I recently heard that kids as young as second grade were being taught the concept of plagiarism. The person who was telling me this (my wife and I are blessed with not having access to television, and so live in blissful ignorance of all the disgusting plagiarism that is taking place out there) was indignant, not so much with the rampant plagiarism that is rotting the very tissue of society, but that children of the tender age of, say, seven, were having to puzzle over the demands of originality. I had to agree. (The image at right is actually resident at another website; my use of it without providing a reference will be construed to be plagiarism.)
Little kids, of course, are struggling to use words and sentences, and we naturally teach them the skillful and idiomatic use of their (admittedly intractable) mother tongue through the use of models. We were all taught that way, and some of us were lucky enough to be steeped with brilliant passages from Shakespeare, and Milton and the Bible, as Professor Henry Higgins said. The more erudite among us can hardly utter a sentence without using phrases, and even entire sentences, that derive from literature (that is, stuff that we have read. Of course, we were shamelessly reading a lot of stuff, a vice we indulged in in our misguided youth). I used to quote heavily from P. G. Wodehouse and Leslie Charteris, my favorite authors when I was growing up. Now, ironically, my friends think that many of these phrases are Archie specials, and I’m too lazy to tell them their origins, because it usually involves such deep questions as “Who the heck are those people?” These days, as long as you stick to short sentences of words of one syllable, you’re fairly safe; the computer programs that check for originality usually let pass a quotation consisting of a single word.
Grade school teachers, you see, have been provided an operational definition of originality. You take a sample of writing, which is to be tested for originality. You feed it into a computer program which compares it with all the samples of text that are contained in its database, and if there are no matches beyond a certain length, JOY! The sample is certified as original. So, in the absence of a truly useful definition of what it means for the essay of a student to be original, young teachers (who were themselves students in college when the Great Leap Forward of the Witch-hunt Against Plagiarism exploded into being) have resorted to this procedure to establish originality.
Let us rewind to an earlier time, when teachers had to puzzle over the problem of plagiarism (spelled without capitals, here, or 'Caps', as they are fondly called these days) in the essays students turned in. Teachers need to teach their pupils to write, and so they assign students to write what are called essays (yes, I know you’re intimately acquainted with these things) about some topic, which is usually a compromise between a topic of interest to the teacher, and a topic of interest to the students. We all know what a chore it is to write such a thing. But, fast forward to the present day. On any given day, close to a million idiots out there are putting out a BLOG POST; including my humble self. What is a blog post? An essay.
So teachers assign their students to write a blog post on some topic, which, once they arrive on the teacher’s desk, must be taken home, and read. The teacher has to reluctantly read the essays (or blog posts) which between twenty and thirty students have reluctantly written. Usually, students write pure pap; sometimes the students write something substantial with the help of their parents. Sometimes the parents write the essays for their kids. Sometimes, especially older kids, steal the material from the Internet.
Since standards of writing have declined over the years, teachers, in desperation, require an ever greater volume of writing from their students, who turn to the systematic theft of writing from other sources. If we were to actually find out to what extent students submit material that did not originate with themselves, we would lose faith in all that we hold dear.
Plagiarism, is, in its essence, the submission of the work of someone else as your own. In contrast, today, plagiarism is defined indirectly as presenting a plagiarized piece of work, and a plagiarized piece of work is defined, in turn, as something which contains a significant portion which matches up with something already in a database.
To make things perfectly clear, if one were to submit work that essentially matches up with something in the database, I suppose that an argument could be made that one is handing in the work of someone else as one’s own, but there’s always the chance that it was not intended to be deceitful. Plagiarism that happens unwittingly cannot be considered a culpable offense; it deserves the term plagiarism only if there is intent to deceive.
I have many problems with this whole business.
First of all, I’m not at all sure that assigning writing on topics that do not inspire the student is helpful. For instance, if I were forced to make a blog post about something completely outside my interests, such as the voting habits of Buddhists in Montana (and bless them, anyway) I would end up stealing most of it from the Internet.
Secondly, there are relatively easy ways of ensuring that essays are original. One way is to ask the students to write a brief paragraph right in the classroom. Then you ask the students to expand it into three paragraphs at home. You can then check the two versions to see if extraneous material from possibly Internet sources (if that is what you’re worried about) have crept in. It is my belief that, if the student gets help from older relatives on the essay, and if there is an aspect of plagiarism involved, we could safely overlook it, because it is sure to have been a learning experience anyway. Sometimes older relatives are worse writers than the students themselves, and I suspect that the student will soon arrive at this conclusion him- or herself.)
Thirdly, the problem of being unoriginal at the phrase or sentence level is not problematic, and should not be confused with truly large-scale plagiarism. (However, when a kid uses uncharacteristic phrases in an essay, it is taken as a clue that plagiarism has crept in. But is a teacher clever enough to know how characteristic a particular phrase is for a given student? Kids pick up phrases like cats pick up fleas.) My own writing, for instance, will most certainly contain numerous phrases and sentences that might be found in literature of one sort or another, especially if I were to be writing on Bach or Mozart. Nothing I have ever written has been so original as to have escaped earlier writers, some of whom I may have read at one time or another. Computers are wonderful things, but it seems a mistake to rely on mechanical aids to ensure that learning is taking place. This is one reason why I just don’t believe in distance-learning for younger students, who are still at the stage where they’re being made to learn material reluctantly. (When I was in college, I looked forward to every lesson; this is not the case with kids in college today. They learn everything reluctantly, and this has a bearing on the entire plagiarism debate.) Today’s computer just might be smarter than today’s teachers. It’s okay for me, as a private individual, to suspect that, but it is deplorable for administrators and legislators to take that point of view.
Some of this preoccupation with originality is a cultural thing, of the same mindset as that which wants to enforce copyrights and patents, and digital rights management (DRM). When the benefits of originality are measured in dollars and cents, in a certain perverse sense it seems reasonable to inculcate in the very young the means of making a living from their originality. But unfortunately, it seems to be taking the route of teaching kids not to get caught infringing the plagiarism rules. Research today is often misconstrued to mean: read up about the subject, and report on what you have read in such a way that a plagiarism detector will not accuse you of copying the article. The assignment is ambiguous: find out what others have done, but make it your own. Some geniuses are perfectly content to work with this paradoxical instruction. I sincerely doubt whether it can be done honestly.
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