Hey!, Wanna See Some Sin?
"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet and show my people their transgressions and . . . their sins." Isa. 58:1.
22. Lies
22. 11. Teaching our children to lie.
We teach our children to lie by calling it "manners":
"The first lie children are told is to always tell the truth. Parents want, at least unconsciously, their children to lie. Parents want their children to be successful capitalists. Successful capitalists lie and cheat. The competition of a sink-or-swim free market breaks down moral fibers, and people are compelled to do anything, including lie, in order to stay afloat.
Proud fathers are sometimes found holding up their new legacies saying, "He/she is going to be president some day." Surely they don't believe that their child will reach this high office without at least fudging on the truth a little.
Parents even coach their children to lie in order to please others. Parents hide these lies by calling them "manners," but children see them for what they are. I remember part of the warm-up to any Christmas or birthday when my mother would sit me down and discuss how I should behave if I happen to receive socks or underwear as a present. I was supposed to smile, say "thank you" and write a thank you note the next day explaining how I liked the socks. I have never met a five-year-old that wanted socks and underwear for his or her birthday. But the lie is deemed acceptable because it makes people feel better.
We confuse kids when we tell them to tell the truth and then demand that they lie."
Honesty Is Not the Policy by CATHERINE DAVIS
http://www.tufts.edu/as/stu-org/observer/1999/april29/observations/3.htm
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We teach lying, by our example:
"When I was growing up, my parents taught me that honesty was always the best policy. In the first place, my parents said, God wanted me always to tell the truth, and in the second place, THEY expected me always to tell the truth. In fact, my parents said, I would not get in trouble if I just told them the truth. The only time I needed to worry about being in trouble was if I lied. Many people have been told those same things by their parents, I expect. But perhaps, like me, many have discovered that we got in trouble for lying AND for telling the truth, regardless of promises to the contrary.
Here's a shocking statement: My family taught me to shade the truth. They taught me by example. For instance, I would hear my father tell someone how special the apple pie was, thanking them for it, and then come home and say how awful it had tasted. No, he never told the person that their apple pie was delicious, but he led them to believe he liked it. My mother would talk about an outfit someone had worn, for example, and when asked what she had thought of it, would say it was lovely. At home, however, she said just the opposite — the outfit was NOT attractive and didn't suit the woman, but she didn't want to hurt her feelings.
One of my aunts was famous for having her child answer the phone and then, if she didn't want to talk to the caller, have the child say she wasn't home. To cover that lie, she would go outside and stand on the back porch until the child hung up the phone, and then would laugh and say, "Well, I wasn't really in the house, was I?"
Perhaps we use the term "white lie" to describe our shading of the truth. Perhaps we convince ourselves that we need not — indeed, should not — tell the truth when it might hurt someone's feelings. The fact is, we are teaching our children to lie. We are making ourselves comfortable with lying — plain and simple. After awhile it never occurs to us that we tell lies — that we are liars ourselves."
"What is a lie? Who is a liar?"
Commentary by REV. MARY E. JENSEN
For The Signal, Saturday, September 19, 1998
©1998, THE SIGNAL · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (emphasis ours)
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We program lying into children by how we treat them:
"What internal workings of the brain tells children that lying is an acceptable form of speech?
By looking at the workings of the brain, some answers can be obtained. The first two years of life are pivotal to brain development and personality growth. It is during these critical months foundations are laid which determine, to a great extent, future patterns of behavior. The way a child learns to think about life, himself, and others in these first years will affect how he behaves during his life and the nature of the relationships he establishes. He will learn to trust or not, love or not, fear or not, think or not. tell the truth or not.
Babies learn to tell the truth or to lie with their first breaths. During the first year of life a baby is a bundle of needs. He needs to be fed, kept warm, comforted, held, rocked, cuddled and attended to. He is totally dependent on others for his survival and emotional growth. When that care is consistent with his needs he learns to trust. When that care is not consistent with his needs he learns to not trust. He begins to tell himself the first lies. The infant signals he is hungry and no one comes. He cries and no one comes. He cries some more and no one comes. He stops crying and the internal messages he must give himself in order to survive are, "I am no longer hungry. I am not cold." The internal lying messages continue, "I am not worthy of being kept warm, comforted, held, cuddled, rocked. The world is unsafe. No one cares" The lies enter his psyche and embed themselves in his brain. The distinct line between truth and falsehood begins to blur.
