My friend Alex Kjerulf today has a post about homework that I am in complete agreement with. He points to this TIME magazine story which, to an unschooling parent, is no news at all.
I already don’t send my kids to school, which we can do here in Canada. It’s called unschooling. BUT if for some reason my kids did go to school I would do what I have advocated others do and that is, I would refuse to allow the school to assign them homework. It is not simply the fact that kids are overworked. There are four other reasons why homework would be banned at my house.1. They learn nothing from doing it. It is not homework that reinforces an idea or a skill, it is developing a passion for something and then having the time to follow it through that does the trick. Homework is a waste of time.
2. Schools already steal six hours or more a day from a child’s life. If they can’t do what they need to do in six hours, it is not my child’s responsibility to gives them more time. It seems to me that homework is not for kids to learn, it’s for schools to shift the responsibility. Teachers don’t get marked on how useful classroom time is, but kids get marked on whether they did their homework or not. That means a lot of classroom stuff that isn’t working is allowed to continue as long as kids do their homework.
3. Homework is an infringemnent on family time. Many of the big media that would otherwise say that homework is important also decry the fact that kids aren’t spending enough time talking with their families. It is not possible to create an atmosphere of deep family connection when parents and the kids are all working three or four hours a night at home. You need many hours together, playing games, reading books, fixing the house together, going to movies, conversing and cooking for friends to have a healthy and balanced family life. Being together only on weekends is like getting a two day pass from prison.
4. Homework robs children of the time they need to develop real skills and passions. When I was in school for example, I taught myself music theory and theology during my grade 11 year. I wasn’t taking either of these subjects at school, and I set aside a lot of homework to learn them. I failed several exams at Christmas 1985 because instead of studying, I was writing four part harmony arrangments of Queen songs and reading Martin Buber. Both of those experiences have stayed with me long after I can even remember what classes I took at school that year, and both continue to be useful in my life.
So, as we enter another “school year” my radical proposal is that those of you who want that time back with your kids, claim it back. And once you’ve gone a year without homework, it might give you the steel to rise up next year and opt out of standardized testing (which in British Columbia you can do, you know…with the support of teachers too, who really know the costs of this stuff).
And don’t forget parents, you need to set the example. Leave work at work! It’s no good having kids come home expecting some family time and have you under house arrest by your boss too!
Update: Rob Paterson has taken up the call and there are some great comments in his post from folks campaigning to ban homework in Atlantic Canada. I weighed in on a second post he has made
Update: A commenter at Rob’s site pointed to a nice post from Brian Alger from a couple of years ago on this topic as well. There’s nothing new about this, obviously!
[tags]homework[/tags]
Serendipity. Nancy White posted yesterday about why we seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation in the world, and whether it was all about the culture of control and fear. To which I replied – in several hundred words now – look at schools.
And then today, AKMA has a nice post on a talk he is due to give to some Christian anarchists about his family’s experiences with homeschooling, and it’s lovely and concise and carefully thought through and all that stuff that I love about AKMA’s writing.
Something’s in the air, eh?
Have a listen to Sir Ken Robinson, from the TED conference, on creativity and education. It’s a great talk filled with humour and deep insight about how the public education system does not serve creativity, children or our collective future. Some quotes:
All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them.
Creativity is as important as literacy and we should teach it with the same status.
Kids will take a chance…if they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong…If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original…We stigmatize mistakes.
We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or more precisely we are educated out of it.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology…we have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we are educating our children.
We may not see this future but [our children] will, and our job is help them make something of it.
Go listen to the lecture and let me know what you think…
David, a friend of mine, and I were having a conversation the other day about religion, We were both trying to understand our present day connection to Christianity. For him, he was trying to reconcile faith with his humanist upbringing and I related how I was very interested for a time in becoming a Minister when I was a teenager, and since then drifted away from mainstream Christianity although I have had an enduring, although somewhat academic, interest in Christian spirituality. It only creeps into practice through music: I sing in a Christian Evensong chorale and that experience has brought me into closer contact with Christianity. I still do not call myself a Christian, unable to accept the truth of belief as stated in the Nicene Creed.
