Trying Too Hard (1)

We all want Canadian children to be the best they can be. We want them to be healthy, successful at everything they try, and we want them to be safe and happy.

Today, the standards are very high. Parents know that their children must not simply look well fed and exercised to be healthy, but also get precise daily amounts of protein, vitamins and minerals. Competition for places in high schools, arts and sports programmes and elite Universities is fiercer than ever before, and the required level of accomplishment of candidates has increased proportionately. The definition of good parenting has also changed. If, fifty years ago, parents were expected to give their children care and affection, today they must also give them time. Many parents drive their kids to school now, to hockey practices of course, and stay in touch all day on cell phones.

It’s natural for parents and educators to want to do everything in their power to help Canadian children meet these standards of excellence, but I sometimes feel that they try too hard.

Children as young as two are now being enrolled in early-learning math and language programmes. Teachers are also expected, by the school board and by anxious parents, to start hading out homework in grade one. By the time they reach grade six (eleven years of age) it is quite common for children to bring home two to three hours of homework every night.

The problem is that numerous academic studies have demonstrated that homework has little or no benefit in primary school. After grade seven, students who regularly complete their homework tend to be the most academically successful, but this does not mean that homework is responsible for making them academically successful.

If the benefits of homework are at best unclear, the side effects are glaringly obvious. A child who spends 7 hours a day in school and three more hours every evening locked up in a bedroom with homework is not a child who will spend very much time outside. It’s not a child who will have much free time either.

Yet I can attest that all children need free time, and not just to relax like adults who work less than they do. Children need free time to be creative, because it’s no good trying to come up with new ideas when one is permanently locked up in a small room solving math problems.

The greatest irony is that schools have been asked for some time to make creativity a priority, so teachers now tell grade ten students to draw as homework a colourful title page for their math binder. They also encourage students to deliver presentations on “original” media, even if it means compromising on the quality of the content.

This is what I mean by “trying too hard”. In our haste to make children creative and academically successful, we prescribe loads of homework, whose effect is to take away the free time that allows for creativity to blossom. (To be continued)