During the second year of life a child begins to focus on wants in addition to needs. He wants his mother to stay with him. He wants to play with toys. He wants to laugh and giggle in the face of someone who cares. Yet, despite his wants, his mother leaves, there are no toys and no one giggles and coos in his face. He cries and no one comes. He cries some more and no one comes. He stops crying and the internal messages he must give himself in order to survive are, "I don't want my mother to stay. It is OK she is gone." The internal lying messages continue. "I don't want toys and stimulation. I don't want anyone to coo and giggle in my face. Life is fine exactly the way it is. The difference between the truth and the lies becomes even fuzzier. The pathway in his brain gets deeper.
In subsequent years a child learns to distinguish feelings and emotions. These are confirmed by those around him. His mother says, "I love you" and follows that up with a safe home, nutritious food, and warm clothes. It is not the words which convey a feeling of love, it is the actions which give meaning to the words. Contrast that to the child whose mother says, "I love you" and then proceeds to neglect him, perhaps beat him. The actions make a lie of the words. The actions make a lie of the emotion. The child questions, "If this is love, then why does it hurt so bad? What is the truth here?" As a predictable, safe, caring world crumbles about him he gets angry, enraged. However, such strong feelings in so small a person is very frightening to him. In order to protect himself from his own fear, grief and rage he must tell himself that he is a strong little boy, capable of taking care of himself. He denies he is angry, scared or grief stricken. To give himself permission to feel these feelings, to even acknowledge their existence, is to make himself vulnerable to an uncaring world. The lies he tells himself in order to survive continue. "I am happy. I am not angry. I am not scared. I am not sad." Truth becomes a taboo topic for him to consider. Truth becomes irrelevant. Survival is all that matters. The rut in his brain deepens and lying becomes habitual. It has no good or bad connotations. Like the moon and the stars, it is just there.
The child enters a home where truth is very relevant. The concept is so foreign to him it is rejected. The truth has never mattered before, why should it suddenly become important? He has blocked out the difference between truth and lies to the point where he does not even consider it worth his while to pay attention to which is which. Parents and the rest of society however, tend to feel differently so it must be addressed.Central to helping a child deal with lying behaviors is a message which runs counter to prevailing thought. Most people develop relationships with people they can trust and have been known to say something like, "I could never love someone I didn't trust." Obviously, that is not the message a child who lies needs to hear. Parents can be extremely therapeutic when they change that to, "I can love you even when I don't trust you." And, "I am such a great mom that you are not going to keep me from loving you just because you lie.""
"Antecedents to Lying and Teaching the Truth" by Deborah Hage, MSW
http://www.fosterparents.com/DHage.html
The relationship between fear and lying:
"Why do children lie? Understanding the relationship between fear and lying is one of the best ways to deal with children if they start lying. Children lie because they are afraid to tell the truth or face the truth. Children who lie have usually had experiences where they subsequently learned that telling the truth is more uncomfortable than lying. Most of the time children first learn to lie by watching their friends, family or strangers lie.
If children want to avoid reality, or they want to avoid how they feel about their real self, they may end up telling lies about what they were doing, their friends, their families, their abilities, or their belongings. Children say things like "My Daddy is on a secret mission", "I didn’t do it" or "I have a pony". The purpose of lying is to feel better or to avoid feeling worse. Children who are afraid of how they feel when they tell the truth may become liars. Lying is a common way that children learn to avoid anxiety, panic, feeling bad and punishment.
In some cases, lying can become a chronic disorder. Some children would literally have a panic attack if you could force them to face the truth about life, their parents or their self. Lying is one way that children are closing their eyes and ears to the truth. In some cases, lying can become a lot like a phobia – a fear of telling the truth.Chronic lying is a very real problem. Parents are really confused when their child continues to lie even after the child is repeatedly caught and punished. Parents get frustrated when children don’t learn from the consequences of lying or their punishment after they are caught in a lie. Unfortunately, many children do learn. They just learn to try harder next time so they won’t get punished. In the case of chronic lying, there comes a point when punishment, restriction, taking things away and grounding children will only make the situation worse. It is time to get professional help when things just get worse."
