This Side of The Line

While putting together a plot about the lives of schoolmates, I wonder about the adult lives of those who cheated their way through primary / secondary school. Was their cheating and plagiarism indicative of their core personalities or only a reflection of the human adaptive survival response (also known as peer pressure)?

In the classes I teach, I have a small set of students who treat their schooling with the professionalism I've expected to see from senior managers or executives. Their homework papers are typed up and well-organized, and they do not show any signs of copying, cheating or plagiarism. There's another set of students whose homework perhaps shows that a combination of students divided up the homework into mini-assignments that they shared with each other and put into one master document, with the only difference being the name at the top of the turned-in homework. In all these cases, I see signs of initiative, something that, if I was a manager and they were my employees, I would want to have displayed and put to company use.

But I ask myself, where is the line that divides initiative from fraud? I don't look at this from an ethical or moral stance but a legal one, the only one where people risk their livelihoods. It's in this realm where I add value to students' learning. If they want ethical or moral training, then they should seek religious adherents or philosophers, not me.

In class, I have tried to pay special attention to the ones who best display professional school and business skills, pointing out to the others that all of them can reach these same standards, if they choose.

It's the same thing with the story I'm working on. We humans are malleable. We have general personality traits that indicate our propensity for action but do not clearly define the line we will or won't cross when put into a specific situation. Especially when the situation is one that in our thoughts puts us in survival mode. The ol' fight-or-flight syndrome. Adrenaline at the ready. Muscles tightened for action/reaction. Fear of homework. Test anxiety. Popularity threatened or enhanced by thwarting teacher authority.

I want all my students/customers to succeed in business. I have worked with almost all personality types I can think of, except homicidal maniacs and severely mentally challenged (although I did work with a murderer, who had gotten out of prison on good behaviour, back when I worked as a teenager at a restaurant). In any case, success is relative. Some people just want to make enough money to have a place to live and time to fish. Some want a fancy car and a vacation home. Some will do whatever it takes to succeed, seeing no lines that have to be crossed but simply moments in which to be on top of the situation. Some will do whatever they're told, always staying inside the lines of an imaginary box.

Therefore, what am I in class with them for, if their needs/wants differ drastically from mine? I guess I'm there because I understand that we are all different. Although I don't care where our society is headed, I think that the students/customers in my class can get the technical skills they need to help them steer society in the direction they want it to go, to facilitate their success in the workplace, wherever and whatever it may be.

Businesses come and go, with or without owners/employees who have a strong ethical belief/practice. Ethics is only necessary in a court of law or between two people with the same set of ethics. I cannot forcefeed an ethical code of conduct into my students/customers. I can only show them that we are all humans and have to decide for ourselves the importance of practicing behaviours now that we want to display as master skills later on, including ethical ones. The exceptionally malleable ones will skillfully adapt ethics to specific situations, able to read between the lines when a bribe can be written off as a "fee," for instance. It's part of business, especially in the global arena.

Bottom line: I'm teaching my students/customers business skills, most of which happen to be technical in nature, to improve their decision-making. Decision-making is always easy if you've thought ahead and practiced many business skills, including ethical ones. Practice makes perfect. Your ethical code of conduct determines whether you master the skill of cheating/stealing or master the skill of creative analysis. Some people will be adept at intuitively discerning their competitors' intent while others will be adept at getting a hold of their competitors' proprietary information. It's like the game of chess where you become familiar with your opponent through time or you get a hold of your opponent's mental list of the next five moves. You're on this side of the line or the other and only you can describe what kind of line it is. Most important, better make sure you know which side of the line is legal or socially-acceptable in your community. On which side of the line do you want to be seen/caught? Your success depends on answering that question before you have to answer that question.