That is the question. Or is it?
Two bills have been filed in congress seeking to ban homework as a requirement for schools. One seeks to ban homework in general and the other only seeks to ban it during the weekends. It has been interesting following the debate on this issue.
The proponents of the bills, as well as those who are pushing for these, say that it promotes more quality time for the children and parents and enhances well-being by eliminating a stress factor. Besides, they say, a lot of parents or tutors end up doing the homework anyway.
Those against the measure say that by doing this, we are producing wimps. Pile on the homework. Life is more difficult so we should prepare them for it instead of running away from it.
If you have been reading my previous articles, you could say that I favor throwing out the homework. But focusing on homework alone, however, is missing the point. I say throw out the homework, and the entire curriculum as well.
You see, the problem is not whether or not to give homework, because if a child is inclined to learn a certain topic, you can pile all the homework you want and he will do it. But if a child is not interested, no amount of homework will make him learn. Oh, he will perhaps learn just enough to pass the quiz, then the exam, and then forget all about it.
So it is important to study motivation and purpose — not the adults’, not the parents’ nor the teachers’ nor the principal’s motivation and purpose, but the child’s.
There is a popular saying that goes, “the two most important days of your life are the day you were born, and the day you find out why.”
What education ought to be doing is helping children discover their why’s, but what is happening with education now is that it is obsessed with telling children what they should be concerned with, what they should deem as important, what they should do with their time, what they should be studying, and even what they should be wearing and how their hairstyles ought to be.
This is not what education is all about. It is not about molding or shaping the children — because that implies that we are bending them for the purpose of the molder or shaper.
Each child has a unique gift, talent and purpose. The educator’s job is to get out of the way and let them discover the joy of finding it, then support and nurture that joy.
In the words of John Taylor Gatto, “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.
Originally published in Sunstar Davao.
I’ve been following your criticism of education systems with interest, and just as with your plangent criticism of religion a few years ago, eventually the one-sidedness of the argument gets to me and I am drawn in to a debate on the opposite side, even while appreciating the insight in the points you’ve been making.
As we survey the variety of species and read about their evolutionary history, it seems that the single river of a species is often diverging into parallel, split streams, and if we turn back and look at our modern human species, we might also find that among ourselves, two rivers you could call spiritual and materialist, or in the shorthand I’ve been using lately, “philosophers” and “managers”; the “dreamers” who tend to dream into a spiritual vision, which then takes on a primary importance for them, and the practical hard-headed down-to-earth “realists” who aren’t interested in the philosophical, religious ideas because, they say, they’re “too busy living life to think about those things”. In ancient Chinese, there’s a character for the inner two horses in a four-horse carriage, those protected from the arrows that get absorbed by the outer two horses (驂cān), the philosopher dreamers protected by the realists, all four of them together making up the emperor’s team.
Like a nest full of birds in a species where they don’t all hatch at the same time, there are some still in the shell, and some fledglings, the fledglings, going on about the beauty of the sky and the river and the dangerous hawk intermittently spotted above, labelled “philosophers” or “dreamers” by those in their hard-headed shell who can’t see what all the squawking’s about, and in a Facebook internet polarized world it seems all the fledglings want to pull the others out of their shells, inappropriate as that may be, since we all hatch in our own time, and those in the shells want the fledglings to shut up about the “unreal” “nonsense” that can’t be fathomed from inside the shell, a shell where science and materialism seem appropriate for managing everything.
I like to see things from the mother eagle’s point of view, where all the birds in the nest are like wanderers in a labyrinth; everyone is headed toward the same goal, but in the sentry-like twisting path some are marching right and some left, alternating paths that eventually lead to the same central peak and then back out again.
Unlike your columns so strongly against religion and for science and materialism a few years ago, where you seemed to swim on the materialist branch of the river of humanity, in this series your vision is similar to that of Lao Tsu in the Tao Te Ching, all simplicity, casting aside the bureaucratic complexity of the political world around them, the military-industrial-educo complex.
While the philosophers may be quite happy to intensify their ability to dream by setting aside all irrelevant mathematical articulations, there’s that other side to our species, those who populate the casinos late at night, adding up various combinations of numbers at the blackjack tables to see how close they come to 21, calculating percentages all around them, while they avoid the sleep that would bring an encounter with their subconscious in the world of dreams, that same world of dreams you would have them use to design their own education. And those “managers”, still inside the egg, always win out over the philosophers in this zeitgeist, the philosophers always getting their 2% of the vote, while their views are steamrolled as “woo” by the hard-flowing “realist” side of the human species’ diverging rivers.
It seems to me enlightenment, the focus of the philosophers, comes with everybody, born into every creature, but the managers, parents and teachers, they want to distinguish themselves from the enlightened, to disassociate from and make themselves opposites of mystery and wonder. And it does us all some good; if it wasn’t for the managers who go regimented, materialist, learning the lie, there wouldn’t be oil pipelines, roads, infrastructure, the world we philosophers dream within and from which we write our fanciful essays; a world of only philosophers might exist only on a garbage-strewn field.
But I realized how silly it was when those managers told me early on to get back in the egg; escape-driven cracks complete the egg, I told them. And from the philosophical, dreamer side of the splitting human river, I reject the concepts of limitation inherent in your argument against schools, instead plunging head first into the “pointlessness” of the modern education system, for the same reason the mountain climbers say they climb the mountain, for the same reason we eat blueberries – just because they’re there, and we’re here, and we’re part of the infinite, the golden lake of “now”; and we still find a lifetime to “play”, the human species more neotenous than any other; and in our outspreading neoteny we might “play” guitar for a lifetime, always loosening or tightening the strings to find the most harmonious note.
Having chosen the philosophical branch of the human river, I found early on the philosophical and religious writers and fathomed with them the “eternal” questions about the meaning of it all; and as I scraped the bottom of that well, I found a memorable quote from Plato; he said the toughest philosophical question of all time, is “how are we gonna raise these kids?”. The bureaucratic and error-prone governments of our war-torn / war-ready world grapples with that question from one end, and you grapple with it, beautifully, from the other. Hegel in 19th century Germany had the “gymnasium”, balanced evenly between physical exercise and German literature; the imperial university of the Liu Song 劉宋 had four branches of curriculum in an effort to pass down their rich culture – ru 儒 Confucian studies, xuan 玄 Mystery Studies, wen 文 Literature, and shi 史 History; but as Plato pointed out, no one’s ever going to have the final word, because that most difficult of philosophical questions can only be answered by a continued, daily, case-by-case practice of grappling.
Going back to the analogy of the birds and eggs in the nest, I try to find a middle answer, less polarized; as a fledgling, I don’t want to rip the other birds out of their eggs, but I also don’t want to abandon them; my answer is to sit with them and occasionally sing softly into their shell about the sky and the river and the hawk, but not enough to annoy or frighten them, just enough to let them take their time as they develop the faith and hope it will require for them to successfully emerge from the shell. So on that note, thanks for the thoughtful series.
charlie5
PS
this was Morrisey’s recently published perspective on this most difficult of all philosophical questions, reminding me of your columns –
Hi Charlie,
Thanks for your input. Yes, I know I’m going on an extreme position, but it is where I choose to be at this point, in order to make a point. 🙂
As to the last paragraph, I don’t think I’m ripping birds out of their nests. On the contrary, it is traditional education doing that by saying well, the birds ought to be out of their shells now. Why aren’t they out yet? Maybe we should encourage them by cracking the shells a bit, and so on. All I’m advocating for is what you said, sit with them, sing to them, and basically let them be to grow on their own.
All the best.