The Heart of Anxiety, Panic, Phobias & Lying
Published in "The Family News", January, 2001
By: Michael G. Conner, Psy.D, Clinical, Medical & Family Psychologist
http://www.crisiscounseling.com/Articles/FearAnxietyPhobiaLying.htm
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Teacher resigns over plagiarism fight:
"High school teacher Christine Pelton wasted no time after discovering that nearly a fifth of her biology students had plagiarized their semester projects from the Internet. She had received her rural Kansas district's backing before when she accused students of cheating, and she expected it again this time after failing the 28 sophomores.
Her principal and superintendent agreed: It was plagiarism and the students should get a zero for the assignment. But after parents complained, the Piper School Board ordered her to go easier on the guilty. Pelton resigned in protest in an episode that some say reflects a national decline in integrity.
"This kind of thing is happening every day around the country, where people with integrity are not being backed by their organization," said Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, Calif.
Josephson pointed to the Enron bankruptcy scandal, in which an executive whistle-blower had warned superiors about the potential consequences of energy trader's off-the-books business deals. Also in recent months, some of the nation's top historians, including Stephen Ambrose, have been accused of borrowing passages from other authors without proper credit.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis was suspended without pay for a year from Mount Holyoke College after lying to his students about serving in Vietnam. Notre Dame University football coach George O'Leary resigned after falsifying his athletic and academic achievements on his resume.
"It's so hard to keep sending the message that character counts when you have officials saying it doesn't count that much," Josephson said. . . . "The students no longer listened to what I had to say," she said. "They knew if they didn't like anything in my classroom from here on out, they can just go to the school board and complain." . . .
Pelton, 26, resigned days after the board ordered her to give the students partial credit and to decrease the project's value from 50 percent of the final course grade to 30 percent.Board president Chris McCord did not give a reason for the Dec. 11 decision, which was made behind closed doors. He said it was not prompted by parents' complaints. . . . But Pelton said the course syllabus, which she required students to sign, warned of the consequences of cheating and plagiarism.
Rutgers University professor of management Donald McCabe, who has researched academic dishonesty in high schools and colleges, said many teachers ignore cheating, and the Kansas episode illustrates why. "Parents are going to complain to principals and the school board, and teachers feel there's no reason to believe they'll get support," said McCabe, whose study of high school students in 2000-01 found that 74 percent had cheated or plagiarized during the prior year. What is worse, McCabe said, is that tolerance of dishonesty disheartens other students, who have to compete with the cheaters to get into college. "If they see teachers looking the other way, students feel compelled to participate even though it makes them uncomfortable," McCabe said. "The loss of that sense of fairness is the fundamental reason students cheat." . . .
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press.
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School Cheating Scandal Tests a Town's Values
. . . It began in December with a teacher's finding that 28 of 118 Piper High sophomores had stolen sections of their botany project off the Internet. The students received zeroes and faced failing the semester. But after parents complained to the school board, the teacher, Christine Pelton, was ordered to raise the grades, prompting her resignation. Now, the community is angrily pointing fingers as they debate right and wrong, crimes and consequences, citizenship and democracy.
. . .
Several teachers said that nearly half the high school's 31-member faculty plus its brand new principal planned to resign at year's end over the case, while parents fretted that the school's dwindling reputation might result in a decline in property values and disappearance of scholarship opportunities.
. . .
"It's not just biology, you're teaching them a lot more than that," Mrs. Pelton, 27, who had planned to resign this spring anyhow to start a home- based day care center, said between television appearances the other day. "You're teaching them to be honest people, to have integrity, to listen, to be good citizens. "We got rules, and they got to follow the rules," she added. "I'm not expecting more than what would be expected of them either at home or down the road."Students, plagiarizers and non-plagiarizers alike, have already begun to feel the backlash. A sign posted in a nearby high school read, "If you want your grade changed, go to Piper." The proctor at a college entrance exam last weekend warned a girl wearing a Piper sweatshirt not to cheat. A company in Florida faxed the school asking for a list of students — so it would know whom never to hire. At Tuesday's board meeting, as five television news crews rolled tape, a woman worried that the community has been "stamped with a large purple P on their foreheads for plagiarism."
