We should try to remember some of the stupid things we did when we were younger...
GOOD MORNING, class. Today's lesson is about cheating during examinations. We will start by . . . Mr Knowler, what's that you're drinking? Bring it to the front of the class and share it with us. And young Igor May. . . Eating again, boy?
It's matric examination time again. My baby brother has sharpened his pencils to join the other quivering teenage wrecks about to face the merciless pen of the examiners.
There's a sense of history about. This is the first time that all would-be matriculants in this country will be writing the same examinations and tested by the same set of rules.
Or will they?
I've started thinking again about cheating during examinations. This was a fairly common practice when I wrote matric at around the time my brother was born.
The dreaded invigilators would pace the aisles fixing a beady eye upon the trembling masses. Rulers were pounced upon and examined for faintly-pencilled formulae. Log tables (A calculators? What's that?) were shuffled and distributed at random.
But the biggest indignity was that those of us who were caught were all boys. The girls simply scribbled upon their legs just below their underwear and hiked up their skirts every so often to sneak a peek. No stern male invigilator was going to look up a girl's skirt. Not in public anyway.
Stupidly, those of us who didn't cheat never turned in those who did. We were infected with that bizarre sense of loyalty that's peculiar to adolescents.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got to Princeton. There were no invigilators. When admitted to the university, all students are required to subscribe to the Princeton Honour Code.
Very simply, every student promises not to cheat, not to assist anyone else in cheating, and to turn in anyone who may be seen to be cheating. If it could be shown that you were aware that a fellow student was cheating, but kept quiet, you were considered to be as guilty as if you had committed the crime yourself.
Anyone breaking the Honour Code was tried by a panel of fellow students, and in most cases was summarily expelled.
A pleasant side effect of the honour code was that if you wanted to, you could leave the examination hall and sit elsewhere while you wrote. I did this for an English literature exam. DH Lawrence is a lot more real when you are lying on the grass. What a pleasure!
In today's world, there are lots of ways to cheat. There are some James Bond solutions. A miniature radio receiver can fit into your ear while an accomplice reads answers from outside the room.
But then there are these new calculators. They're actually full-blown organisers that include telephone numbers, calendars, and diaries. The fact that they are calculators too means that they can be used in the classroom.
And they include a messaging facility. Notes can be transmitted and received between these things via an invisible noiseless infra-red signal. And they currently work at distances of up to eight metres.
Pricing for these organisers starts at about R90. That's cheaper than most skirts. And the chances of our average schoolteacher being able to recognise these pieces of technology as being anything more sophisticated than a calculator are somewhat slim.
Educational authorities are inherently conservative. They will, in all probability, remain blinkered to the changes in technology while continuing to examine rulers for secret marks.
Meanwhile, those who can afford to cheat using technology will do so, and their classmates won't turn them in either.
I'm slightly wiser now than when I wrote matric. I'm now totally unsympathetic towards rat-faced turds who destroy the value of the hard work that most pupils put in by cheating.
Those thieves continue to freeload off society in later years and are really no different to those who relieve us of our cars at gunpoint -- cars that have been paid for by years of hard work.
No teenager in his or her right mind takes advice from an adult. So I think the Princeton approach has a lot going for it. Make it obligatory to turn the cheats in. Emphasise to pupils that if they don't do so, their own careers are on the line.
And then, maybe, that sense of value will reassert itself in the later lives of those pupils when members of their communities turn to other crimes.