How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.
I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.
In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.
Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.
How do you research HN posts? Fundamentally it comes down to a lot to knowing what source, person, or place of knowledge to trust. What are your rules of thumb to decide what to trust and not to trust?
Do you go to wikipedia and extend your research by looking in the citations, or use google right from the start?
I laughed so much at your comment, cause I used the same techniques.
To get a job, you have to have a college degree and a good GPA. To get that, you have to get good grades in college -- which means doing the homework and taking the tests. To even get into a decent college you have to have a good GPA in high school -- which, again, means doing the homework and taking the tests. Most companies don't care if you actually have the skillset, or if any of those homework assignments actually taught you anything, you need the credentials to get in the door to show it.
Grades aren't as big of a deal if you're going to be your own boss or start a business or found a startup, but in typical corporate America it's the end-all-be-all until you've got years of experience to show instead.
To live is to work and to work creatively. To live is to accomplish things. To be great is to accomplish more. If we teach kids to value doing things by the book what kind of a lesson is that?
Our virtues are built out of the stuff of our vices. Productive laziness, the kind which says "I want to accomplish such and such but there must be a way without working that hard" is a virtue.
My advice is to figure out what homework is really important and try to figure out what you want to do. Shortcuts aren't cheating. Picking which homework to do is not cheating.
If what you learn out of school is to work hard, memorize things without understanding them, and do without sleep, then it is the perfect preparation for, say, doing data entry for someone. But if you want to be great, learning how to get out of homework is a much more valuable lesson....