What the Washington Post is Teaching Your Children About 'Plagiarism'

Like most daily newspapers, the WaPo runs a scam that enables them to inflate their circulation figures for advertisers special program for schools called "Newspapers in Education." They sell reduced-cost newspapers to grade and high schools (or they find an sponsor to foot the bill) so that kids can use newspapers in the classroom.

They also provide lesson plans for teachers to use in English, government  and other classes. Those of you who have been following the Ben Domenech dust-up will probably find this particular lesson plan [PDF], entitled Research Integrity, ironic. Here's a snippet:

Would you ever feed your neighbor’s pets and begin calling them your animals? Or would you throw a net over a friend’s CD collection, toss them in your backpack and take them home as if they were your own?

We hope your answer is no. These are examples of unauthorized borrowing or stealing.

Would you take words written by historians and pretend they were yours? Or find a poem on the Internet and hand it in as your own completed homework assignment?

Although we are dealing with ideas and words, not physical objects that can be picked up and carried away, these are more examples of stealing. Literary theft is called plagiarism (pronounced plâ´je-rîz˝em).

Someone who says the ideas and writing of someone else is his own is a plagiarist.

Too bad Augustine Ben was home-schooled. He might have benefited from this particular WaPo NIE lesson.

[H/T: Jeremías]

UPDATE: Check out this crazy-ass, dog-ate-my-twinkie- smeared-homework defense BD offers via Howie Kurtz. It's par in this Republican era of personal responsibility and competence. 

Comments

[KathyF]

I wondered when someone would point out the connection between homeschooling and ethics. Well done!

[Roxanne]

Well, I think home-schooling can be effective, depending upon who those home-schoolers are. I have no doubt my husband and I could raise an educated child. But it seems like Ben didn't get that kind of education --the kind that teaches that stealing is wrong.

[The Fat Lady Sings]

I've been doing a bit of reading about his father. Let us say the apple doesn't seem to have fallen too far away from the tree. Back we come full circle to the whole 'home schooling' debate. If you don't have a daily serving of ethics at home, you have to get it from somewhere. Personally - my parents modeled some rather appalling behaviors to me. There were many reasons why I didn't pick any of them up - but I did have other places to look other than my home. I also made a definite choice not to go down that road. Somewhere, something got really crossed with Domenech. His choices seem to have been faulty all around.

[doghouse riley]

I've been on that other homeschooled Ben--the virgin one--for some time about this. It's not works he's plagiarized, it's a mindset. Half his opinions are echoes of Carter/Reagan era Young Republicanisms, stuff he couldn't possibly be seeing from his own perspective. Homeschooling is like the ultimate teaching to the test.

There's just too great a risk when the teacher can also send you to bed without dinner. A lot of homeschooling is motivated by a hatred of the culture that is based on what comes through the idiot box, not what's really out there, by at least a vague racism, and by the trend of the last twenty years or so to teach at least some high school subjects in a way once reserved for college--teaching students to think for themselves rather than parrot. I think anyone homeschooling after age 12 is treading dangerously.

[Hubris]

The attendant post at RedState made me feel like I was in Crazytown:

Facts have no meaning. Only impressions have any bearing on this. The charges of plagarism are false, meant to bring down a good and honest man.

Huh? The stuff I've seen is pretty damning. Unless there's a practice whereby journalists get permission to use someone else's writing while changing a couple of words that I'm unaware of.

If anything, the "[f]acts have no meaning" charge would seem to apply to those blindly asserting this type of defense against the charges of plagiarism.

If the dude has a (surprising) valid defense, let's hear it.

[Roxanne]

I expect a great deal of crow-eating in the coming weeks.

[The Heretik]

Oy. Nobody could have anticipated . . . .

[kcb]

I love your blog, Roxanne, but the fixation on homeschooling in Domenech's case is touching a nerve (owee). Yes, there are some crazy hs'ers out there, but there are a lot of us who are sane, ethical and doing it for reasons as diverse as having a special-needs child for whom the public schools cannot provide proper services, a family that travels for work and doesn't want to be separated for months on end, and an infinite variety of other reasons.

I know this isn't about me, but if the rap on Domenech's failures is his education, wouldn't it be consistent and intellectually honest to attribute Bush's incompetence to his prep-school background? What about the ineptness and corruption of so many public-school-trained politicians?

Before I started hs-ing my kids as an alternative to our piss-poor Texas public schools (of which I am a graduate), I held some pretty negative stereotypes of hs'ers, too. For me, the crow wasn't especially tasty, but the portions were huge.

[jw]

Little things.

Ben's apology about his comment is because it's been "way overblown." Not wrong, not stupid, but people have reacted to it.

Caption under photo might lead one to believe that ol' Ben regretted the comment about King soon after making it, "later regrettted", not yesterday, after a big pile of poo was piled on him for making it, and the Post for hiring him.

Less misleading, but still undated is the info in the article about the comment and apology. Surely the sentence quoting his apology would have been more honest had it ended with "Domenech said yesterday", instead of "Domenech said."

And easily missed is the humor excuse. Righties love that one. Domenech charactized the comment as "tongue-in-cheek." But later we learn that King really did work with organizations affiliated with communists. The Blues Brothers defense.

[KathyF]

I actually did homeschool my child. It's from talking to some of the other homeschoolers that I made that statement. Some of them are just freaking nuts.

[kcb]

KathyF, I don't doubt you're right; I just never have occasion to talk to those types. The isolationist homeschoolers here have their own groups that wall everyone else out so they are more or less invisible to me and my fellow inclusive hs'ers. Of course, here in Texas, where public schools in Odessa are trying "Bible literacy" courses, there are hardliners everywhere.

I guess my broader point is that it's hard to link a person's particular failings to the method of his or her education with any certainty. I assume that most people in this country who are busted doing unethical things are products of public or parochial schooling, just because of the prevalence of those forms of education. But unless the offender was homeschooled, his childhood education isn't made into an issue when discussing his failings.

Sorry for the thread drift. Domenech, regardless of whether homeschooling made him do it, came across as a real tool in his most recent column.

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