I’ve longed for years to arrive at this point in my life. The point where I begin the early stages of my planned curmudgeonliness, and spend all my time complaining about “young whipper-snappers”, and how “by golly, we didn’t do things that way in MY day“. As a ninth grade dropout who remains without a degree but would have loved a different life in which I had either had less arrogance or more firm guidance as a teen with an above-average IQ, I’ve spent much of my adult life lamenting the sad de-evolution of education. The focus on test-score-driven funding and the creation of “degree mills” has left us surrounded by an amazingly dumb and inarticulate group of 18 to 24-year-olds. It’s vaguely appropriate that they’re already being called Generation Z, because their brains are obviously snagging a few. The recent flap at UCF involving widespread cheating was telling enough in its own way, and I think it’s already common knowledge that the students of the last couple decades confuse learning with the relocation of information. As is evident in the success of the term paper mills that have been making news since at least 2006. What is probably even more telling in the case of the Florida cheating scandal though, is the students’ reactions. They of course are trying to assert that cheating is “simply how it’s done these days“, and blaming the professor. I’m going to let this little bunch of morally decrepit miscreants speak for themselves. Being the cute little Digital Natives that they are, they’ve saved me some video embedding by doing it all on their school news website with a piece called UCF Students Give Their Side in Cheating Scandal With Video. I think you should pay special attention to the Quinn Confrontation video, brought to you by a young gentleman (or “fuckstick”, as a friend of mine referred to him) named Logan Herlihy. Herlihy is probably destined for success in cable news. He seems to be comfortable confusing news with vapid sensationalism, and as he says on his ModelMayhem page: “as cheezy as it may sound I really believe my body is my temple. I come from a great genetic line my grandfather and mother were both film stars and my mother and father were both international models back in the 70′s“. Reading that kind of self-assessment makes me think that while the educational system gets rid of that psyche-scarring “D” as a grade, we should add a new letter. “P”. For “precious”.