Let the one who has never cast a bulging eye towards the copy of his neighbor cast the first stone. Anyone who has never even been tempted to inscribe a few cabalistic signs on a wacky medium in the hope of drawing valuable information from it when the time comes, dare to condemn all the occasional or compulsive cheaters whose classrooms abound.

The author of these lines is not free from turpitude, and remembers having one day inscribed a mathematical formula inside a pencil case in the hope of palliating the failures of a trembling memory . But to tell the truth, the crutch was not very useful: I was red with anguish and shame and did not dare to use the scandalous "cheat sheet" for fear of being immediately spotted by a professor who did not could only notice such a suspicious attitude. Because I was, like many children, brought up with the idea that nothing would have been more serious than to find oneself pilloried for having transgressed the rules of class or society. Shame would have killed me more surely than a reprimand from my parents (for a reprimand there would have been, of course). I am one of those children, entire generations of children, brought up in modesty and shame. In this guilt which is the very foundation of civilization and which small-footed Nietzscheans relegate to the rank of deadly behavior. But let François Bégaudeau, the trendy adulator of transgressive youth, be reassured: modesty and shame have long since been eradicated from our social behavior.

So students cheat. In class, for exams, for homework. But they don't cheat like their parents cheated, with a few illegible slips of paper whose mere realization had required so much concentration that it had been enough for their author to memorize the lesson. No, since progress has no end, cheating has passed, like agriculture or furniture making, from the artisanal era to the industrial era. It will be argued, of course, that young people are of their time, and that if new technologies are invading our space, there is no reason why their use should not be subverted. We know the refrain: the technique is neutral, only the uses are determined. So, if our children use USB keys and i-phones, it is because they are adapting to the times. Some, even, will not fail to rejoice, and once again make fun of these nerdy teachers who would master computer tools less well than their students. Serves them right. "The dear little ones know so much more than us at their age..." and other such nonsense. So these young people do not hesitate to hide in their kit a telephone connected to the internet or containing everything you need for the course. And since good souls in love with Human Rights and democracy keep telling them that in the name of "respect for their private life", so precious of course, no one can dig into their affairs, they know how to assert this right with the arrogance of false outrage.

But it goes further. Teachers now know that any work done at home is likely to be an exact copy of a document found on the internet. This poses various problems. First of all, copies of original texts have a name: plagiarism. The middle and high school students who practice it quite conveniently forget that a classroom is not a private space, and that the use of texts without the authorization of their author is therefore prohibited there. But when you get to university, and especially at the master's or thesis level, the problem is indeed of a legal nature. In secondary school, where homework remains relatively short, the shrewd teacher will have no great difficulty in typing a few key words into a search engine when he finds passages whose style obviously does not correspond to the approximate and laborious style of His students.

Because this is the second aspect of the question, which can be summed up in a somewhat provocative maxim: intelligent cheating could at a pinch be forgivable, but stupid cheating is intolerable. The student who copies from his neighbor or the one who copies Internet pages most of the time shows a crass nullity, their absolute lack of vocabulary making them incapable of modifying the sentence so that it is not recognizable (and the author of these lines has repeatedly found two or three copies that repeated word for word the same aberrant formulations and the same staggering errors). We painstakingly copy words that we do not understand and that we struggle to arrange correctly in a reasoning. Hence, most often, an assignment that does not respond to the subject posed since the answer key has not been found that corresponds exactly to the assignment. This cheat, contrary to what the followers of triumphant modernity and the pre-senile apologists of festive transgression claim, has absolutely nothing inventive or intelligent about it. Typing a few words on Google is within the reach of the first fool to come. Copying a few sentences without the slightest discernment does not require any skill. Worse, computer copy-paste no longer even requires the cheater to make the effort to write the sentences, which, through gesture, made him assimilate them. The object of his cheating is now absolutely, radically exterior to him.

We will answer, of course, that cheaters are not yet in the majority, and that technological cheating has not yet conquered lecture halls and classrooms. Certainly. The opposite would still be bewildering. But there is an underlying trend. And this trend feeds on the lack of credit given to knowledge that young people are told is useless, disconnected from the professional world and the needs of society... In short, why bother? As for plagiarism, it is, for its part, institutionalized to such an extent that progress is rapid and that there will soon not be a subject, however specialized, that does not have its answer key ready to use. on the Web.

