In a TED Talk viewed over 2 million times, Efosa Ojomo of the Christensen Institute made the provocative case that corruption isn’t the problem holding poor countries back. Corruption is the solution for people in poor countries to make progress when facing scarcity around basic needs like food, education, health care, economic opportunity, and jobs.
The real problem? A lack of better options to make progress.
There’s a similar phenomenon in education.
Cheating isn’t the problem holding schools back.
It’s a solution students use to make progress in an education system built around a zero-sum mindset designed to sort students rather than develop every child’s full potential.
Before you click away, let me explain further.
Ojomo’s basic argument is that people don’t engage in corruption because they are bad people. Nor is he arguing that we should “just ignore corruption.”
His research findings are that people do corrupt things because it’s a workaround. It’s the most accessible way they can make progress in societies where many of the basics we take for granted in the West are scarce.
The reason this matters is that, in Ojomo’s words, “conventional thinking on corruption and its relationship to development is not only wrong, but it’s holding many poor countries backward.”
“In a society that’s poor and corrupt,” said Ojomo, “[the popular thinking goes that] our best shot at reducing corruption is to create good laws, enforce them well, and this will make way for development and innovation to flourish. Now, it makes sense on paper, which is why many governments and development organizations invest billions of dollars annually on institutional reform and anti-corruption programs. But many of these programs fail to reduce corruption, because we have the equation backward. You see, societies don’t develop because they’ve reduced corruption. They’re able to reduce corruption because they’ve developed. And societies develop through investments in innovation.”
He gives several examples in the talk, drawing from the book he coauthored with Clayton Christensen and Karen Dillon, titled The Prosperity Paradox. These range from the development of South Korea to the growth of the mobile phone industry in sub-Saharan Africa.
Before the launch and growth of Celtel, for example, telecommunications was an industry filled with corruption on the continent. But as abundance replaced scarcity, a positive-sum reality—in which the pie grows larger as individuals achieve success—replaced a zero-sum mindset. Corruption faded.
There’s a similar dynamic in education.
At a recent dinner with several university presidents and provosts, many made the point that rampant cheating has been alive and well for a long time. Different studies show that roughly two-thirds of high school and college students, for example, admitted cheating on at least one test or exam 30 years ago.
AI has merely made cheating far easier, such that, according to a recent Common Sense Media survey, “among teens who use AI, 63% say they get an answer to their schoolwork from AI.” As a result, AI has brought the issue of cheating into the national discourse—and exposed a larger problem.
The natural response from many educators is to ask for more discipline, crack down on the cheaters, restore the honor code, and the like.
But these responses, while fine as far as they go (remember: the goal here isn’t to excuse cheating), ignore the root cause of why a student would resort to cheating in the first place. And why they’d not just cheat on a given assignment, but cheat themselves out of the opportunity to learn by actively doing the work themselves.
One root cause lies in the zero-sum system of education, in which students find themselves caught in a world where for every winner, there’s a loser.
This system is at the root of why higher education, for example, swings between the unsatisfactory poles of grade inflation on the one hand and arbitrary forced grading curves on the other—with neither actually assessing with any rigor whether a given student has mastered the material at hand.
That’s because the system acts as though success is scarce: that one person’s success must come at the expense of another’s. This puts the emphasis on “winning the game” by beating others as opposed to actually doing the learning.
What’s more, teachers in this system act not just as educators, coaches, mentors, and advocates, but also as the final judge and jury. The current time-based system compels teachers to rank and sort students relative to one another, rather than focus solely on helping each child become successful.
It undermines their first set of roles around being a confidant and coach, and encourages students to cheat to “win” the “game” of school.
As Matt Pittinsky, the cofounder of Blackboard and Parchment, who is returning as Blackboard’s CEO once again, recently wrote in a thoughtful white paper titled “Mark Hopkins’ Log: AI, Higher Education, and the Extraordinary Potential of an Ordinary Technology”:
“A student cheating with AI is behaving rationally; the system trained that rationality long before ChatGPT. For thirty years David Labaree has argued that American education serves three competing purposes—democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility—and that the third has steadily crowded out the others. Social mobility treats education as a private good: a zero-sum competition for the credentials that secure advantage. When the credential is the prize, the learning becomes incidental. If you are there for the grade and not the knowledge, Labaree observes, your incentive is to get it ‘the cheapest and easiest way I possibly can’—the effort a credential demands is just a price, and no rational buyer pays more than they must. AI simply dropped the price to zero: the ‘magic sauce,’ in his phrase, that lets a student ‘go through school without becoming educated.’ AI did not create the gap between what a credential certifies and what a learner knows. It exposed it.”
Just as market-creating innovations are the key to breaking through a zero-sum world of scarcity to create prosperity and eliminate corruption, so too do we need innovations to reinvent schooling around a positive-sum mindset…and eliminate the breeding ground for cheating oneself out of learning.
