125 Harvard undergraduates stand charged with academic dishonesty after collaborating on a final exam last spring. There is a certain amount of grim irony in the particulars: the course is “Introduction to Congress.” While Congress is no stranger to dishonesty, academic or otherwise, it does seem increasingly estranged from any semblance of collaboration.

In this, Congress is far from alone — many organizations struggle to get collaboration right. But this is not terribly surprising, given that most of us are trained in school systems that prize individual achievement and discourage, even penalize, collaboration. If working together can be considered a crime for the first 22 years of your life, perhaps it’s not unreasonable to assume that you won’t be very good at it when you graduate. No wonder older workers, further removed from their schooling, are better at it.

“Our education system is a key reason for our lack of skills in collaborating effectively,” Morten Hansen, a professor at UC Berkeley and INSEAD, and author of Collaboration, told me via email. “This is now out of sync with today’s world of work. We do not emphasize collaborative skills and teamwork much in education, from K-12 to high school to college. It is an afterthought, it seems. Learning how to work well with others should be as important as learning math or accounting.”

In most organizations, collaborating the way the Harvard students allegedly did would get you a gold star: when they stumbled on a problem they could not solve, they used all available resources and worked together to devise a solution. Unfortunately for the accused, they are students — not engineers or project managers — and the professor meant to ban such collaboration in his instructions to the test. (You can decide for yourself if they’re clear enough; the editor in me takes issue with his permissive use of “etc.”)

Collaboration is not the only skill schools fall short on. Traditional schooling frequently fails to prepare students to think critically, innovate, and be creative. (Other methods — like the Montessori approach — seem to turn out more innovators.) Perhaps this is to be expected, given that the roots of the modern public school lie in the Industrial Revolution, when publicly funded schools were instituted to give students the necessary skills to work in factories (pdf) — an approach first modeled by a Prussian reformer who died in 1835. Even so, we might be able to live with that model, if it at least did what it said on the tin: give students a basic grounding in math and reading (let alone history or science). But America’s numeracy and literacy rates are far behind other countries’. Academia has become an institutional Galapagos, an island so cut off from mainland of society that its creatures and customs bear less and less resemblance to those left onshore. (How many times in your working life have you had to complete a set of multiple choice questions in 50 minutes or less?) And yet when students graduate and sail to the mainland, we expect them to know the norms and customs on arrival.

And yet the answer I’d propose is not the usual one — that schools should be turned into instrumentalist straightjackets where students learn “hard skills” that can be measured by round after round of standardized tests. In fact, I think the problem we now face has its roots in that approach. If your goal is results and efficiency, then cheating is always the best solution: copying someone else’s work is the most efficient route to the correct answer. And indeed, rates of cheating in America’s school system have risen alongside rising rates of standardized testing. The higher the stakes of the test, the greater the incentive to cheat. Clearly, increasing our focus on these kind of “results” would only worsen the problem. In the current system, “Students pursue grades, not creativity,” said Hansen. “The obsession with standardized tests turbocharge this malaise. This is well documented in research; over-reliance on extrinsic motivators (such as letter grades and standardized tests) crowd out creative problem solving, as written about in The Progress Principle and Drive.”

The human brain is hard-wired to learn, and to enjoy learning. And that’s the key to both preparing students for the “real world,” and to keep them from cheating in school (or anywhere else): Teach them to love learning for learning’s own sake.

In other words, focus less on the outcome and more on the process. A student who loves learning for learning’s sake — for the challenge, for the fun of it — doesn’t want to cheat. A student who has learned to love the process of learning will never be redundant, her labor never commoditized. It’s the one skill that will serve us best in an economy that is uncertain, a world that is volatile, and a future that is anything but predictable. I don’t know what hard skills I may need in 2030, 2020, or even 2013. But if I have learned to love to learn, I will be sure to acquire them.

Sadly, some subset of Harvard students seems to have gone all the way through their K-12 schooling, and at least part of the way through college, without learning to love learning. “Professor Platt said on the first day of the course that he ‘didn’t care if you went to section’ or lecture, and that he ‘gave out 120+ A’s last year’ and would do the same this year,” complained one implicated student, anonymously, to Salon. “There was absolutely no incentive to learn any material.” It is heartbreaking that even one student at a university of Harvard’s caliber cannot see learning as its own incentive.

But perhaps it is not surprising.

While great teachers have always been able to nurture that flame in their students, education policy has focused on efficiency — getting the biggest bang for the taxpayer’s or tuition-payer’s buck — and focusing on results is seductively efficient, especially in the short term. But schools are not factories, and students are not inputs. Efficiency is not the only value in this conversation; quality also matters.

In talking about the “ROI” of our schools, we have focused too much on the I, and not enough on the R.

Getting that balance right is difficult. It’s not the problem of doing the right thing that presents us with our thorniest questions; our most difficult problems arise when two or more “right things” conflict. We’re seeing this play out now on the national stage in the US presidential election — the Republican Party is emphasizing liberty (low taxes) while the Democratic Party emphasizes another deeply held value: justice (economic fairness). In an ideal world, we’d have liberty and justice — for all. But what if, in certain cases, you have to choose between liberty and justice? What do you do then? And what if, as an educator, a policymaker, a manager or a student, you have to choose between quality and efficiency?

That’s when the choices become contentious, and hard. In a business, that’s the kind of tension that managers have to negotiate. In a school, that’s the kind of tension teachers have to equip students to manage.

Yes, perhaps some of those 125 Harvard students cheated. But I would argue that the far bigger scandal is the way our nation’s school system cheats our children of the education they need, every day, while too many adults stand by and do nothing.