The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn

Author:Alfie Kohn [ALFIE KOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Chain of Assumptions

The demand to raise standards and further cement traditional teaching methods in place is renewed with fresh fervor every few decades. It’s not always clear why this happens on the schedule it does, but one hypothesis can be ruled out immediately. It isn’t explained by any objective decline in student achievement, because there is no evidence that such a decline precedes each new call to raise the bar. Nor does the demand for more homework follow the release of new studies on the subject. “Current thinking at any given point in time seems more influenced by cultural and political philosophy than by new information,” one researcher commented.30

Policy makers tend to take an aerial view, looking at education as an abstraction rather than weighing whether homework helps this child—or even this group of children—to become better thinkers. What’s more, the focus is on the state of our economic system, and specifically how we’re in danger of falling behind [insert name of current rival]. If we’re going to triumph over other countries, we’re going to have to send our children home with packets of worksheets.

Thus does a New Jersey principal defend ever greater quantities of homework even for very young children by shrugging, “This is what’s demanded to stay competitive in a global market.”31 Thus in the 1990s did we find that California board of education president Yvonne Larsen, appointed by a Republican governor, and the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Delaine Eastin, a Democrat, finally made common cause by issuing a joint statement that proclaimed, “Our children are competing in a global economy. The extra hours spent after school on homework in Europe and Asia are giving those children an extra boost into the 21st century.”32 Thus do we find newspapers around the country issuing interchangeable editorials featuring statements like this one: “Homework. . . is more important than ever. Americans are competing in a world market. While kids here are shirking their math and science homework, kids in China and India aren’t. When all of them grow up, guess where the best jobs will go?”33

A little historical context is useful to put such talk in perspective. In economics and education, in technology and the military, we are constantly being told—often in hysterical tones—that some other country is either ahead of us or gaining on us, and we must mobilize to beat them. The United States is not one country among others; we’re one country against others, and we must always be ahead of them. The fact that the Soviet Union launched a rocket in 1957 meant that our approach to science education was a humiliating failure and had to be revamped. In the 1980s, it was Japan’s manufacturing prowess that ignited the same combustible combination of (nationalistic) fervor and fear (of coming in second). Today we hear about a whole world of potential rivals who may show us up—and that can’t be permitted. We must be king of the mountain again, and therefore we must assign more homework to our children.

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