Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

In The Homework Myth, Alfie Kohn has some good things to say. Take this (from p. 59): "People are active meaning makers. They are not passive receptacles into which knowledge, or skills, or dispositions can be poured." This is a powerful statement which has wide implications in the field of education. And, in fact, Mr. Kohn has a number of other good things to say in this book beyond his insistent calls to eliminate homework. But he does little with his big ideas. They are hidden beneath his avowed purpose in this book: to convince us that homework is a bad idea. But, no matter how you feel about Mr. Kohn's thesis, it is a bitter pill to swallow since his tone is so stridently negative and he falls into the same traps that he accuses the supporters of homework of sliding into.

I speak mainly of his selective use of research data. In fact, there is not enough valid research to support either eliminating or sticking with homework. And yet, Mr. Kohn has no trouble reinterpreting past studies that "proved" the usefulness of homework to support his thesis. And, in any case, he says, in the face of indecisive research we should throw homework out. That's not a very "scientific" argument or conclusion.

This goes beyond his tendency towards hyperbole and otherwise overstating his case. Is it really so easy for educators to face down parents who want their kids to have homework? Does he really believe that, given the free time elimination of homework would provide, kids would drift into idyllic pursuits like "hanging out with their parents," "read[ing] for pleasure," or "get[ting] some exercise"? Does he really believe that colleges and universities should accept low-performing students? Does he really think that schools shouldn't inculcate some kinds of norm, for social behavior, for example? Personally, I was most irritated by his ad hominem comment on page 47 where he implied that people who supported homework were not even good human beings let alone good educators.

The hard thing for me about this book is that I actually agree with much of what Mr. Kohn says. I certainly believe that in many cases our kids are given too much homework and that it has decreasingly less value the younger the child. I believe we rely too often on standardized testing. I also agree that meaningless drill work is pointless; however, I believe that it meaningless drill work is pointless in class or out. Any in-school lesson as well as its associated homework assignment (if called for) should have authenticity so it will expand the mind and bring significance (not the same thing as fun, by the way) to education. It is unfortunate that the good stuff Kohn has to say is lost beneath the railing and hypocrisy. Otherwise, he might have made a difference, at least in the mind of this reader.

I read Kohn's 4-page article online at
[...] and was so impressed that I bought the book. The book "The Homework Myth" is very dry and scholarly, and didn't seem to offer much new knowledge beyond the article. I put it down after about page 50.
Kohn had warned that most teachers and parents inherently believe without proof that Homework Is Valuable. I haven't given any homework in the seven years that I have been teaching high school chemistry and Spanish. My coworkers pound me for being too easy, but the kids love it and the parents never complain. And my students do as well on standardized tests as any other teacher's students. I am confident that Kohn is right that homework does not improve learning. But try to tell that to old-guard teachers!

Kohn leads off with some solid observations. Some children are given what seems to them and their parents to be a lot of homework. It is often more than the rule of thumb guideline of 10 minutes per day per grade. And, as Kohn points out, that rule of thumb has never been so subjected to any empirical test of reasonableness.

It is also true, as he claims, that some homework is just pure busywork. Before the national Council on Teaching Mathematics recanted and went back to basics this year, they endorsed some pretty dumb ideas. My kids laboriously cut out little squares of paper, arranged them in into rectangles, and counted the squares. We built a replica of Hadrian's Wall with rocks and glue.

Thirdly, his claim that there is not much of a scientific basis for formulating homework assignments is also true. Teachers are not taught how to make homework assignments. it is also true, although not central to his point, that teachers are not taught how to make in-class examinations and quizzes. For all of the research that goes on in our schools of education, there is an awful lot that we just don't know. I will add as a graduates student of education myself that a vastly disproportionate amount of the research in education goes into a single topic, the black-white test score gap, and such diversion of research funding to questions of equality appears to starve research in fundamental questions of how children learn and fundamental teaching techniques.

Kohn does not define homework. It is assumed that he means specific assignments, such as sheets that are handed out to be filled in. He does not explicitly indicate that it includes studying for tests, or researching papers. My definition would be fairly broad. I would include under the title of homework every thing that a student does at home that is school related. I would even venture to assign value to different kinds of activities. For a student to study foreign language vocabulary on their own, or commit equations for geometric forms to memory, shows a lot more initiative and academic bent than filling in some stupid busywork assignment.

Kohn's arguments against homework are similar to his arguments against testing. He complains about criterion-referenced tests (like NCLB, with a fixed pass-fail criterion) because they are not norm-referenced (like the SAT, with each examinee measured against other examinees; in other words graded on the curve), and norm-referenced tests because they are not criterion referenced. He complains about time limits on speeded tests. He complains about the way distractors (attractive wrong answers) are used on multiple-choice tests. Kohn doesn't like testing. His position on testing is that because there can never be totally fair test, there should be no tests at all. His position on homework is thus pretty predicable. Because it isn't perfect, we ought to do away with it.

Kohn says he is unaware of studies have addressed the question of whether homework enhances the depth of students' understanding. It is a question of how people learn The theoretical basis for assuming that homework would help is well established in the field of psychology. Homework has a student collect data in their short-term memory, organize them, and move them as "chunks" of knowledge into long-term memory. It is a process that can and does of course happen in the classroom. However, as should be evident, not every student picks up every point that a teacher delivers orally in class. Homework has the virtue of taking place at the student's own pace, giving them the opportunity to internalize material at the rate at which they can absorb it.