The sophomore leaf project, an elaborate exercise in which students spend months collecting leaves and researching their origins, dates back a decade.
Mrs. Pelton, who came to Piper High in the fall of 2000 after a five- year program at the University of Kansas, sent an outline of the assignment home on the first day of school, along with her classroom rules (No. 7: "Cheating and plagiarism will result in failure of the assignment and parent notification. It is expected that all work turned in by the student is completely their own."), which students and parents had to sign. Mrs. Pelton said she began to worry in October, when students' oral presentations, filled with big, unfamiliar words, sounded strangely similar. As she flipped through their projects a month later, she found the writing far more sophisticated than previous assignments. A plagiarism- detection Web site, turnitin.com, showed one in four were laced with lifted material.
The principal, Michael Adams, who declined to be interviewed, backed Mrs. Pelton's decision to give students zeroes, as did the superintendent. But after parents protested at the Dec. 11 school board meeting, the superintendent, Dr. Michael O. Rooney, sent a memorandum home saying he had "reluctantly" directed Mrs. Pelton to deduct just 600 of 1,500 points from the plagiarizers' projects, and to cut its value in the overall grade from 50 percent to 30 percent.
Mrs. Pelton said a student told her, "We won."
Though teachers here say they begin discussing source citation in the fourth grade, some parents, of students with zeroes and those with A pluses, insist the students did not realize what they were doing was wrong . . .
It is just the latest plagiarism revelation afflicting American high schools and colleges, aggravated by an Internet age in which research papers — as well as programs to detect cheating — can be downloaded by the dollar. A Rutgers University professor's survey of 4,471 high school students last year found that more than half had stolen sentences and paragraphs from Web sites, 15 percent handed in papers completely copied from the Internet, and 74 percent had cheated on a test.
. . .
Many parents have expressed sympathy for the 75 percent of students who did not cheat, some of whom received lower semester grades in biology when the project they had slaved over suddenly counted less than they had anticipated. . . . Teachers, ever-protective of the sanctity of their grade books, say the board has robbed their independence and professionalism. Instead of a lesson about the importance of honesty and originality, they say, students learned that complaining to higher powers mitigates punishment."If I make a decision, I don't know if it's going to be backed up," said Angel Carney, a business teacher who submitted her resignation this week. "I had a disagreement with a parent the other day; right away she wanted to go over my head." . . .
Piper High's handbook does not mention plagiarism specifically, but says the penalty for cheating, even a first offense, is no credit on the assignment. . . .By Jodi Wilgoren
February 14, 2002, Ed Zurga for The New York Times
------------------------------Pathological lying has source in childhood:
"Research on pathological liars has been limited because habitual liars rarely seek professional help. The little research available indicates many liars have been traumatized as children. Some were terrified by abandonment, shame or abuse. They may have begun lying as a means of protecting themselves against assault and blame (Isa.28:15).
One-third of pathological liars, according to one study, have parents or siblings who are alcoholics or mentally ill. Still another study speaks of impostors as growing up in families where there is often an abundance of shared deception, lying, cheating, make-believe and living in a fantasy world—a world of denial.
Other liars simply grew up with a miserable self-image. Down deep, they really don't believe they are worth anything. According to Deckert they are constantly trying to buttress their self-image by telling grandiose stories, while in actuality their behavior has caused them to be their own worst enemy (Ekman, 1986). Hosea states, "But you have planted wickedness, you have reaped evil, you have eaten the fruit of deception. Because you have depended on your own strength and on your many warriors, the roar of battle will rise against your people, so that all your fortresses will be devastated . . ." (Hosea 10:13-14)."
"Lying" by Dr. Sidney Langston
References: Ekman, Paul. (1986). Telling lies. New York, NY: A Berkeley Book.
http://members.aol.com/elrophe/lying.htm
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Top Secret"Concerns about breaches in the security of state tests have caused several states, including Kentucky, Maryland, and Rhode Island, to tighten security and revise their codes of ethical testing practices. In the past, most of the cheating on tests was done by students, but now there are more examples of cheating done by teachers and administrators because of the increasing pressure of test results. States use results from standardized tests to reward or punish students, educators, and schools, by determining if students graduate, teachers and principals receive salary bonuses, or schools get shut down."
