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Website Does Homework For Kids
A new French website allows children to pay older students to do their homework for them. Faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) allows children to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes costs 80 euros ($100). Founder Stephane Boukris says, "I realized there was a gap in the market. Add to that a dose of insolence, a zest of arrogance and the internet, and you have faismesdevoirs.com." I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
... is all that matters and not the actual comprehension, then they will find a way around the arbitrary system.
In other words, if you ask for bullshit do not be surprised when they bullshit you.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
That makes perfect sense to me.
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I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
Not everyone has older siblings, you insensitive clod!
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Rich kids buying themselves out of good education increases the probability for wasting their families fortune when they grow up. Honest, hardworking fellows will be happy to fill in the space.
Rich people getting richer with each generation aren't a good thing for any economy. Deterring work ethics of descendants, who never had to work in their live, have corrected this for centuries.
Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.
I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.
Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.
This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".
I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.
If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.
Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.
School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.
I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.
At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.
At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?
Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.
But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:
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The problem is that exams are a retarded way of judging people too.
They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.
I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.
This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.
Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.
To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.
So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.