I think kids should be taught to perceive the mechanics of any system and leverage those mechanics, within the bounds of ethics and fairness. They should ignore what people say and focus on what they do.

I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.

In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.

Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.