Last week, the Education Ministry set out a policy that will drastically reduce the amount of homework given by teachers to pupils. For schoolchildren in early grades (up to Grade 6, when most children are around 10), this will mean as near to no homework at all as makes no difference; the change is less drastic but still significant for older pupils.
The policy strikes me as eminently sensible. There are very many reasons why homework is more often than not a waste of time, and a fairly cruel one at that.
But first, it is worth underlining the difference between schoolchildren and late teenage or young adult students. A 10-year-old who spends time after school ticking off grammar exercises is doing homework. A 19-year-old classics student who spends her evenings reading texts mentioned by her professors is not. The first is a mechanical matter of more of the same, the second a labour of passion that leads to deep knowledge of a field.
If homework is pointless, should we therefore expect 10-year-olds to spend their evenings reading Aristophanes in the original? Of course not. Speaking for my own childhood, the everyday alternative to homework was television, and books by Enid Blyton and such.
The routine blackmail was that there would be none of the second until the first was done. Given the circumstances, that was probably good parenting. Except television and books opened up a world that was not that of school, and that was bespoke to every individual child. School was for things like grammar, which was good, but the rest would have been up to us. “No homework, until you finish your book on stick insects” would have made more sense.
The point is that, no matter how adventurous schooling may be, it is always and in large measure confined to a curriculum. And, because homework is an extension of schoolwork, it is equally curricular. The solution to the first bit would be to replace school with individual tuition, which nowadays is a social, cultural and political impossibility.
The solution to the second is to do away with homework and let children explore worlds other than those prescribed at school, by which I mean anything that stimulates them. No homework, then, could make for intellectual promiscuity.
The second argument for the abolition of homework is that it is cruel. Now it was George Orwell who said that whoever writes about childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity, but I’ll take the risk. Thinking back to my school days, I remember homework as a daily bane which made terms like ‘after school’ and ‘weekend’ feel like a taunt.
Dickensian it may not be, but the average 10-year-old’s working week is still 10 hours longer than an adult’s
As is, children spend about half of their waking hours at school. Like all work, and no matter how colourful the classroom walls, school takes a toll on the body and the mind. Add to that homework, and many children end up working around 50 hours a week. Dickensian it may not be, but the average 10-year-old’s working week is still 10 hours longer than an adult’s. The old fear that the devil finds work for idle hands may have something to do with it.
One argument that’s often made is that the abolition of homework is another nail in the coffin of standards – in other words, that it is part of a broader programme of dumbing down.
The problem is that the argument confuses quantity with quality. If dumbing down is happening at all, it has nothing to do with children having more and more free time. (In fact, they have less and less.) Rather, it is about accepting mediocrity and poor standards wherever they show up – and that includes school and homework for children, and work for adults. Heaping more of the same on children will not make people any sharper or more knowledgeable. It simply makes them busier producing larger quantities of the same dross.
Finally, there is the curious thing that it is generally parents whose level of education is modest that are the most militant about the need for homework. Partly this is understandable, because school is as much about social aspiration (in the best sense of the word) as it is about the love of learning. Thus the wonderful Maltese word tirsistilhom, which translates only imperfectly and unjustly as ‘pushy’.
It is also the case that homework is often part of a daily routine that brings children and parents (mothers, usually) together. To help children with their homework is an important form of exchange, which is also why younger children especially tend to do their homework in the kitchen, or in a living room.
Thing is, to do away with homework is not necessarily to disregard this cultural context. No one would want to stop parents from aspiring to an education for their children, or to interrupt the shared routines that make family life. Homework may be a route to all of that, but it is not the only one. In fact, I rather suspect it’s among the devil’s favourite job opportunities.
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