Unpopular Thoughts on Education

Yeah, I’m going there…

It caught my eye that schools are thinking about doing away with homework. Why you ask?

• Mental Health

• AI

• Ability of high school students to have jobs

My head is spinning. First, schools took away cursive writing. This is a disaster because we know that being able to write in cursive helps with reading comprehension, both the printed word, and older documents written in cursive. Then, calculators and AI for math have taken the place of pencil and paper. Students can no longer show their work, and that gap shows in test scores.

And now they want to take away homework. In elementary school, one of the best homework assignments we used to get was to read a book. Any book. I need someone to explain to me how reading a book of one’s choice adversely impacts one’s mental health. My late mother was offered a full scholarship to Cornell. Her father wouldn’t let her go because it was “too far from NYC for a girl to go alone.” She raised me to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be, and I spent a lot of time as a young girl reading about women’s firsts – Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor and my idol growing up, Marie Curie, Margaret Sanger, Amelia Earhart, and the list goes on and on… things that helped me decide where to go and what to be. OH WAIT – they ban books now. So, I guess that’s now “bad homework”.

And what about math homework? How can you learn your times tables without flash cards? OH WAIT – they don’t do times tables anymore. Help me – if you haven’t learned your times tables, how can you easily and quickly calculate how much you’re saving at the 25% off everything sale?

I admit guilt at being a member of Spiro Agnew’s “[E]ffete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Source. And perhaps that’s why I just don’t get it. When did “intellectual” become a dirty word? OH WAIT – MAGA!

Seriously, I come from the last generation to go to school where academics ruled over other things. Yes, there was art, music, sports and electives – but academics, especially in the lower grades, was where it was at. Learning, both in school, and out of school was both fun, and fundamental. I harken back to the physics problem to determine the optimal angle for a cannon to have the furthest reach of a cannonball. We didn’t own a cannon, but my dad had a slingshot, and we practiced with various angulations until he took me through the actual math. Good times.

Let’s look at the reasons given in the link for no homework.

First is mental health. From the link cited above:

Butterfield Canyon Elementary School in Herriman, Utah, has had a no-homework policy since 2020.

"It helps increase the overall social-emotional health of our students because they're not so focused, especially at the elementary level, just on 'academic, academic, academic,'" Jay Eads, the school's principal, told Axios.

I was curious what Butterfield Canyon’s Elementary School test score were. And yeah, they do a scunch better than the rest of Utah, but still, look at this:

These are the test scores for the elementary school nearest to me, where they still give homework. Just sayin’.

I don’t know if the “mental health” of elementary school students is better there than here, but I’m pretty sure that Butterfield Canyon Johnny can’t read, can’t do math, and when he signs that mortgage document for the house he can’t afford when he grows up, he won’t know he can’t afford it, and he’ll sign with an “X”.

Certainly, there is an issue with mental health, especially with teenage and pre-teen girls owing to Tik-Tok, Instagram and other social media sites, but it would seem the answer is to fix THAT problem. My uneducated guess is that the better someone can perform academically, and thus think critically, the better prepared they are to slough off social media nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, conditions like depression and other diagnoses need to be treated, but the solution is NOT less homework.

And then there is AI. The “logic” is that kids can use AI, and therefore they don’t need to do homework because they can rely on AI to solve things for them. It is hard to know where to start. We’ll take an example of something I love: the US Constitution. If I ask you: “How many amendments does the US Constitution have?”, you can use AI (or Google, or heaven forbid A BOOK) and find out that the correct answer is “27”. But then when I ask you “What are they?” you don’t know. You can pull a list, but you don’t own the knowledge. And it’s likely that since it’s written in older form of English, you won’t understand anyway. If I ask you which amendment was ratified the quickest, and which took the longest time to ratify, AI can tell you, but AI likely won’t know WHY. (I don’t necessarily mean YOU, personally, but you get the idea.)

AI takes away from the ability to consider, and to estimate. This means you’re screwed if you’re out of range of cell service and need to figure something out.

Another problem with AI is that students turn in work completely undertaken by AI, meaning they learned NOTHING except how to type a question into a Chatbot. I’ve heard through the grapevine that teachers are stymied at how to discern what is actual work, and what is AI. Seems the programs they use to check don’t always know.

I have a simple solution. When I was in college, I would arrive for a test with several pens, and be handed a test and several of these:

Thus, all original work. Requiring work undertaken by hand precludes AI, or at least it means students would need to write out what they find via AI. OH WAIT, they took cursive out the curriculum, and I’m pretty sure printing by hand is next. SIGH.

And finally, the ability of high school kids to have jobs. The problem isn’t that they have jobs – the problem is that too many of them have fulltime jobs. Because the money is needed to support the household. THAT is the problem. Solve the economic problem by paying the parents a living wage and the kids won’t have to work. Except, of course, the migrant children who shouldn’t be working, and are here without parents. Source. (That source is one of many.) Those kids are exploited and working in violation of Federal law (except in Arkansas, where they have legalized violations of child labour laws.)

It used to be that a lot of high school kids had jobs, and those jobs didn’t impinge on the ability to do homework, or do well in school. They were part-time jobs, often ending in the early evening, or wholly worked on the weekends. They told us it built character when I was in high school.

I say more focus on academics. Longer school years. More homework. No cellphones in school. Think I’m wrong? Consider this: Source.

• Worldwide in developed countries, the literacy rate is at or above 96%.

• In the US, the literacy rate is 79%. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).

Think about those two bullet points again. MOST AMERICAN ADULTS CANNOT READ AT A 6TH GRADE LEVEL. That means 54% of Americans cannot read and comprehend the post you just read. How can we compete globally for high paying jobs if Johnny can’t read?

Done ranting.