The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing [Paperback]

Alfie Kohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2007

So why do we continue to administer this modern cod liver oil-or even demand a larger dose? Kohn’s incisive analysis reveals how a set of misconceptions about learning and a misguided focus on competitiveness has left our kids with less free time, and our families with more conflict. Pointing to stories of parents who have fought back-and schools that have proved educational excellence is possible without homework-Kohn demonstrates how we can rethink what happens during and after school in order to rescue our families and our children’s love of learning.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Education watchdog and author Kohn (No Contest: The Case Against Competition) questions why teachers and parents continue to insist on overloading kids with homework when there are no definitive studies proving its overall learning benefits. Indeed, argues Kohn persuasively, homework can be detrimental to children 's development by robbing families of quality evening time together and not allowing a kid time simply to be a kid. Americans in general advocate a tough-going approach to education and push teachers to give more drudgery nightly as a way of "building character." Yet Kohn shows that doing forced busywork only turns kids off to school and kills intellectual and creative curiosity. The American insistence on producing good worker bees "by sheer force or cleverness," notes Kohn, "reflects a stunning ignorance about how human beings function in the real world." Kohn pursues six reasons why homework is still so widely accepted despite the evidence against it, including the emphasis on competitiveness and "tougher standards" and a basic distrust of children and how they would fill their time otherwise if not doing busywork. There aren't enough case studies in Kohn's work, but Kohn sounds an important note: parents need to ask more challenging questions of teachers and institutions. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Kohn has mapped for himself an uphill struggle against widely held beliefs that American children need homework to stay on track for academic success and to compete with better-prepared children in other nations. Kohn outlines the costs of homework: overburdened parents, stressed children, family conflicts, little free time, declining interest in learning. He highlights the debate between parents and teachers as they argue about the relative benefits or detriments of homework, and explores research--from as far back as the 1800s--indicating that homework does not improve learning. Exploring the variety of assignments, from fill-in-the-blank sheets to more creative efforts, Kohn maintains that homework does not improve learning for children, whether in grade school or high school, and laments the trend of giving homework to younger and younger students. He also takes to task the alleged nonacademic benefits of homework, including teaching children time-management and study skills. Whatever their opinions about homework, parents and teachers will find this book an interesting part of the debate. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738211117
• ISBN-13: 978-0738211114
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alfie Kohn is the author of nine previous books, including Punished by Rewards and The Schools Our Children Deserve, that have helped to shape the thinking of parents and educators across the country and abroad. He lectures widely and lives (actually) with his family in the Boston area.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Really About Homework, February 25, 2007

By 

Sean Howard - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Homework Myth (Hardcover)

Growing up, I was a gifted student who absolutely hated school and teachers with the end result of becoming a proud college drop out. I picked this book up to, frankly, justify my educational opinions and to perhaps collect ammunition for when my own daughter goes to school. That's not the book I got. I got an even better one.

People seem to think this book is about how homework is bad for you. It's not. The premise of the book is that homework isn't good for you, an important distinction. This isn't a book about homework. This is a book about the homework myth - why we believe it, why we want to believe it, why we can't ignore it, and why we are controlled by it. When the author quotes Chomsky, you know the subject has moved beyond the usefulness of worksheets.

This is a book essentially about faith. I may actually be doing a disservice to the book when I describe it that way, since I've made a polarizing connection with the material, but it's really what the book is about. When faced with the lack of evidence, why do we still choose to believe things? Like why does Harris Cooper, despite his own research either having nothing to say or even contradicting his opinion, still conclude that homework is good for you? He goes from point A to point C. This book is about that hidden point B.

The first part of the book is basically tearing down a bunch of preconceived notions about homework. Rather than saying homework is bad, he spends considerable effort convincing us that there is no evidence that homework is good. To some people, that's not enough, but his point is, I think, that it's plenty enough to at least open a serious discussion on the matter. If a group of kids do just as well without homework as those who do, why then must we burden them, their parents, and their teachers on what is ultimately a time wasting effort? If the net effect is zero, then wouldn't that time be better spent on just about anything else? It's not that homework is bad, it's that it isn't good enough to justify itself.

The second part of the book is where it gets interesting. The author then proceeds to examine the why of homework. Given the lack of measurable support in favor of homework, why do we still insist that it is a good thing? He tackles many subjects, from parental pressure, to common misconceptions, to political ideals, to the distrust of children. There is a lot of good commentary and insight here and I think he hits the nail on the head plenty. Ultimately, I think he fails to solve any of these problems, which may frustrate some readers, but his point was never to solve them. Exposing a hidden problem is simply the first step, and I see this book as the beginning of a discussion rather than the end of one.

