In one of his stories, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima describes the work of students as a very clever exercise in fraud:
The adults demanded that everything we absorbed within those confines should be ‘worthwhile.’ So, quite naturally, we learned the alchemist’s way of faking things, creating from lead a spurious substance which we persuaded our patrons was gold till, in the end, we were convinced ourselves that we’d produced the precious metal. It was the school’s cleverest alchemist who earned the label of model student. The ‘model student,’ indeed, is one of the most accomplished frauds in any field.”
–Yukio Mishima in “Cigarette,” Acts of Worship.