Postplagiarism and the Remaking of Education, 2000 to 2050

Abstract

I have spent much of my career studying ethics and integrity in educational contexts, including plagiarism, contract cheating, and other forms of educational and scientific fraud. From where I sit in 2026, the half-century from 2000 to 2050 divides into two phases. The first (2000-2025), now a matter of record, was organized around detection of misconduct: institutions increased access to education while building ever more elaborate machinery to verify that student work was authentically human. The second half of this century, now beginning, rests on a different premise. Humans and machines write together, and policing where the human ends and the machine begins is not only difficult, it may well be an exercise in futility. In this, my first editorial as the incoming editor-in-chief of the Journal of Educational Thought (following in the footsteps of my colleague, Ian Winchester) I take a position. The detection paradigm has failed on its own terms, and the sooner we say so, the sooner we can build what comes next. I explore the postplagiarism era as an entry point to the second half of the first century in this millennium.