The Saint

Story by Christopher J. Curry, Opinion Editor

A few weeks ago, I was at a coffee shop with some of my friends doing homework. I was working on a paper for one of my classes, and they were just doing some assignments relating to their classes. Neither of them attend Aquinas College. One was studying marketing, the other was studying physics. I picked my head up to stop and think for a moment on what I wanted to write, but I noticed they were both peering back and forth between their computers and their assignments. It turns out, they were both using an online homework checking website called ‘Chegg’, copying the answers posted online.

Before I continue, I won’t sit here and say that over the course of my academic career that I never did something similar or even the exact same thing. I have to say that I was disappointed that this would occur amongst students in College. 

I questioned them, asking “Are you just getting the answers from the website?” They both looked at me as if I was wrong to question them. The girl responded, “Yes, is there something wrong?” Mind you, they were both paying out of pocket to get an education!

At this point I realized that there is a total misunderstanding on the part of students as to what higher education actually is. This stems from a failure to understand what learning is. The goal of learning is to know unqualifiedly that something is the case and reason for it. All that one is doing when they plagiarize is simply inserting a part into a machine they’ve been told to insert. It destroys the principle of going to school in the first place.

It seems to me that students now view higher education as being analogous to the relationship between buyer and seller, and for this I don’t blame them entirely. Institutions are selling a commodity on whose selling point is that it will make the buyer (the student) more marketable. The problem is that as soon as education is viewed as a commodity and not a good in itself, then the means of attaining an “education” are simply circumstantial. 

The point of education is to learn and gain knowledge, and to do so, we must come to know not just that fact, but also the cause of the fact. Education is the means by which we achieve this end. There’s no point to paying for an education if there is, in fact, no learning occurring.