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The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, by David Callahan (2004), Orlando, FL: Harcourt Press
In this treatise on cheating in American soci- ety, the author traces the cultural and ideologi- cal roots of current problems with cheating: in classrooms, in corporate boardrooms, and in political corruption. Character educators would do well to read this fine piece of schol- arship. While character education focuses on the development of character, or the interac- tion of individual character and the group dynamics of school culture, the values and concepts espoused in other areas of American culture such as popular media and entertain- ment, financial, and political domains also impact the children for whom you are con- cerned. Callahan connects instances of cheat- ing in diverse areas of American society through an explication of what he sees as a shared culture of cheating. While the descrip- tions of business and political corruption in American society are sobering, and the author critiques popular American public culture for making matters worse, he does so from a place of hope and personal purpose. The Cheating Culture provides readers with history, analysis, and ideas to understand the confluence of materialism, unfettered competition, the concentration of power into the hands of a few, and the wholesale corruption of both political and business institutions through the expansion and institutionalization of the cheating culture. Understanding its influence on citizens of all ages follows from understanding the underlying assumptions of the culture itself, which this work of social criticism lays out clearly.
Callahan begins by acknowledging that cheating is not a new problem. The Olympics in ancient Greece were "rife with cheating" (p. 15) and in ancient China there were severe penalties for cheating on civil service exams. Callahan argues that we need to understand something of the history of cheating in our society in order to contextualize the cheating that is bemoaned today. Cheating has a very public pedigree in American society. While at first blush we might say that cheating is profoundly un-American, Callahan presents evidence to suggest that cheating is an almost inevitable outgrowth of the blend of ideological commitments that have historically characterized the American cultural landscape.
The United States, for all its moral preoccupations, distinguished...