און צעקריּפלטע און טויטע ֿפאַ לן דאָ און דאָ רט נײַ ע לעבנס אָ נגעגרײטע ֿפילן אויס דעם אָ רט און אין גרויסע טיֿפע קֿברים ּפאַ קט מען לײַ כעס ֿפיל און די הערשער, די קײסאָ רים שּפילן שאַ כמאַ ט שּפיל

“And the crippled and dead fall there and there new lives are prepared to fill their place and in the great deep graves men pack full with bodies and the masters, the Caesars play chess.”

-Shlomo Shmulevitz, “Mentshn-freser”

    With the advent of distance learning in the light of the current pandemic, new problems arise in pedagogy. How can teachers enforce the maintenance of academic integrity ie. to prevent cheating, to prevent plagiarism, and et cetera. We have already seen the decline of academic integrity in the final semester of the last school year; people communicating with their phones, watching TV shows when they are in class, people not paying attention in class. We have also witness the teachers’ pathetic reaction, of which includes the imperative that we must turn on our camera so that they may surveil us[1].

     One solution some within the current government have proposed is a return to in- person classes, clamoring about the dire need to educate children, as if it were a self-evident sine qua non. Our school has already decided to continue distance-learning for at least the first semester of the next school year, however the possibility remains.

     This solution is an existential threat to us, and an alternative solution must be found and so that we may both “Achieve the honorable” and be safe and healthy. However this is not of our concern, in fact what is most beneficial to us, the students, is that no solution exist, where academic integrity is unenforceable and cheating and procrastination is made easier.

“At this point, a Sophist, Thrasymachos, enters and denounces all of the debaters as milky-eyed idealists. In reality, he says, all talk of “justice” is mere political pretext, designed to justify the interests of the powerful. And so it should be, because insofar as justice exists, it is simply that.”

-David Graeber, Debt pg.196

    In no way in the perspective of a student[2] is academic integrity a desideratum. By cheating if done successfully and without detection their scores and grades improve. There is no real reason students should not cheat, except it is “morally” wrong to do so, ie. against academic integrity. The concept of academic integrity like many things is a social construct. Its creation does not benefit the student, if so we must ask, in the words of Shlomo Shmulevitz poem, mentshn-freser[3], “What agent do you serve?”

    For what reasons should students actually care about the accuracy of test scores of students and student participation in class? Whatever the reason is, it is not the students’ concern, who only wishes to have good grades and escape from this prison.[4]

    The true beneficiaries of “Academic Integrity” are not the students, who have the most to “gain” from it, but the capitalist system and its apparatus the state; there is nothing intrinsically “good” or “moral” about an educated citizenry. It is just that the masters of the world find it convenient that their respective citizens are loyal and educated on self-evident subjects, such as “History”,“Economics”, “Civics”, Math, and the national language.

    In the era of the Coronavirus, however, we might very well witness the death of academic integrity and a drift away from what Paulo Frerie calls “The banking concept of education”, and we must fight against its preservation, as our leaders would eagerly pay in our own blood for its affirmation.

End Notes:
[1] In a way extending the boundaries of the school into our homes, of which we must submit to their authority. No longer is our homes a place of escape.
[2] student here does not actually refer to a real existing student, but an abstract being, and like many abstractions, it does not exist in the real world.
[3] Lit. Human-devourer,
[4] It is no coincidence that schools resemble prisons, both often are designed by the same people.