My own psychotherapy practice is a stone's throw from Great Neck, where the SAT scandal is underway, in that a graduate of Great Neck North High School who is presently a student at Emory University has been accused of taking SAT exams for six current high school students to the tune of 2,500 dollars a pop.They are all being accused of cheating, though the high school students will be tried as juveniles.
So, why is this not shocking to me? Perhaps it's because anyone who lives in this neck of the woods, the "great" neck so to speak, knows just how huge the competition and pressures are to get into college, let alone the college of one's choice.
Not to condone or excuse or come up with some fancy psychoanalytically-oriented explanation, but can we also look at context? One of the major obstacles to an effective exploration, for example, of the bullying crisis in America, is that we tend to look for the perpetrators, never stopping to gauge the cycles of bullying and how we as a society are complicit. We adults can be bullies and we can feel bullied, and what's more much of our entertainment has to do with humiliation made into a sport.
Let's take a look at two of the definitions of cheating: 1. Act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, esp. in a game or examination 2. Deceive or trick.
Well, then, going back to these definitions, what or rather who comes to mind? Let's see: Wall Street, Congress, the president, all of the people who got us to trust and then placed us in jeopardy, in our social and in our personal lives as well, and of course perhaps ourselves. Mind you, this is not an all-out defense for any of these youngsters, though it does suggest that there may be broader contexts to which we might attend, so as not to be lost in the distraction and scapegoating of one group only in one more scandal and set of criminal convictions, while many of us may be secretly wondering whether the same thing is happening in our own backyards or basements.
We can and really must, it seems to me, take a time out, instead of just giving one to our kids, to look at the broader implications, causes, and perhaps cures. One of the contexts I feel, really I know, to be important here is the ungodly pressure on kids and parents from the get go regarding college acceptance. Many students at college are heavily involved in illegal drinking and drug use, which all of us know, and which by the way is a form of cheating. Many students are involved in humiliating and sadistic hazing procedures in sororities and fraternities even when such practices are overtly condemned on the same campuses. And many students come into college depressed and overwhelmed, burned out before they even get to what they are told should be the best times in their lives, because learning from the start has been given to them as college preparation.
In terms of cheating our children, let's think of how many activities are given to them, even forced on them by parents and parent coaches and advisors who are planning the college interview from a child's infancy, or almost. There are many activities given to children whether the kids like them or not, with time filled up to the hilt, with little emphasis on creative imagination or shall we say, volunteer work other than the type strategically planned to look good. Odds are, if we allow and inspire our kids to be a truly central part of their educational planning, they will instead feel an authentic intrinsic and internal motivation that is never present when activity after activity is superimposed on them.
I am suggesting that we need to look at the fact that most teaching of moral values comes through modeling, and not merely through preaching. It doesn't even come through fear of consequences, capital punishment being long ago shown as not deterring criminal activity in those determined or ill enough to persist. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey just told a hungry crowd that his decision to run for president or not would have to come from within himself. Good for him, that he has a self, because many of the young people I see from Great Neck, and from Port Washington and other suburbs either have lost theirs or have tenuous ones to begin with.
At a time when we rush our kids through childhood in part out of our anxiety about prediction, calculation and our need for certainty, we are combining this with public and private dire -- and very confusing and depressing -- predictions about the future, and their future for sure. We are also depriving them of the space to become themselves during a phase of life known to us as developmentally unsteady and filled with swings of mood and feelings of grandiosity, impulsive actions and tunnel vision based desolation. Adolescents are well known for surpassing speed and safety limits, thinking they are indomitable.
I have long felt that this is a time where connection with adults, and family in particular, should be encouraged as strong, flexible and as honest as possible. I have counseled parents to aim to be the first one to be called in case of emergency and to build that trust.
This is by no means a judgment on these particular parents because we are parents are inhaling the polluted system of a race to the top that is becoming all too costly not only financially but emotionally as well. In addition we have been pressured ourselves to push so many vocationally talented kids into academia and have felt ourselves so judged by the name -- or its lack -- of the prestigious college our child enters.
Unfortunately there is all too often often no traffic light placed at a dangerous intersection until there is a deadly accident. And while this incident is not a matter of actual death, it could well be the death of hope for these students who engaged in a scam for reasons, and out of contexts we do not yet know.
I say let's not judge them (or their parents) too harshly or too hastily. Rather, let's make the effort to investigate the mood, not only at Great Neck North but throughout the districts where we are cheating kids out of their autonomy and curiosity, and not the least out of the joys and excitement and play that true learning can give.