Not-So Pastoral Counseling: A fictional short-short story

The Final: Part 1 in a 3-Part Series on a College Couple

Should You Be Living With More Integrity?

Is this too sanctimonious?

 

Eight Staggering Statistics About College Student Cheating

This article documents that the majority of college students cheat. I believe the three main causes are:

1) The obvious one: a decline in ethics among our leaders: priests have sex with children parishioners, athletes use illegal drugs to give them an unfair advantage, politicians lie--well, that's nothing new. If role models matter, we're not modeling well.

Solution: All of us, especially those who are prominent, must realize that our actions educate the young on what's really the way to behave.

2) Students feel the course material isn't worth learning and the assignments, such as term papers, aren't worth doing.

Solution: Professors really should make courses and assignments of greater value. Sit in on college classes and examine the course readings and assignments, and if you're honest with yourself, you'll realize how much of it is unimportant in the larger scheme of things.

3) Colleges are admitting ever weaker students. Such students simply can't graduate unless they cheat.

Solution: Admit only students whose high school records (including the difficult-to-cheat-on SAT ) suggests a reasonable probability that college is the wisest post-secondary path for that student.

Ethics Education: The most important topic that's so rarely taught

Today I received yet more reminders of how ethically deficient we are. On top of the Charlie Rangel outrage, in my own private practice just today, clients made the following statements:

"Lawyers often double-bill."

"I want to milk the education thing as long as I can so I don't have to grow up." Professional students waste class slots that could have gone to people who would use that slot to be productive, to better society.

"I flirt to get what I want and then I claim I feel violated when they flirt back." Beware.

As I've written before, physician clients admit to me that they do procedures, including surgeries, that could have more wisely been treated medically. Why? Simply to make more money.

All that ethical filth is on top of the corporate excesses, priests screwing parishioners (including children,) people lying on the resumes and income taxes, using synthetic urine to pass drug tests, and as I wrote about yesterday, hiring people to write their theses, etc., etc., etc.

A society in which integrity is lacking will be so much less than it otherwise could be.

What could help? Ethics courses have, of course, been taught for decades, especially in law and business schools, alas with only modest effectiveness. Nevertheless, my best proposal is, as I wrote yesterday, that a critical-incident-based ethics curriculum in which we feel the effects of unethical behavior on the victim, be suffused through K-16 education, including emphasizing the primacy of parents BEING ethical--No matter how much a parent urges their child to be ethical, if the parent behaves unethically, the kid will realize that the words are empty.

The message of ethics over expediency need be so woven into the fabric of all our citizens that people will reflexively, with little temptation, make the ethical choice, even if it leads to poverty.

Fortunately, ethical people are probably no more likely to end up impoverished by their integrity. They may even be rewarded for it.