Kohn says that there is no value to homework in elementary school. I would argue that homework has to develop on a continuum. At the far end, adult life is a matter of homework assignments that we give ourselves. In graduate school homework consists of large projects that we conceive on our own, with guidance from our professors. At the undergraduate level it is a mixture of short assignments and projects. In high school the emphasis is more on short-term assignments, and so on down to elementary school, at which level most of the assignments are fairly brief and highly structured. Kohn's stance on homework in elementary school begs the question. Where on the continuum should one start?

One of the problems with Kohn's analysis is that he leaves ability out of the question of correlation. A number of students in my kids' schools use tutors. It is safe to some that the kids who have tutors spend more time on homework than the kids who don't. It is also safe to as some that the best students don't need tutors. Right off the top, it ought to be evident that time spent on homework doesn't correlate with superior ability. If we leap to the conclusion that superior ability correlates to high grades, we would expect that the time spent on a homework correlates negatively with grades. Kohn's correlations don't make sense without taking ability into question, but the fact is that schools haven't given IQ tests for 30 years or more and they don't have any objective measures of the kids' native abilities. Neither he nor the researchers he cites, such as Harris Cooper, could do it. Significantly, Cooper's experimental-method studies (take equivalent students, give some of them homework, others none) show the most positive correlation between homework and achievement.

Kohn claims that homework destroys the desire to learn. It is hard to square this claim with what we observe in university enrollments. More and more people are going to the University, and more and more are in graduate school. If they couldn't do homework, they wouldn't be there. At a minimum they get used to it, in Kohn's parlance. And in some cases, they even develop interests in the subject matter that is covered by assigned homework.

Kohn surely knows that homework is here to stay. He could make a bigger contribution to education, though he might sell a few fewer books, if he confined himself to suggestions as to how to make it better. There is ample room for improvement. I should add that my area of professional interest is in helping kids find the quickest and easiest way to get whatever homework they happen to be assigned done. They all have computers, but for the most part nobody tells them the best techniques to use those computers to get the job of a student done. More information on my web site.

In addition to this book, I read an interview with Mr. Kohn in Parent & Child Magazine, and I agree with his thesis one hundred percent. I have first-hand experience of homework ruining home life, exhausting children, eliminating the joy of childhood, ruling out extracurricular activities and down time, and occupying a child's every waking hour with school. As a child of a special-needs student, I have been in the situation in three different schools where I would have to re-teach the day's lessons before even starting homework, which would take twice as long for my son. There was no way out of this nightmare, other than removing my son from school and homeschooling him. I am not saying homeschooling is for everyone. But because my son is able to complete and comprehend his work during his school hours, he is now free in his non-school hours to participate in activities which are at least as educational as school. Playing with his younger siblings and learning to care for them; independent reading apart from school assignments; learning daily living skills and chores; participating in theater and martial arts; and spending time with family and friends, or alone. One of the problems with homework is, not every child is typical. What one child can complete in an hour could take the whole afternoon and evening for another, robbing them of life and making education a misery. When one teacher offered us the option of limiting homework to an hour, all this meant was that my son would be hopelessly behind his class, so it was really a non-option. My last point is: teachers, please give families AND kids some credit for making good, positive use of OUR time. Teachers are not the only people in a child's life with something valuable to offer them, and we do not need schools dictating how our children's, and therefore our family's, non-school hours are spent. To me, it doesn't matter how many research studies Mr. Kohn has done; there is more than one way to measure the quality of a child's education and of his life. My observations of the positive changes in my son's life since we said NO to homework tell me more than any studies ever could.

This book has changed my life. I've shared it with dozens of friends and even got my husband to read it! It challenges the traditional reasons why children do so much homework. It asks parents and teachers to question meaningless homework. It asks us to also reconsider issues like rewards and punishments, traditional teaching, standardized tests, and grades. I've read four more of the author's books since starting with this one. It's a must for any parent of school-age children or for any teacher or administrator!

I ordered this for the professional library at the elementary school that I work at. I am also a parent at the school. I am trying to get some information as to why our kids are getting so much homework. This book seemed to have some answers for me. If I was an average parent with no school based knowledge, I might have found this book incredibly dry and hard to read. Alfie Kohn addresses a lot of the studies that say that homework is good for kids and tries to debunk this myth - which he did for me. If only I can get more of our teachers to read it.

I also just heard Dr. Kohn's interview on National Public Radio and recommend that everyone hear it and consider what he says.

As the parent of a second grader with homework several nights a week, I object to my child being assigned homework. It should be the right of the family to select and pursue educational activites together in the limited time available. Mandatory homework is burdensome and does not build a child's skill set for a lifetime love of learning.

Education should be an adventure the family takes together. Instead of being his "educational guide" or "educational partner", I am put in the position of "educational adversary". I become a "task master" when I am obligated to force my exhausted child to sit by the table and do more rote work. We have been strictly informed by school that homework is to be done at home after dismissal at 4:30 pm (which further also means after sports activity and after dinner.) What benefit can there be in compelling an exhausted child to complete more rote exercises? This is not the way I want my family's time organized.

Our child has learned far more of the spirit we would like him to develop by enjoying time with family and friends and some time watching educational television programs - like those on the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and even on CNN on the weekend (which we tape for later viewing). We would like to increase his participation in additional creative activities but what time is there remaining after homework?

Our child is better prepared to return to his "grade-level" work with his body exercised and rested, and with his mind and soul inspired by well used family evening time.

The concept of homework as beneficial truly is an urban legend. The family has rights.