Plagiarism: Ethical Issue or Educational Issue?

In Susan Blum's text "Academic Integrity and Student Plagiarism: a Question of Education, Not Ethics" she brings about some new thoughts about an old topic of students vs. plagiarism. Her thoughts about the subject, as you can see in the title, present the topic of plagiarism not as a topic of ethics but one of education. At colleges across the country students are told not to plagiarize when they agree to the institution's honor code. She says "Such codes appeal to the desire of students to do the right thing. The codes assume that, with appropriate social pressure, they will." This is the only way colleges right now are enforcing students not to plagiarize. Blum proposes that students already break a vast majority of other rules included in the honor code why would this one be any different. "The laws regarding drinking, for instance, are routinely flouted at almost every college, and those regarding music downloading, a form of sharing intellectual property, are broadly disregarded." This scare-tactic method might not be the most effective way to tame a generation of college students who already disregard the other rules of their institution. Blum believes that teaching students why to plagiarize their work instead of scaring them with punishments is a more promising way to instill these ideas in students. "Treating academic integrity as a constellation of skills, taught largely through the long apprenticeship of higher education, is the most promising approach for getting students to follow the rules of academic citation, and the one with the least likelihood of providing a shortcut." I think that Blum makes a good point and it sounds good on paper but in reality there just aren't enough college students who want to learn why they can't plagiarize. Most just accept it and cite their work so they do not get thrown out of college. Although this may be the way it should be taught, it just isn't practical enough for the majority of college students.