My daughter's homework free future is anything but secured, even in light of this book, but I feel more confident in my ability to affect it. The problem of homework no longer seems impenetrable and omnipotent, but petty and pitiable - something I can overcome. That alone is enough to recommend this book to other parents.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The homework myth disspelled or how we're teaching children not to love learning examined in exceptional book, March 23, 2008

By 

WTDK "If at first the idea is not absurd, the... (My Little Blue Window, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Paperback)

We live in an achievement driven culture that is so obsessed with success we often don't question the value of those things we do to reach them. Alife Kohn's book The Homework Myth takes us down the rabbit hole showing us the flawed assumptions and conlcusions of numberous studies and how they shape school policy teaaching children not to love learning but to hate it. We categorize, grade and put our children into slots using homework, "standardized testing" and other devices that often are meaningless measures of true intelligence or success. As Kohn quotes one writer, grades are "an inadquate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined mastery of anunknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material". Got that? In other words, grades are as subjective and uninformative as can be. The same can be said for homework and how it adds to our children's understanding of the material. Kohn takes apart multiple studies that have been done to support the concept of homework and discovers that these flawed studies were designed to prove their point rather than find out the true meaning and understanding of homework in our children's ability to learn.

Kohn suggests that a placebo like effect is seen in studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of homework and he has a valid point. He points out the flawed thinking of teachers and school districts believing that homework correlates to academic benefit. There's no clear cut evidence of this. He also looks at the detrimental effect that homework has on family life, social interaction and questions the nonacademic benefits of the homework "system". He shows why homework persists based on miconceptions about how people learn, competitiveness and an essential distrust of children and how they spent their time (something you'll also find in the business world which is why "busy work" is assgined as well despite the fact that it burns out employees and makes them not enjoy the work they do. In a sense, I suppose you could argue that homework prepares children for the pointlessness of the work world--i.e., "better get used to it" as Kohn refers to the pointless tasks we'll be asked to do later in life).

Kohn also takes on the myths of testing (since homework often is preparation for testing particularly to make sure that children do well on standardized testing).

We find out nothing about whether a child's learning has improved or deepened but instead how well a child can memorize by rote. Every hour spent making sure that children do well on standardized testing is time taken away from true learning (you're teaching them to take the test well not to develop critical thinking skills).

For example, he looks at standarized testing and discovers that
1) Timed tests put a premuium not on thoughtfulness but on speed.
2) Tests that focus on "basic skills" are geared towards cramming facts that are useless without the connection to comprehension and ideas.
3) Most children under the ages of eight or nine are tripped up by the format because they don't understand its purpose and, as a result, don't do well.
4) "norm-referenced" studies are designed not to measure knowledge but, instead, to artifically rank students focusing on the competition not on comprehension. In other words, some children are better at taking these tests than others but it doesn't give us a sense of their depth or understanding of the materials and is useless.

This book should be required reading for school administrators, teachers and**yes**parents. It's a thoughtful look at how we are destroying the desire to learn with often untested or assumptions that we make about human behavior. I highly recommend this book for any school age parent simply because it will help you understand the system and its flaws.

66 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a Great Book for Parents and Teachers, August 27, 2006

By 

B. B. Trammell (Baton Rouge, LA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Homework Myth (Hardcover)

I didn't realize I got this book from a bookstore on the first day it was available. I've read half of it so far, and must say that Kohn makes some excellent points about how homework is something we don't consider doing without. Nor do we tend to consider whether or not it is even helpful. Thinking back on my experience as a student growing up, homework was just a chore I had to do. Of course it helped me remember the forgetable facts I was being tested on, but to justify assigning homework based on that is to assume memorizing forgetable facts is a productive and valuable experience.

He brings up a valuable point that homework does not play upon any intrinsic desire to learn something but is just more forced learning that can even make students hate certain subjects or even learning in general. If only teachers knew how much making me read a bunch of stories I didn't want to read caused me to hate literature. If only teachers knew how much all the performance-based math homework and testing made me hate mathematics when I may have loved learning it with a focus on understanding the concepts involved and possibly considering how it could be applied to something practical. All I got was math homework and grading from math teachers

Although this book is good, I would recommend reading Kohn's What Does It Mean to be Well Educated first to get a good idea of his perspective on education in general. Kohn displays his brilliance and revolutionary thinking in 18 concise essays that should be seriously considered by students and teachers alike.

There are two things Kohn has not mentioned so far. First, sometimes students do homework at school. I don't mean during lunch or recess or other non-instructional times, but during classes so they don't have to do it at home. Second, he never referred to sibling rivalry/jealousy involving homework. It was quite a negative experience to know my brother was free to play Nintendo or do other enjoyable activities while I was stuck with significantly more homework than him.

The previous review mentioned that Kohn's theories dominated public schools, but that is FAR from the truth. My high school experience did not involve much homework, except in my honors classes. Even if that's a standard high school experience, that would only be consistent with ONE of Kohn's theories although it may not even be based on Kohn's concepts but for other reasons.

In conclusion, even if you don't agree with what Kohn says, he presents questions to you about education that MUST be considered if you want to be a powerful and effective teacher or if you want your child to grow up enjoying learning and not just going through the motions of our current school system motivated simply by making grades and the unjustified rewards and consequences tied to them.