Cheating the System

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I read every day about someone trying to cheat the system. It goes from cheating on tests to trying to rob a bank. Have people’s values sunk so low that they just don’t care about the system?

The system is the laws and rules we have in place to keep things peaceful, and stable.  The exact opposite of this would be anarchy and the criminalization of society.

The whole point for rules is to protect people from bad things like murders, or bank robbers or to a lesser extent cheating on tests. It all started for me when I was in Junior High school. Some kid wanted to cheat off of me because I was good at taking tests, English for smart. I told my mom this one day and she said, “You shouldn’t let other people steal off of your work. Let them fail and let society deal with them. But of course these students were my friends. How does one stop a friend from cheating without losing that friend?

Well over the years I learned that these were not friends these were people who would go home do no homework party all night and use me for information.

I started to wonder, “Where have our values gone?” That these creeps can have a social life and not worry about failing a class because they cheated off of someone, well, it was mind numbing.

Then I got into high school where cheating was the norm. I continued studying my brains off and doing tons of homework while these guys partied and did the littlest possible. Then one day I got into a college. You had to sign a contract that said you could not and refused to cheat. A few of my so called friends followed me to college and started doing the cheating game. Only problem was that the professor knew about it and threw those kids out of the class. In the end, these bad apples got thrown out of the college and it made us kids who had no life and had studied for so long feel vindicated. In our commitment to education, the old way, we had learned that finally someone was paying attention and our forced social hibernation was finally paying off.

I go back to our talking about the system’s society values and morals. Where have they gone? It is not such a bad leap from school cheating, to White Collar Crime to actual Street Crime. What has to be remembered is that society has to find these school bad apples, first, and fix them before they become the bad apples of society. I guess that’s my point. We need a reexamination of society in schools to make the society of tomorrow. If you’re studying hard and a lot of other kids are just copying off of you what does this say about their future.

A lot of people get molded into the people of today due to experiences in school. If they cheat, watch out for white collar crimes. If they feel they don’t fit in, they will quit school and become hard core criminals. The system needs to be reexamined.

 Maybe we should be teaching morality, catch cheaters early, try and reach failing kids, and not just school work? Schools are our young kid’s society. A lot can go wrong at an early age. Where are we on fixing this?