Why do your homework when you can just get the answers from one of your classmates in a matter of seconds over text message? It’s just homework right? Now you have more time to chill out, watch some TV and hang out with friends. Homework is just what teachers give you to ruin your social life and bore you to death… Right?

Although no one fully enjoys homework, it is a necessary  evil. In order to be successful in a class and do well on a test, you must unfortunately go over the material again and again. However, this “work hard and succeed” mentality has started to diminish as the generations  and the advancement of technology progress. But why? What could have caused this sudden, undeniable laziness of students?

The thought of actually reading a book is absolutely absurd. No one has time to sit down and spend hours trying to figure out what Hawthorne is trying to convey in The Scarlet Letter or what themes are present in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Instead, students simply turn on their Macs and take about twenty minutes to read through summary on Spark Notes – or if a student is extra lazy, watch the video the website provides discussing the entire novel. Boom. Done. They’ve successfully “read” the book and “completed” their homework.

Technology is a wonderful thing. Don’t know what the capital of Morocco is? Google it. Need to know how many feet there are in five miles? Google it. Who was involved in WWII? I don’t know…Google it. Basically anything you are unsure of can be searched and discovered in a matter of two minutes.

If answers to questions are so incredibly easy to come by, who would sit and ponder the questions their history teacher has given them for homework? But if students just simply ‘Google’ their way through school, they are not actually learning and are therefore missing the point of the assignment.

Ever since iPhones have dominated the teenage population, it has become common to just snap a picture of the homework and send it to classmates. The student who actually did the assignment has nothing to worry about though, because tomorrow someone else can send them the answers via picture messaging. Apathetic students all over the world do not worry about completing their assignments because they can effortlessly convince their peers to send them a picture of the answers.

Acquiring information requires minimal effort thanks to technology. People rely too much on the power of the iPhone and rapid search engines that they have stopped trying as hard. Technology has dramatically furthered the laziness and cheating of todays generation of students.

The main concern with this escalating dilemma goes beyond indolent students. If education is completely taken for granted and students continue to cheat, the value of education also takes a dramatic decline. In order to solve this problem students must think about their futures and realize the work they put in now will positively impact the rest of their lives.