A teacher can be a cheater, but why? [closed]

Question

Quite along the lines of @Tim B. 's very popular question, but generalizing stuff a bit here.

A teacher can be a cheater, after all, it's there in the name.

Why would a teacher, a fountain of knowledge, guidance, truth and ethics, be exactly what they try to counsel us from not being, which is a con, trickster and a "cheat" (not that that needs any explanation)?

Plausible answers will be preferred, and extra preference will be given to those answers which actually allow the teacher to ethically get away with it. Instances of such cases are most welcome.

Answer 1

To teach us skepticism, critical thinking, unfairness, and humility.

A teacher who cons us could then teach us how to avoid being conned in the future. Their students would develop valuable critical thinking skills, learning how to evaluate scenarios that are "too good to be true", or are otherwise suspicious. They would develop a healthy sense of humility in the process, realizing that even the most clever of them can be fooled, if they are unprepared to face a seasoned trickster.

A teacher who is a cheat could also foster an ongoing discussion of the subjectivity of fairness and how it relates to real-world situations that the students would face in the future, be it in a workplace, government bureaucracy, relationships, etc.

There would be no ethical violations if such cons, tricking, and cheating were done within the scope of the classroom and did not cause any more undue emotional stress than important exams do today. It would be important that the whole process be done with a healthy dose of good humor and no vindictiveness.

Answer 2

Lies to Children

"A lie-to-children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child's mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie". The authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie" - The Science of the Discworld - Tery Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen.

A teacher doesn't have to tell the truth to lead the student to truth, and, often, telling the truth will obstruct the student from the path to truth. You tell lies-to-children to help them arrive at the truth in a way that they can process.

There are many examples of things which are very helpful, aside from the minor issue of being wrong in every respect. "The internet is a series of tubes" would be a good one.

Answer 3

There are several reasons why teachers might (and sometimes do) cheat.
One is funding. With standardized testing came the practice of linking test results to money for the school. The reason is that if a teacher is a good teacher, more of their students should pass the tests, and so the school should get more money. Bad teachers will have poor students, and so schools with bad teachers should get less money.

This has lead to cheating in several ways:

1. Teaching to the test. This is a minor cheat; teaching the students what is on the test, and sometimes ignoring other equally important things that aren't on the test. This is bad for the students, since it causes them to pass the testing without getting a full education.
2. Changing grades. There are teachers that have been caught changing their students grades from failing to passing. This mostly is because enough students failed the test that it would have put the teacher below a certain threshold. By changing a few answers of a few students, or maybe filling in answers that students left blank, a teacher can very subtlety go from a failing teacher to a passing teacher, all while "helping" a few kids.
   Teachers and faculty at schools in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta have been caught doing this, and there are very likely others.

Other reasons teachers might cheat? The usual ones: money, politics, sex, favoritism, etc.

Answer 4

1. A teacher teaches, and this involves the imparting of "knowledge". Knowledge of the world is always tentative at best, and sometimes downright wrong. At various point in history, children were taught by teachers that the Earth was flat, and that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Generations were cheated of cosmological truth. Even in the physical sciences and in mathematics, which are supposed to be exact, there are many misleading things taught to young children. Gross simplifications abound. First example: Newtonian Physics is taught to all school children like it is gospel truth, only to later be demolished by the revelations of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which can lead to a feeling of disillusionment amongst some students. Second example: teaching younger students that you can't take the square root of a negative number, only to cheat them of this early assumption with the introduction of complex numbers. "Simplification" is a euphemism - it's basically tantamount to cheating the students of a deeper truth. It's even worse when you consider humanities subjects like History, which necessarily involve subjective interpretations of events in the past. It's quite safe to say that the many students who end up rejecting "accepted" historical narratives to embrace "alternative" ones feel thoroughly cheated by their original mainstream teachers.

2. If we accept as an axiom that ignorance is bliss, then surely anything that dispels ignorance to banish bliss is the basest form of cheating. Bliss is a divine state, why would anyone stoop so low as to cheat us of that? The best of teachers are the worst of cheaters.

Answer 5

The teacher wants to make a living.

He or she might be in the business to make money, not for altruistic reasons. One way is to honestly teach what you think the students need, and hope that that will get you paying customers. Another way is to teach them what they say they want to learn, even if that is harmful, and hope that that will get you paying customers.

• Teach the students only what they need to pass a test, without giving them true competency.
• Sell them degrees which make them a laughingstock for genuine academics (diploma mills).

This becomes a con or cheat from the viewpoint of the students if the teacher misrepresents what the diploma is worth.

Answer 6

Teachers, especially supply (substitute) teachers may give lessons in subjects where they have little knowledge. So long as they remain one lesson ahead of the students they can con the pupils that they are an expert. This is ethically sound so long as they stick to facts since the students still benefit from the (limited) research the teacher has done.

Answer 7

Having taught for quite a few years, I must attest that teachers often are cheats. Very rarely do you see teachers actually do what they preach. In fact quite many times a teacher couldn't pass their own examination with flying colors (this is especially true in higher education). Many times the teacher can not even solve their own homework problems, instead they copy the ready made solution from a different source. While this sounds bad, its actually a boon because this way you get less mistakes falling through.

Secondly, teachers tell white lies all the time. Sometimes a very definitive explanation holds much more water than a very well worded "maybe". The thing is not much of our knowledge is as definitive as we might want to think. Often the truth is so complicated that in order for to begin to explain a subject:

1. One needs to get a simplified run through.
2. Once you attain a specific level, we can tear down the previous knowledge and replace it with a new one.
3. and repeat the process.

All explanations are thus some kind of lies. For this to work we need specially adaptive minds. Lots of half mastered people walk out of the classrooms all the time. So maybe most destructive of all, we let people keep their misconceptions as to not show that they were lied to from the beginning. And this is one of the big lies.

Third, there is also some globally accepted self perpetuating lie. Where people assume that having attended A. taught by B. and graded by C. is somehow accurate. Grading is terribly inaccurate, and not at all objective. So be careful when categorizing people by their education or scores. Errors happen a lot, much more than generally accepted. Many societies would in fact collapse with more scrutiny on this matter.

In defense for all good teachers out there. There is little choice, all communication is corrupted in transit and affected by previous misunderstandings. So there's no way to reach the goal. But one thing is certain: no pain, no gain. If it felt easy you didn't learn a thing.

Answer 8

In a school system where teachers are rated (and paid) based on how well their students perform, it can make (dishonest) tactical sense for teachers to lie about how well their students are doing.

There have been plenty of real-world cases of teachers cheating on standardized tests in the U.S. The most notable cases was when 11 Atlanta teachers were convicted in 2015 of modifying students' standardized tests. The piece When Teachers Cheat from The Atlantic offers some possible reasons:

Perhaps these things happen because of negligence. Maybe the teacher is just a rogue offender—an educator attempting to boost test scores for self-serving reasons. Or it could be the result of intimidation from top-down management. Regardless, the growing prevalence in recent years of dishonest practices such as these suggests that something is amiss within America's schools. [...] School districts are increasingly tying teacher pay to performance, and there's no consensus on the best way to measure student proficiency, so high test scores are starting to look a lot like money.