everyone who interviews for a job should get that job.
We have numerous examples of parents pushing and prodding their children into club athletics because they themselves failed to do better in athletics when they were children. Conversely, many parents so over-schedule their children with dubious, adult-led activities that children aren’t developing the skills that come from free time play.
There is nothing wrong with children wanting to excel, and their parents wanting excellence, but there is a point where excellence must take a back seat to rational behavior. The student from South Korea undoubtedly raised the stakes with every one of her stories because she inherently knew she could never please her parents.
The question that needs to be asked is how many students in the U.S. have subconsciously failed or wanted to fail because their parents were never pleased with them. In their minds, cheating was preferable. How many students never participated in sports after high school because they could never please expectations of becoming star athletes?
The enquiries mount because we often confuse wanting the best for our children with trying to re-live our pasts in the hope of changing our own outcomes. It holds true for parents in South Korea or in South Carolina.
We can’t go back and re-live the past. It just can’t be done.
