The Cult of Homework
Joe Pinsker
大西洋月刊，
AFRICA STUDIO / SHUTTERSTOCK / THE ATLANTIC
家庭作业到底有没有用？
The Cult of Homework
Joe Pinsker
大西洋月刊，
America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn’t last either: In the ’80s, government researchers blamed America’s schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.
美国长期以来与家庭作业有着一个变化无常的关系。大约一个世纪以前，进步的改革者认为它让孩子负担过重，之后的一些案件里导致地区级别的七年级以下作业禁令。然而，这种反作业情绪逐渐消退后仅在60和70年代重现，而世纪中期美国正落后于苏联的恐惧导致更多作业，六七十年代更加开放的文化认为作业扼杀游玩和创造力。但这并没有持续下去，在80年代，政府研究人员指责美国学校教育造成的经济问题，并建议再次增加作业。
The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn’t have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.
就目前来看，21世纪是一个作业繁重的时期，美国青少年现在与他们1990年代的上一辈相比，每天要花两倍还多的时间在作业上。甚至连小童也被要求把学业带回家。就如一项2015年的研究，研究者倾向于同意学前班不应带任何25分钟作业回家。
But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work—and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They’re reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it’s time to revisit the subject.
但并不是没有让步。由于许多孩子，更不用说他们的家长，已经疲于他们的日常工作量，一些学校和学区正在重新考虑作业该如何运作 – 一些教师考虑完全废除。他们正在评估关于作业的研究（需指出，这存在争议），并得出结论是时候重新审视这个问题了。
Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.
希尔斯堡，加州，一个旧金山的富裕郊区，正是一个改变方法的学区。这个涵盖3所小学和1所中学的学区与教师合作召集家长座谈小组，以便制定一个作业政策旨在允许学生有更多计划外时间陪伴家人或者玩。2017年8月，放出了一个政策更新，强调作业应该是“有意义的”，并禁止将交作业日期设在周末或休息日的转天。
“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”
“头一年有点坎坷。” 学区主管Louann Carlomagno说。她说这些调整对于老师有时很难，一些教师已有1/4个世纪按同样的方式完成工作。家长的期望也是个问题。Carlomagno说她花了些时间才“觉悟到二年级学生没有1小时作业是OK的，这很新颖。”
Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.
然而，在第二年的大部分时间里，政策运行得更加顺利。“根据我与家长的谈话，学生的压力似乎减轻了。” Carlomagno说。这也帮助学生在去年州标准化考试中表现得跟以往一样好。
Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.
这一年早些时候，马萨诸塞州萨默维尔学区也改写了作业政策，大量地减少了小学和中学生可能收到的作业。比如，从6年级到8年级，作业被限制在1晚1小时，每周2-3晚。
Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”
Jack Schneider，一位麻省大学洛厄尔校区的教育学教授，对新政策感到满意。但是，他说这是一个更大的，令人忧虑的模式的一部分。“这的根源来自家长普遍的不满，不足为奇地尤其是来自特定人群。”中产白人家长往往更加直言不讳…他们觉得有权发表自己的意见。”
Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”
Schneider在全力重新审视那些理所当然的做法比如作业，但也认为在这一过程中，学区应保持包容。“我大约没听到过白人中产家长谈论作业是学前班到2年级确实可以最有效地沟通学校和家庭。”因为大部分这些家长都已经感到了与学校及社区相连，作业的这项好处是多余的。“他们不需要作业” Schneider说：“所以他们不主张。”
That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.
但这也并不必然地意味作业在低收入学区就更重要。事实上，尽管社区间有所不同，但低收入学区也有同样令人信服的理由。在爱荷华州小镇丹克顿教高中西班牙的Allison Wienhold，在过去3年已逐步取消了派发作业。她想，她的一些学生，“几乎没有时间做作业，因为他们一周花30个小时照顾弟弟妹妹。”
As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.
随着教育工作者减少或消灭了他们所派发的作业，值得问的是，什么数量和什么种类的作业才是对学生最好的。事实证明，研究者间存在的分歧将他们分属于两个阵营。
In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.
在首个阵营里有Harris Cooper，杜克大学心理学和神经科学教授。Cooper对2000年代中期关于作业的研究进行审阅后发现，在一定程度上，学生的作业数量与他们在课堂测验上的表现呈正相关。审阅发现的正相关性，学生的年龄越大则越强。
This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.
这个结论被教育工作者普遍接受，部分是因为它合乎“10分钟原则”，这条在教师中十分流行的原则建议适当的作业量为10分钟每晚，每年级 – 是的，1年级每晚10分钟，2年级每晚20分钟，如此这般，直到高中生为2小时。
In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”
在Cooper眼里，对典型的美国孩子作业并不繁重。他指出，2014年布鲁金斯学会的报告发现，“鲜有证据表明普通学生的作业负担增加了”；断然有地方存在繁重的作业，但显然很罕见。此外，报告指出，大部分家长认为他们的孩子得到了合适的作业量，而且担心不足的比担心超量的多。Cooper说，后者的担心更多来自那些“关心自己该怎么在最抢手的学校变得更有竞争力”的社区。
According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)
根据坚定站在第二个阵营的Alfie Kohn的说法，前三段中列出的大多数论据都值得怀疑。Kohn，作业迷思：为什么孩子得到了太多不好的事情 一书的作者，认为作业是“可靠的好奇心灭火器”，并且有几个控诉证明Cooper和其他人引用了它。Kohn指出，除了其他事项，Cooper在2006年的整合分析并未建立因果关系，其相关性是基于孩子（潜在不可信的）自报用了多少时间做作业。（Kohn关于此问题丰富的写作指出了众多其他的方*论法**错误）。
In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)
事实上，其他的相关性显示了令人信服的案例表明作业无济于事。一些国家的学生经常在标准化考试中优于美国学生，例如日本和丹麦，派给儿童更少的作业，同时一些国家有比美国更重的作业负担，比如泰国和希腊，却在考试中更差。（当然，国际间比较可能存谬，因为教育系统和社会中的诸多因素都影响学生的成功）。
Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”
Kohn还对评估成果的一般方式提出质疑。“如果你们想要的全部就是一个脑子里装满明天考*答案试**并在下周忘掉的补习班儿童，yeah, 给他们更多时间在晚上补习，确实可以提高分数。”他说：“但如果你对懂得思考并喜爱学习的孩子感兴趣，那么作业不仅无效，而且适得其反。”
His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.
