Every year, as Labor Day approaches, there’s a topic about which some of our readers always want me to write. No, it’s not Eugene V. Debs, as appropriate as that might be after the Bernie Sanders campaign. It’s homework.
Folks apparently remember that I really dislike homework. The main reason is because I believe what’s fundamentally wrong with our educational system is the killing of a kid’s intrinsic motivation by external rewards, like gold stars, meaningless trophies and especially grades.
I should mention again that a lot of what I have come to believe through teaching was reinforced by W. Edwards Deming, the brilliant statistics professor and consultant who, among other things, taught the Japanese auto industry how to emerge from the ashes of World War II and become an economic miracle.
Deming, who didn’t care to be called William, spoke in condensed, direct sentences: “The big problems are where people don’t realize they have one in the first place.” He called external rewards, including fear of failure, merit pay, numerical quotas and competition the Forces of Destruction. “A bad system,” he said, “will beat a good person every time.”
Homework is a big part of our bad educational system. The people who like it believe that every moment of a kid’s time needs to be scheduled and that homework develops discipline and increases achievement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do either.
Homework makes most kids hate studying, and most parents hate being the enforcer of someone else’s drudgery, with which they usually cannot help. It discourages independent study and, even worse, discourages reading simply to explore and satisfy curiosity. Some experts claim it increases achievement on standardized tests, but it actually diminishes it. In our quest for test scores, we sacrifice what we’re actually trying to achieve, a lifetime love of learning.
Tests, by the way, simply quantify how the teacher, not the student, has failed. It’s very much like inspecting a product to see how badly the process that made it failed. Deming would call it driving by looking in the rearview mirror. Tests simply manufacture meaningless competition and anxiety. And why on earth do we consider not knowing 30 percent of the material “passing?”
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A teacher’s job is to teach every student, not just those who happen to understand the first way you explain something. Sometimes you have to explain or illustrate something three ways. So what? If you really understand it, you’ll be able to do that and know when they finally “get” it. If there’s not enough time, then you’re probably trying to do a “mile wide, inch deep” curriculum with modern, cool-sounding fad topics, which is foolish. Fundamentals are important. STEMs need roots.
But teachers are required to assign homework, right? That’s just more bad system. It always amazes me that a town that doesn’t think government can accomplish anything refuses to understand that schools have become a government, complete with taxation, centralized control and silly, Soviet-style dictates like Common Core.
Give teachers autonomy and let them decide how best to teach each class. If your teachers lack good judgment, you’re pretty much out of luck anyway. If they think a topic requires home practice, fine. Most things don’t.
What’s most important is to never forget that families need lots of time together and that kids need time to do the rest of the really important things required to grow up, like play and wonder about stuff. As much as they would like to be, schools are not a child’s whole life. They’re a service to parents that has become too expensive and too intrusive into family life. That family time is far too precious to spend on homework.