Plagiarism, rote memorizing and other "bad" habits in the Greek University and beyond.

Abstract

Drawing on my experience as professor of Anthropology in Greece, this paper focuses on student practices like rote learning and plagiarism academics commonly consider inimical to meaningful learning, intellectual empowerment and the cultivation of critical independent thinking.  In this paper I refrain from viewing such practices from the standard academic perspective according to which they must be eradicated, and try to appreciate them from the perspective of the students who engage in them.  I suggest that they serve as means through which students navigate in and cope with the university environment, but they also provide a point of view from which the university appears as a setting within which the 'bad habits' academics so despise are sensible and helpful.