If parents excuse cheating, what should we expect from their kids?

By David McElroy · August 5, 2011

In Atlanta, the government-operated school system was caught earlier this year in long-term cheating on standardized tests. Although the Washington Post is a big defender of government schools, even the Post called the details “shocking.”

Teachers, principals and administrators were all caught up in cheating by a system that was said to use fear and intimidation to get teachers to go along with the scheme. (At the same link, you can find links to PDFs of the full state report, which details just how corrupt the system has been.)

The people who are most cheated by this are the students and parents. Students have resources that are supposed to be used to educate them being used instead to finance a world-class cheating operation. Parents who send their kids to schools and see positive test scores believe their kids are getting the education they need, so they have been cheated and lied to. The kids are too young to understand how they’re being cheated, but the parents would be justified in feeling intense rage.

The parents, it turns out, aren’t angry. In fact, at a public meeting Tuesday night in southwest Atlanta, they lined up to sing the praises of their schools and defend the teachers who had been cheating their kids. Seriously. I’m not making this up.

How can these parents expect their kids to learn that cheating is wrong if they won’t even support holding the teachers accountable? There’s no way the kids can have anything other than warped values if their parents don’t care about it.

The mutual co-operation that we count on in our society is based on some common shared values. Frequently, when people talk about values, they’re talking about the values or moral standards of their own religion, but that’s not what I mean in this case. I’m talking about the values that allow people to live around each other and trade with each other.

When it comes to trusting you enough to live around you and trade with you, I don’t have to care whether you share my Christian faith. You can be an atheist or a Jew or Muslim or one of a dozen other religious beliefs, but as long as I know I can trust your basic honesty and integrity, we can do business with each other. We can potentially live in peace.

People who grow up learning that it’s OK to cheat as long as you have redeeming qualities aren’t people I want to live next to. They’re not people I want to employ. They’re not people I want to do business with. They’re not people I can trust.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that these are the first people to teach their children that cheating is OK, but I’m disturbed because it seems as though it’s becoming more common for people to excuse cheating and dishonesty — and be open about it.

Cheating and dishonesty have always been with us, but it seems as though there used to be more of a sense of shame about it. Even when people where cheaters — and knew they were going to cheat — they had a realization that what they were doing was wrong on some basic level. It seems as though we have a larger and larger proportion of the population who believe that what’s morally acceptable is determined only by what you can get away with. These parents are just a symptom of a much larger problem.

I don’t know the solution, because I can’t force people to adopt values that I believe are important — and I wouldn’t force them if I could. It’s true that the decline of religious morality might play a role, but it seems as though non-religious people used to share the same sense of shame about dishonesty, so this isn’t really about religion. (Also notice that some ministers were part of the protest in Atlanta to support the teachers. That disgusts me.)

We don’t have to share religious beliefs to live together. We don’t even all have to share beliefs on every point of morality and ethics. But there’s a shared core set of values that are required for human beings to live around each other peacefully. What we saw from those parents in Atlanta Tuesday night is just the opposite of what we need to maintain a relatively peaceful society.

It’s for this and many other reasons that I tremble when I think about what future generations of people in this country are going to face if they don’t find ways to build private cities and enclaves to protect themselves from the grandchildren of people such as those parents in Atlanta.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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