在某种方式上，他关注的问题是哲学的。“做作业是假设只有学业进步才是重要的，以至于让孩子用上大部分的上学时间都还不够。”Kohn说，作业对与家人共度时间的质量有何影响？在长期知识保有上？在批判性思辨技能上？在社交发展上？在今后生活的成功上？在幸福上？那些研究在这些问题上默不作声。
Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.
另一个问题是那些研究倾向于关注作业的数量而不是质量，因为前者比后者容易测量。尽管专家们普遍认为作业的实质非常重要（而且大部分作业都是乏味的搬砖），但什么是最好的，仍没有一个一揽子准则 – 答案往往对每个特定课程和学生个体都是特别的。
Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.
鉴于作业的益处是如此狭隘（甚至这里也有争议），令人有点惊讶的是，布置如此多作业经常是课堂默认的，而且并没有为使作业更丰富多彩而做更多。很多事情都只是在保持现状 – 这与作业是否有助于学生学习无关。
Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)
Jack Schneider, 马赛诸塞州家长和教授，认为这种行为的代际惯性也很重要。“绝大多数公立学校家长自己也是毕业于公立教育系统。”他说，“因此，他们对什么是合理的观点早已被他们表面上批判的这个系统所塑造了。”换句话说，许多父母自己的作业经历可能让他们对孩子有同种期待，比之更少则被认为是老师不够严谨的迹象。
Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says.
Barbara Stengel，一个范德比大学教育与人类发展学院教育学教授，在让作业保持死记硬背的教育系统提出了两种教育发展模式。第一种是过去几十年标准化考试中被置于重点的，它隐藏于众多公立学校的课程决策上，并频繁地挫伤老师布置更具创造性作业的努力。“他们可以做，但他们害怕这么做。因为他们每天都受到考试分数的压力。”Stengel说。
Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says.
第二种，她称之为职业教育，工资相对较低，缺乏自主权，努力去吸引和支持想要重构作业，或者教育的其他方面的人。“部分我们为何对作业更不感冒的原因是，一些真正挑战极限的人不再教书了。”她说。
“In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.”
“通常来说，在变成作业后，就没有想象力了。”Stengel说，她希望老师能有时间和资源来将作业重做成能确实吸引学生的东西。“如果我们让孩子阅读 – 任何东西，体育版面，任何他们会读的 – 这是最好的了。如果我们让孩子去动物园，让孩子放学后去公园，如果我们让他们做所有这些，他们的考试成绩应该能提高才对。但他们没有。”
“Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.
“探索性”是Mike Simpson用来描述他希望他的学生承担的作业类型时所用的一个词。Simpson是Stone公学的校长，这是宾夕法尼亚州兰卡斯特的一所小型私立高中，开业于2017年。“我们很幸运能在1年半以前开办这所学校。”Simpson说，“所以很容易去说，我们不会发练习册，我们不会发反胃的习题集。”一个例子是， 6个学生最近在校园里建造了一部25英尺高的投石机。
Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.”
Simpson说他认为学生必须回家做的部分往往是教学中最不充实的，这是一种耻辱：“当我们的学生不能把周二晚上11点做的事情与他们想要的生活方式产生关联时，我想我们就失策了。”
When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.
当我与其他改造自己课堂上作业的老师交谈时，我很少听到后悔。Brandy Young，一位德州约书亚的二年级教师，三年前停止了分发成包带回家的练习册，取而代之是开始要求学生晚间20分钟的兴趣阅读。她说她乐见结果，但也注意到一些有趣的事情，“有些孩子”她说：“真的喜欢作业。” 她开始做了一个作业箱让学生自愿抽取 - 无论是因为他们想要一个额外的挑战，还是想在家里待着。
Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time.
Chris Bronke，一位芝加哥郊区道纳斯葛罗的中学英语教师，给我讲了相似的事情。这个学年，他除去了他班的新生的作业，现在更多是让学生自修或组成小组在课堂上。这取决于他们每天的工作，令Bronke印象深刻的是他们如何管理自己的时间。
In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said.
事实上，他们中有些愿意在家做作业，无论是因为他们特别尽责，还是因为他们想做更深的思考在校外，或者是因为他们课上需要花时间准备，比如说，下期生物学考试。“他们为运用自己的时间做了有意义的决定，而我不认为教育在此上真给过学生经验，也没有实践。” Bronke说。
The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.
对不堪重负的作业的典型药方是减少 – 移除。但或许更有用的途径是，对很多课堂而言，应该是只有当老师和学生相信它确实需用用来推动课上的学习时才创建作业 – 从零开始，按需增加。