Plagiarism isn't bad (en)

Plagiarism isn't bad. It's boring.

Teachers who try to prevent students from plagiarizing using fear of punishment do not understand what education is about. Instead, they show that they would plagiarize themselves if they were not punished by higher authority. They are fear-motivated. They have no spine and self-respect. In fact, this behavior is clear evidence of incapacity on the teacher's behalf.

No student needs to be warned about plagiarism because, for a healthy child, it is counter-intuitive anyway. A healthy child wants to know who he is and show this to the world (and himself) thus he wants to explore his own thoughts, not sell other thoughts as one's own. Such doing would be pointless and does not align with the child's desires. To a teacher who understands and embodies this, it would never occur to threaten his pupils. After all, he is responsible for their protection, growth, and development. A good teacher's intrinsic desire is to see his pupils develop into unique, strong, and loving individuals. He desires that his pupils will surpass himself, that they will be better off (in every dimension) than he was. A good teacher is curious about who his pupils are at their core, he is curious about the authentic personality of the child. Thus the only sensible consequence is to support the child in any way possible to help it become who it is meant to be. The student's success and happiness is the teacher's happiness. A good teacher would thus never use fear against his pupils, instead, he would inspire them to be themselves, to follow their own curiosity, and to stand up for themselves by personally exemplifying such qualities himself. A teacher who is honest and authentic with his pupils will have them raise their eyebrows in disbelief hearing about people plagiarizing each other.

Plagiarism only becomes attractive for a child in a system of education that doesn't give a shit about the individual human being and its development. Only in such an inhumane system in which education is about giving answers that satisfy the teacher's ego, in which one's performance is graded according to an arbitrary, external standard, only in such a system plagiarism becomes attractive.

Plagiarism is essentially an attempt to satisfy external expectations, e.g. the teacher's. In fact, such a system demands plagiarism to a certain extent because only one kind of answer or opinion is accepted. In that way, a student must, in one way or the other, copy foreign thoughts, and present them as his own. Otherwise, he will fail his education. That is why our education is so traumatizing and why most people coming out of school or university are so incredibly boring, fearful, and unoriginal conformists.

Instead of threatening children with the consequences of plagiarism, one could also propose that a teacher doing this should instantly lose his job as he is clearly not qualified to bear the responsibility of such a sacred role in society. Such a proposal might seem drastic and surprising to many but this is only because they were conditioned by the same kind of systemic child abuse that our school system is. Indeed, this might not be an ideal way of dealing with it (because the teacher is, of course, a victim of his socialization himself), yet it would be much more humane and child-protecting than letting incompetent teachers implant fear of self-expression in our kids as it is happening every day in our classrooms right now.