Homework Emancipation Proclamation

Louis Menand:

The French President's emancipation proclamation regarding homework may give heart not only to les enfants de la patrie but to the many opponents of homework in this country as well--the parents and the progressive educators who have long insisted that compelling children to draw parallelograms, conjugate irregular verbs, and outline chapters from their textbooks after school hours is (the reasons vary) mindless, unrelated to academic achievement, negatively related to academic achievement, and a major contributor to the great modern evil, stress. M. Hollande, however, is not a progressive educator. He is a socialist. His reason for exercising his powers in this area is to address an inequity. He thinks that homework gives children whose parents are able to help them with it--more educated and affluent parents, presumably--an advantage over children whose parents are not. The President wants to give everyone an equal chance.

Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it. Children hate it for healthy and obvious reasons; parents hate it because it makes their children unhappy, but God forbid they should get a check-minus or other less-than-perfect grade on it; and teachers hate it because they have to grade it. Grading homework is teachers' never-ending homework. Compared to that, Sisyphus lucked out.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 16, 2012 2:33 AM
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