The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe:
“Educating a child is a hugely philosophical project. How does one become a fully-functional adult with a zest for all that life has to offer — and acquire the knowledge, skills and habits to pursue it?
“Homework, traditionally conceived, is not part of the answer. And when we consider the sadly large number of young people who are tuned out, dropped out or more actively rebelling against their formal schooling, homework is often a major culprit …” [Read more here.]
Previous column in The Good Life series: Loving Money and Books — Which Is More Evil?.
On the trade-off issue: Why is it more important for kids to do an hour of work around the house than an hour of homework?
As for this: “No healthy person, and especially no healthy child, likes to be ordered around.”
It’s not clear to me that a healthy child would see homework as an “order,” any more than a healthy driver would see a “Yield” sign as an “order.” A healthy child would grasp that if excellence is her aim, the skills gotten in school take practice, and that, for lack of time, part of that practice has to be done at home. She would abstract from the fact that someone is asking her to grasp this fact, grasp it on her own, and act on it. Only a somewhat neurotic child would regard the identification of these facts as an “order” issued by an authority figure.
Granted, it depends on how the “order” is issued, but nothing about homework per se requires authoritarianism on the part of the teacher. If I teach you how to find the slope of a line, or the conjugation of the Spanish preterite, or whatever, no one doubts that you have to sit down and apply that knowledge yourself before you know how to do it yourself. Unless we’re satisfied with mediocrity, students need time to internalize and master those skills, so that in one form or another, homework is indispensable. Why blame the educational establishment for this fact, rather than demand that parents and students acknowledge it and act accordingly?
It’s interesting that few students regard their coaches’ straightforward commands as authoritarian orders, even when that’s exactly what they are, and exactly how they’re offered. Nor do most students “rebel” against the coaches’ demands for fifty push-ups, wind-sprints, “driving harder,” “giving 110%,” and so on. Some realize that in the moment, their motivations may be flagging, and that the coaches are trying to get the best out of them. More cynically, others see coaches living out the athletic dreams that they never managed to realize in their own lives. But very few people conclude, “Let’s give up on organized after-school sports; it’s an authoritarian waste of time.” Nor, I think, would the inference make much sense.
But the truth is, if we scaled back organized after-school sports–and abolished the NCAA altogether (having strangled, beaten, and burned it first)–there would be more than enough time for homework. Having spent literally 40 years in education, I haven’t encountered a single teacher anywhere that was half as authoritarian as the average sports coach. But coaching histrionics are regarded as part of the game; meanwhile, the meek request that students do some problem sets or reading somehow becomes “an order.”
I think this column vastly underestimates one very real reason why people don’t like homework. In many cases, the real reason is that they don’t like mental work of any kind, and homework is an instance of the hated phenomenon–one that has to be done in solitude and quiet, where the person herself is the monitor of the quality of her efforts, and of her mental life as such.
In that respect, homework is less a series of “orders” than the suggestion that one take a daily look in the mirror at the specifically intellectual part of one’s inner world–that one discipline it, and make an appraisal of one’s self-disciplinary efforts. I can get why many people would have trouble pulling that off, and I get why they resent the “demand” that they should do it. I don’t really get why the educational establishment should stop making it–as opposed to doubling down on it.