Danny ChaiI read a fascinating book recently, The Homework Myth. Its basic thesis is that, if you look at the research, more homework does not foster more learning. Indeed, looking dispassionately at the data, there is more to suggest that homework is a detriment to education. Children learn more and better when they are not given any homework at all, especially in elementary school.
I don’t know about you, but when I hear that, I immediately think that the idea is ridiculous, that there are clearly situations where homework is beneficial. What he does in the book is take all of these potential objections and show how they’re unfounded. It’s pretty compelling, because he bases it all on data, not theory. Honestly, he’s a little over the top, in that he tries to debunk every possible positive role homework can play – he comes across a little extreme, having the same attitude towards homework as Henry does toward taxes: it kills people. But on the whole, it’s pretty compelling.
For example, one objection people have is that, for certain subjects, like math, there has to be homework. That was my gut reaction. But then he raises an interesting point. Do children ever really learn anything by doing repetitive math exercises? If they already know how to do it, it’s a waste of time. If they don’t know how to do it, repetition reinforces bad habits. It can possibly be useful for just a fraction of the students, and even then the repetition reinforces pattern recognition – plug n’ chug – not true conceptual understanding. If the latter happens, and they do achieve conceptual understanding, it’s independent of the homework itself, not because of it.
I totally agree with that just because I feel it’s been true in my life. I remember a friend saying, and I felt the same way, but when we got to a certain level of education, we were expected to understand core concepts, but we had only learned to plug n’ chug the formulas. We didn’t really understand the concepts behind them. And so sometimes our professors would look at us in disbelief that we didn’t understand something so fundamental. But now that I think about it, it’s no surprise. That’s what repetitive math homework reinforces: formula, not concept. When I did understand the concepts, it was a function of me sitting down and thinking it through, not through homework.
What’s the alternative? I’m not a teacher, and I’m not pretending to be an expert. But he suggests a possibility – giving kids problems to work on in groups in class, and instead of showing them how to solve them, having them discuss together how it might be solved, forcing them to think about the process. Supposedly stuff like this works really well. Maybe it’s impractical, I don’t know. But it’s intriguing.
Another objection people commonly have is that without homework, students won’t be ready for the next level. His argument is that, supposing this is true, and students need preparation for the homework rigors of high school, do they really need 9 years of preparation? Why should the first step be so early?
Another objection is that we’re falling behind other countries who supposedly assign more homework, and we need more homework to keep up. Which gets to the fundamental thesis of the book: why do we presuppose that homework helps learning and that, if we are falling behind, that more homework is the solution? Especially when, in the past however many decades, we’ve been consistently assigning more homework and supposedly performing worse and worse against other countries? What evidence is there to show that more homework is the answer?
Furthermore, why should education even be viewed as a competition? If you honestly answer this question, it’s because people think the economy is a competition. But is it? And even if it is, why should the primary point of education be about the economy?
It’s not true, right? That the world economy is a zero-sum game in which one country can do better if and only if another does worse. The whole theory behind free trade is that the more trade you have, the more everyone benefits. It’s not a zero-sum game – everyone can mutually benefit. Shouldn’t our goal therefore just be that we benefit as much as we can, not necessarily that we be #1? And similarly, shouldn’t we just care that our children learn what they should, not that they learn more than everyone else? That mentality isn’t sustainable.
And why should producing workers be the point of education? Why shouldn’t it be something like producing people of character, or inquisitive children, or anything like that? Why should education ultimately be about money? Isn’t it worth asking whether this makes sense?
There are other objections, for example that homework teaches time management (which implicitly acknowledges that it’s not about learning), and there’s tons more I could talk about, like the misguided emphasis on “rigorous” education, which really means “busy” education. But you should just read it, highly recommended, and I think it’s deeply influenced how I’m going to treat Abby’s education.
You can wake up now, I’m done.