Against Homework: A Polemic

As a schoolboy I tirelessly resented the intrusion of homework. School had me seven hours a day, my body rigidly confined to a desk, my mind a captive audience to the vagaries of curriculum, the insistence upon behavioral compliance the grinding subtext of every school-bound moment. This strict compliance includes the body, witness my kindergarten teacher placing me in a chair in front of and facing my classmates as I waited for my mother to rescue me with clean clothes after my bladder had not complied. It also includes the social, as evidenced by the fourth grade teacher who enforced complete and total silence in my elementary school cafeteria during lunch, and who made us proud of our subjugation by afterwards congratulating us all over the intercom for our spectacular act of capitulation. But this was never enough. In order to fulfill its overarching mission of subjecting the pupil to the sufficient degree of domination necessary for casting the dye of a conforming worker, school required homework.

Homework accomplishes a necessary step in the molding of the agreeable worker. The assignment of homework, whether completed, ignored, or eaten by the dog, demolishes the barrier between the realm of labor, with school but a proto-workplace, and the private sphere of home and family. With homework, home is metamorphosized into the place where work goes and they have to take it in. After homework, the home becomes little more than a branch office with better office furnishings. Henry Ford famously stated that you could have his Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Homework says you can do anything you want to do in life, as long as it is a job.

The best pupils, those who please their teachers most, are inevitably those who spend the most time doing homework. By giving their lives over entirely to school they have received everything that prep school has to offer, a preparation for replicating their self-sacrifice on the altar of professional success. Amidst the absence of sturm und drang, the silence, as hallmark of a well-modulated, professionally aspirational student body, shouts one thing: you can only serve one master. Doing all of your homework is the first and foundational act of serving that master for the rest of your life. The master rewards such servitude the only way it can, with some cash and yet more work. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their masterwork The Dialectic of Enlightenment, capture this succinctly: “The gradations in the standard of living correspond very precisely to the degree by which classes and individuals inwardly adhere to the system. Managers can be relied on.” The best early outward sign of this inwardly grounded reliability is doing your homework.

And I do mean early. A friend and, yes, co-worker of mine (my life is as dominated by work as the next guy; outside of my wife and family nearly the only people I interact with on any consistent basis are my co-workers) recently told me that her three-year-old daughter’s day care provider was assigning homework. My wife regales me with tales of published studies establishing the complete lack of any academic benefit to such early assignment of homework. But of course, any academic benefit of homework is always completely beside the point. By assigning homework at age three, the day care provider is passing on the only folk wisdom we have left, our societies’ master signifier, symbolically branded onto the forehead of every homeless vagrant cum economic deserter: Get A Job.

So when our childrens’ spines are literally bent by the weight of the homework they must tote home every night in their backpacks, a deforming of the body marking the self-sacrifice of their voyage to Harvard and beyond, a deforming, it goes without saying, preferable to those tattoos and piercings which might forever bar the door to observable managerial reliability, let us be reminded that these contrasting outward markings of, respectively, inauguration into or exclusion from professional status, are both symptoms of the soul-bending force of economic conscription. Let us remember this when we ask our daughters and sons if they have done their homework before they are allowed to go outside and play. But, of course, if they are staying inside to play another six consecutive hours on their Playstations anyway, perhaps the battle is already lost. They might just as well complete yet another pointless worksheet. Is it still too late to talk my wife into reconsidering homeschooling?