More Classwork

6 October 2003


The Homework Cop-Out

A study came out last week that says American school children are not suffering from a deluge of homework as anecdotal evidence has suggested. Most kids in high school don't even do 2 hours a night in homework, according to the study. What amazes is how the entire educational system thinks that homework should be the norm rather than a very rare exception.

There are situations where work done outside of the class is appropriate -- long research projects, essays of some length, final review before exams, reading the odd bit of Dickens, Tolstoy or Mishima. Nonetheless, most of the homework that is assigned is pointless. Few children in this day and age return to a home with a parent at 3.30 or 4 pm able to devote a significant amount of time to supervising additional lessons. Often, kids on their own grind through 25 definitions of words, used in a sentence, and written 5 times in preparation for a spelling test, followed by 20 math problems done on their calculators, rounded off by a crossword puzzle of science terms. This is rubbish.

There is far too much emphasis in American education on rote learning rather than on reasoning. A tape recorder will do a better job of retaining data than the average 12-year-old, or even the above average 12-year-old. What makes humans such an entertaining species is the ability some of them have to think. It is of marginal importance to know that America declared its independence from Britain in 1776; it is supremely significant for any American (and a great many non-Americans) to understand why.

Reasoning, though, is not easily taught. It requires imagination, which in a conformist, consumer-driven society is only moderately acceptable socially. Moreover, the answers often differ from person to person, which makes standardized testing rather a problem.

Above all, the homework worry stems from the desire to quantify the qualitative. In theory, if one spends two hours declining Latin nouns, one will be better at it than if only one hour is spent at it. In practice, two hours wasted doing it wrong is far worse than not doing it at all. Teachers should spend whatever class time they have imparting knowledge as efficiently as possible; the rest is a distraction, and homework as it is assigned now is an admission that the system can't do its job.

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