A Washington Post article suggests that cheating is on the rise among secondary school students.  I have mixed opinions about these survey results.  It was suggested that students are cheating because they are apathetic about their education.  I tend to agree that our students seem to be more and more apathetic when it comes to the classroom but I think it is more of a response to over-worked, over-stressed, and under-fruitful lives than anything else.  I believe that our students are over-worked to meet the demands of a testing-based education program.  Don't get me wrong, I think we should be able to assess our students' learning and progress but from the first day of school to the last the focus is on the SOL test. (or whatever test may be in place in your particular state)  Students feel the pressure from home to make the grade, from teachers to acheive the minimun passing score, and from society to prove that this system is doing what society hoped it would.  Students rarely have the joy of learning for the sake of learning, instead they "learn" in order to fulfill the demands of everyone around them.  I would also argue that we need to remember that secondary students are still children.  They are still learning what is right and what is wrong.  I know we, as adults, believe that our students ought to be mature, trustworthy, respectful, slightly shorter-than-full-grown adults but the reality is that they are still kids.  That's why they aren't allowed to vote until they are 18 and consume alcohol until they are 21.  Hopefully by the time they have reached these ages, they are all that we hoped they would be four years earlier. Sometimes it seems that we, as a society, blame kids for the trouble with today's kids but where did these kids learn these undesirable traits???  From society!  They didn't teach us, we are teaching them!  Any kid who has watched the evening news in the last year has heard about adults cheating, stealing, lying, murdering and more.  So why do we wring our hands and wonder what has happened to these kids?