The tragedy of technological cheating is ultimately twofold. The first, and the most terrible for what it tells us about our society and the children we have raised, is the total lack of remorse of these young people who practice cheating on a large scale. Non-compliance with the rules is perfectly uninhibited. Morality is an old bad sleeper fad. In a world where the utilitarian philosophy – born, let’s not forget, of liberal thought – fits so well with the economic system, only success counts. Scruples no longer tickle anyone, since the result alone will be remembered and glorified. Our children being only what we make of them, it is hardly surprising that they have learned the lesson so well. And parents who want their cherub at all costs to be a "winner", a resourceful person, have perfectly succeeded in their educational mission: the development of the dear little ones is total. Of course, they risk falling from a height the day they come up against reality, which is often cruel, and sanctions that are all the more violent the later they come. The kid accustomed to cheating almost openly in front of teachers who sometimes don't even bother to walk through the aisles of classes and lecture halls during an exam, and who don't bother to check on the internet that such a well-formulated sentence does not is not their favorite dunce, will live like a tragedy to be banned from exams for five years, because caught cheating in a slightly less lax framework.

But the second aspect of the problem is ultimately just as serious. Just as travel, in the sense in which the poets liked it, has given way to displacement, which is only the passage from one place to another, and whose success will therefore lie in the great speed with which it will be carried out, in the same way, in the head of our dear children, who are the future adults of our so advanced societies, knowledge is a tool which makes it possible to progress in studies, and therefore in the rungs of the social hierarchy. But the fact that certain specific knowledge is required to be able to claim to be a professional worthy of the name seems to completely escape a significant proportion of them. Only the diploma counts, its content does not. Again, young people are only what we make of them. And we, who have been selling them for years a demonetized paper called baccalaureate, for the sole pleasure of admiring success statistics now exceeding 86% (we are impatiently awaiting the 2010 vintage: 90%? 95%? …), would have bad grace to blame them.

But knowledge, we have forgotten, transforms those who appropriate it. “I do not ask an honest man to know Latin, wrote Saint-Marc Girardin, a famous critic who died in 1873, it is enough for me that he has forgotten it. And what did he mean, if not that frequenting Latin had changed him who, certainly, could have forgotten the declensions and the vocabulary, but whose spirit would remain shaped by this language, its structures, its rigor, and the immeasurable humanity of its authors. He who has forgotten Latin is a little richer in humanity than he who has never learned it, but who can, if necessary, if he had to stick to it out of necessity, consult some notice on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Someone who knows mathematical formulas by heart knows, more surely than anyone else, to reason mathematically. The peasant who knows his plants and his animals is also richer in humanity than the one who has to refer to books and notes. And he who knows the qualities of materials will be a better worker than he who must constantly consult some manual. Our future professionals, if they apply their ingenuity to cheat during exams and small everyday checks, may well not master at all what is at the heart of their profession. Let's not even talk about jurists, since the faculties of law, as much as the others, are the scene of this new sport. The application of the law reduced to its technique, in the absence of any moral reference, risks producing astonishing judgments. But we tremble at the idea of ​​what happens in medical schools, even if we cheat less there than elsewhere...

There is a virtue that the Greeks called "aïdôs", and which could be translated simultaneously as honor, dignity, modesty and shame. It is in a way the dignity that we conquer in the eyes of others. Note that such a virtue implies – oh horror! – that we are subject to the moral judgment of our contemporaries. This is undoubtedly the virtue that we should learn to cultivate and pass on to our children.

Post Scriptum: Since the aïdôs is the least shared thing in the world today, we will not be surprised that it has so cruelly failed a French team made up of little narcissus demanding respect, because our society has constantly told them that it was intolerable that it should be conquered and not be a prerequisite. And the hand of Thierry Henri can only be understood through his exegesis, that of the trainer on the one hand ("Let me savor"), that of a singer with a famous husband on the other ("Pas vu pas pris ").