Ironically however, singing has not brought me closer to Christian teaching per se, but rather has drawn me closer to the inspiration for the music, tapping some of the same spirit that Bach and Bruckner and Verdi sensed.
I have written a little over the years about Christianity, and I’m number one on Google for “beatitudes vs. ten commandments”, because of this post from a few years ago. There is much that resonates with me about Christianity, and especially from the example of Christ’s life. But there is much that I cannot abide, like the tales of genocide in the Old Testament in the name of the God that sent Christ to earth.
So in conversation with my friend I expressed a concern that so much of Christian sacred text seems to me to be pointless, and yet, if one takes this as necessarily complete, then it all must come with the territory. I can figure out how Leviticus or Daniel applies to my life today, and I cannot accept those prescritions on my life and family. So am I just to selcect and pick and choose? How is it that Christians reconcile their belief in the Bible as the exclusive source of their religion with some of the strange things that are contained in there?
My friend David gave me the appreciative answer to this question: notice what resonates with you and honour that response. There must be something to it. This is not the answer that serves to move one closer to becoming a practicing Christian, but it is a useful response for a non-Christian in understanding the value of these stories and the traditions that have supported them for thousands of years
And here, finally, is good advice. If we work on tuning ourselves, we can become more and more sensitive to what might land on us and find ways to incorporate that into the evolving beings that we are.
Also in Peterbourgh I met with David Newhouse, perhaps my most influential university teacher and a good friend. David arrived at Trent in 1989 from the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He came to teach in the Native Management and Economic Development Program, which at that time was a fledgling effort, mostly focused on economic development and with no real management curriculum. I was hired in May of 1989 to help research the field of native management, and I spent the first month of my employment searching for one book – any book! – on the subject. There simply wasn’t one anywhere.
We quickly realized that if we wanted to teach the subject, we had to create it. David, being an MBA graduate of Western University, felt strongly that we should be using the Western/Harvard case study method, which meant that I, as the researcher, needed to produce some cases. And thus began a three year collaboration during which I wrote or co-wrote something like 24 case studies for teaching management in Aboriginal communities and organizations.
My opus magnum of case studies was a set of four I did on the National Association of Friendship Centre’s process to negotiation with the federal government for their funding program. It was a large set, with many documents and many conversations detailed from notes taken by NAFC staff. Working on that case set introduced me to the NAFC, and when I subsequently moved to Ottawa in 1991, I started working there. They very much started my career, and my connection to them was facilitated by David and the cases I put together.
In my final year I undertook an honours thesis with David as my supervisor. I produced an 80 page piece of original research, developing a model that might be useful for looking at Aboriginal organizational culture. It was a rich learning experience writing that paper – the richest of my entire academic career – and on its completion (receiving the only A+ of my entire academic career) I felt no need to pursue academic studies further.
David is not a character without controversy, and this is why I love him. He needles around the edges of things, finding the questions that change everything. He is uncompromising, but curious and he quietly holds ground where he feels that truth is at stake. Here’s what he says on his profile page for the Department of Indigenous Studies:
“My interest is in examining the ideas that are forming the basis of collective, i.e. societal or institutional action within contemporary Aboriginal society. I want to try and counter the idea that we laid in front of the bulldozer of western civilization and waited for it to flatten us. The historical and contemporary record indicates that we have always understood the world around us, knew what was happening and tried to affect the world to make it more hospitable and amicable to us. For the most part, our agency as living, thinking human beings has been erased. I want to show how we used our imaginations to live in the world we found ourselves in.“
I love that…it sums up much I know about this man.
The ideas that I was exposed to working with David have constantly resurfaced in my life over the past 15 years. Like all good teachers, he teaches by being. He offers much in his stance towards a world obsessed with the pre, post- and present day modernity of indigenous peoples by simply refusing to allow anyone to pin it all down. Indigenous life is a slippery every changing world of transformation, conversation and change, and that is what David is too. There are no easy answers, only an invitation to converse together thereby discover together who and where we are.