By Jesse

It looks like a full third of seniors at Bishop Sullivan High School in Virginia Beach cheated on a test during the last weeks of school.

And no, they weren’t passing answers by way of the Holy Ghost. They were texting them.

To be honest, I don’t necessarily blame the kids. The test was on modern forms of government. I mean, what kind of days-from-graduating 18-year-old truly cares about the way a bill becomes law in Syria or France?

If I was a Bishop Sullivan student, I too probably would have been led down the path of digital temptation.

I don’t blame the school or the teachers either. The school bans use of cell phones during the day, so you can’t fault policy. And I’m sure the teachers are doing their best. As a former teacher I know how hard it is to deal with both cheaters and technology. Teaching well is hard enough; being an in-class hall monitor on top of it makes good pedagogy nearly impossible.

My strongest criticism falls on parents, and on a  culture that presents cell phones as a safety necessity on par with life vests on a boat.

Parents should not be letting their students bring their cell phones to school. It is that simple. Cell phones necessarily lead to being less attentive in class. And, as those morally-educated Bishop Sullivan students proved, even the best raised of students can find the ease of cheating with technology too appealing.

I graduated high school in the pre-9/11 days, when none of us had cell phones and we weren’t taught to be afraid of the colors the government tells us to be afraid of. And we got by just fine. When there was an emergency, our moms would call the office, and the office would call us in from our classrooms.

Seems to me like this system could still work.

So, parents of high school students out there, don’t let your kids bring their cell phones to school next year. It will certainly save their teachers a lot of grief. And if they’re a Bishop Sullivan student it could save them from–anyone know God’s policies on misusing new technology?–maybe even hell.