(Education Week, July 14, 1999) Education In The News
Summaries of media stories regarding education and related issues
http://www.lx.org/ednews.html
-------------------------Administrators fail to support teachers over plagiarism:
"Rutgers University management professor Donald McCabe found that more than three-quarters of nearly 2,000 students at nine large public institutions admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on tests or examinations, or to having engaged in serious dishonesty in written assignments.
"There are incidents of plagiarism at Oberlin every year and, while the honor system is notified of some of them, my sense is we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg," says Jim Helm, Oberlin classics professor and chair of the Faculty Honor Committee.
"It's difficult to identify, and thus to prevent it. I used to give closed-book take-home exams, but found that the pressure this puts on students is too great. I have stopped giving take-home tests unless they are open-book."
With term papers, he adds, an option is to assign very specific topics; finding the subject on the Internet is more difficult.
In another study, Rutger's McCabe asked 800 faculty members why they ignored possible plagiarism violations. Professors cited "inadequate support" as a primary factor."
http://www.oberlin.edu/~alummag/oamcurrent/oam_fall2001/ats.html
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Cheating scandals test schools
"As the school year ends, the test scores are coming in. Scores on which a school's reputation rises or falls. Scores on which a principal's job can depend. Scores that will soon become even more seminal if Congress passes President Bush's education reform plan.
But increasingly the strong medicine of high stakes testing may have an unwelcome side effect -- cheating.
A few weeks ago, 71 schools in 22 districts across Michigan were cited for "testing irregularities." State Treasurer Douglas Roberts, who is responsible for administering the state's standardized exams, said three sets of test reviewers found multiple cases of identical answers on essay questions. "We had examples of where a test answer might be as many as three sentences and four or five or six students had exactly the same answer," Roberts said.
Although some schools that were named claim there are innocent explanations for the irregularities, Roberts said it would be hard to explain away some of the examples. "The worst examples I've seen are serious," he said. "I think that when you have several students and they're identical (answers), I would say that's a serious issue."
It's just the latest example of cheating scandals that have broken out in a dozen states in the last few years.
Just last May, a middle school in Montgomery County, Maryland, suspended seven employees when an advance copy of a state math exam was handed out to several teachers, to help them prepare students for the test. Two teachers actually gave students the test questions as homework. "We first realized it after two students identified questions on the test as being the exact same questions they had just completed the night before on their homework," said Brian Porter, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Superintendent's office.
New York City was rocked 18 months ago by a citywide cheating scandal. A special investigation found that 52 educators in 32 schools had helped students with state tests, to boost their scores. The investigators found that teachers corrected children's answers, gave them the answers outright, or even wrote on students' exams themselves.
In Austin, Texas, a school official and the entire school district were indicted in criminal court two years ago for tampering with test scores. The State Attorney said it was the first time in Texas history that a school district had been indicted.
"We've seen an increase in cheating," said Vincent Ferrandino, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
Proponents of high-stakes tests say they are the only effective way to hold schools accountable, that without them many students fall through the cracks and school performance stalls. But Ferrandino said there are other forms of assessment that may do a better job of evaluating a child's progress and help prevent an epidemic of cheating. "These tests have put educators in a position out there if in fact students perform poorly it could mean, in the case of a principal, the loss of a job, in the case of a teacher it could mean a poor evaluation and consequently the loss of job downstream. For the students it could mean being retained," Ferrandino said.
Why would teachers, who are supposed to be role models for their students, resort to such behavior? "I think part of it is because they want their students to do well," says Ferrandino. "I think in many cases teachers may look at the test and say, 'you know this really is not a test of what these children know, and what I've been teaching for most of the year.""
By Kathy Slobogin, CNN, July 23, 2001
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/fyi/teachers.ednews/07/23/cheating/
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We lie because we were taught at an early age:
Telling the truth will get you in trouble.
It's not nice to hurt peoples feelings.
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything.
It's okay to protect a friend.
Always play to win.
(source unavailable)
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