“If I want to get the better grade, I’m going to cheat to get it. No question. Anyway, in the real world you do whatever you have to do to get the better job.”
How would you describe this student? Mercenary? Unethical? Amoral?
“He’s a good kid, but he’s competitive,” [Principal Dana Trevethan] says. From the March 2006 Reader’s Digest.
“What gets lost when good kids act bad for the world to see?” reads a partial headline of an article in the October 2007 issue of Family Circle Magazine about kids and the wacky & tacky things they post on YouTube .
This is not a “kids these days!” post, but rather one about language and definitions. Here’s the question: If the “good kids” are cheating, lying, or making fools of themselves and posting the proof on the internet, then what exactly constitutes a “bad kid.” Or if you don’t like that terminology, an “ungood kid.” Or, in the case of the YouTube postings, a “kid who knows no shame.”
If we use the term “good kids” for those who cheat, lie, intentionally humiliate themselves and others in the most public ways possible, what in the world will we call the kids who don’t do these things. Or what about those kids who help the less fortunate, start their own businesses, or in other ways “go beyond” the call of normal teenage duty. Great kids? Remarkable kids? Mutants?
What does a kid have to do to be labeled a “bad kid?” Violence? Felony theft? Refusing to recycle?
Theologically, I believe that we’re all bad, that is, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Linguistically, “good” means “morally excellent; virtuous; righteous; pious.” Cheating, lying, and public displays of stupidity are neither excellent nor virtuous. How is it helpful to pretend otherwise?
