On May 15, the Pacifica Community Charter School of Culver City hosted Alfie Kohn, lecturer and author of many books on education and parenting, including Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting. An enthusiastic crowd of more than 300 parents and educators from around Los Angeles filled the First Lutheran Church pews. Mr. Kohn spoke on The Homework Myth, the title of his newest book. His radical idea: "It is time to stop taking the value of homework for granted."
Kohn believes "Homework is the chief extinguisher of children's curiosity," and because of this, we have "a moral obligation to change things." He sees the problems with homework as attached to a much larger set of problems, and "if you pull one thread, the whole rug wiggles."
He outlined three myths about homework’s benefits:
Myth 1. Homework forms a bond between family and school.
Because of homework, parents have had to become the enforcer of the school's agenda. After a long day at work and school, away from the family, the parent's first question to the child is "What is your homework tonight?" Kohn asks:
Is this a bond? Aren't there better ways to build this bond, like telephone calls, email updates, parent-teacher meetings? Why should the burden be on the kids -- filling their backpacks and their evenings?Myth 2. Homework promotes academic achievement.
Kohn says emphatically, "No study has ever found any academic benefit to homework before high school." He says “research going back 100 years has turned up zero evidence of the academic benefit of homework for elementary and middle schoolers.” At the high school level, any correlation effects are small, or disappear when compensating for other effects. Even standardized tests, about which Kohn wrote another book (The Case Against Standardized Testing), fail to show that homework has any academic benefit.
Myth 3. Homework has non-academic advantages, i.e. it builds character and teaches responsibility.
According to Kohn this is an urban myth and no study supports it.
Let's just use logic here. If the child has no say over whether they have homework, what it is and when it's due, how does that build character? Doesn't it actually promote mindless obedience? Is compliance the same thing as responsibility?
Kohn says we don't ask serious questions about homework because we, as a society, don't ask serious questions about most things. We quibble about the details of implementation rather than looking at the core. He quoted Noam Chomsky on this, saying that a spirited debate on a narrow range of questions gives the appearance of depth but prevents us from asking the bigger questions.
In Kohn’s experience even activist parents don't ask the big questions. He joked that if students were required to stand out in the rain and memorize the phone book, the few parents who complained would say things like "Does that include the yellow pages?" or "Can't he wear a raincoat?"
Underlying the myth of homework is the fact that many people don't trust children to decide how to spend their own free time. The number one question Kohn gets when he goes on call-in radio programs is "If they don't have homework, aren't they just going to sit around and play video games or watch TV?"
A teacher at a "Preparation H school" as Kohn calls them (where parents are prepping their kids for Harvard before they are out of diapers) admitted to him that when he was an inexperienced teacher he gave a lot of homework, shifting the burden to the kids to learn the stuff he was supposed to be teaching. Now that he's a seasoned teacher, he doesn't give any homework and his AP students have very high scores. He also noticed that after he stopped giving homework, some of the kids started reading the newspaper everyday and discussing current events with him.
But it’s true that some kids won't do anything academic after school, and Kohn asks:
Why is that a problem? Don't we want well-rounded kids? Don't their social and emotional and physical development warrants some time? And if they do just play video games after school? Well, don't we all need to relax sometimes after a long day? It is not the teacher's responsibility to make sure that the video games they are playing are appropriate. That is the parent's job.
The ultimate illogical reason to keep giving homework is what Kohn calls the BGUTI excuse -- "Better Get Used To It" He got this from Monty Python's "Getting hit on the head lessons" skit. The idea is -- if you hit them over the head frequently when they're young they will be better prepared when they are older. Makes sense right?
So giving homework to children, as time-consuming, anxiety-provoking, and pointless as it may be, will help kids get used to doing homework when they're older. I guess we should also feed them lots of cancer-causing chemicals at an early age to prepare them for later.
There is a small but growing movement against homework. Schools like Pacifica Community Charter are questioning the collective assumptions about it. Kohn mentioned the Kino School in Tucson, Arizona, that has made a commitment to "Respecting family time" by not assigning any homework. As a result the kids there have begun finding interesting and creative things to do after school.
Kohn gets hundreds of emails from parents saying, "I can't tell my kid that those worksheets are good for her. But when I complain to the teachers I just get slogans in response." He also gets many emails from teachers saying "I don't want to give the kids homework but the parents are insisting on it!" He encouraged parents to arm themselves with the statistics and talk to the teachers.
A flyer was handed out to the crowd at this point, promoting a group called "For the Love of Learning," which is a South Bay parents’ organization trying to do just that. Their mission is "to solve the issue of balancing homework and family life." (Contact Grady for more info on them).
Kohn ended with a call to listen to the language used about education these days. Statements like: "We need rigorous education"; "We don't want this "feel-good" stuff"; "We need to "raise the bar"; "We can't let teachers/parents/children "off the hook"; tell us much about what's really going on.
It's all about being tougher, meaner, louder, stronger. But rigor kills the motivation to learn and squelches curiosity in children. Competitiveness is at the core of this whole story. Homework, standardized tests, rigor etc. are not about fostering excellence in academics, they are about victory, being number one, beating out the competition. And it's about Boeing over Airbus, the corporate success of US companies over everybody else. It seems we are supposed to actually root for the failure of children in other countries.
Alfie Kohn’s new book tells us that this is not the way to guide the next generation to become the creative and cooperative people we need them to be. Rethinking our assumptions about homework is a step toward recommitting to education that nurtures children’s curiosity and encourages life-long learning.
Note: Pacifica Community Charter School is currently requesting letters of support to get its charter renewed by LAUSD. See their website for more info.
[homework photo by Christel Hendrix]
