After all, the student who can find, analyze, and display an elegant solution to a task possesses the skills necessary to prosper in the Information Age. Employers are interested in the bottom line, not the footnotes. In an era of a rapidly expanding global knowledge base, it is more important economically to be able to plagiarize existing elegant solutions than to create your own inelegant solutions. Of course, people who can create their own elegant solutions will be the most highly sought after, but even they will benefit from mastering the basic skill of plagiarism. We must cast off the notion that the knowledge pool is static and embrace change as an inescapable and desirable fact of education and research.
Critics traditionally insist on judging new paradigms by criteria generated by the old paradigm.
For example, educators initially resisted books because they feared a degeneration in the ability to remember oral lectures. Of course, they were quite correct about this, but misguided in their belief that oral memory would forever remain the most significant educational skill. Today, educators fear that the Internet will cause a degeneration in basic skills. If we judge the success of the new paradigm by criteria which measure the basic skills of the old paradigm, we are likely to be disappointed in the outcomes. In the end, the new paradigm is inevitable.