Homework’s best lesson is about life and not just about our standards in education

The homework debate has been going on for a while. Some academic studies have claimed that homework has little beneficial impact for school pupils. Gary Lineker gained a wave of support from both parents and teachers when he tweeted that “Homework is a waste of time. Brings stress to the home, stress to the child, stress to the parent-child relationship.” Yet many other parents demand it, and if they are paying for a child’s education, they may feel it’s part of their money’s worth.

Irish school pupils do 7.1 hours of homework a week; British children 4.9; Americans, 6.1; and Chinese, over 14 hours swotting at home each week.

The homework debate is partly about education; but it has also become somewhat political, with those on the liberal left disfavouring the homework discipline, and those from a more conservative persuasion upholding the homework practice.

One of the points made supporting homework is that – contrary to Lineker’s claim – it helps to engage parents and families with their youngsters’ school work. Parents who are interested in their child’s homework are likely to be more supportive in many other ways too. But some parents don’t, or can’t, engage, because they don’t have the educational confidence to do so. Or they are just too busy trying to juggle everything that they have no time.

Thus homework may discriminate against children from poorer backgrounds: they may not have the “social capital” to benefit from it.

I am not in a position to arbitrate on what is best, educationally, for school students: I can only say what homework taught me. And the homework lesson wasn’t really about education at all – it was about life.

The lesson learned was: “preparation is everything”. Homework is designed to be revision after the day’s work, but it is also preparation for what’s next.

Being creative is wonderful: but most creativity follows from many hours of work. The Canadian writer, Malcolm Gladwell, who specialises in the psychology of success, claimed that high achievers in any field put in at least 10,000 hours of preparation before reaching their creative standard. That includes natural-born geniuses such as Mozart or even the Beatles, whose gruelling five-hour gigs in Hamburg were an apprenticeship, for their later success.

Peter Brook, the legendary theatre director who is credited with inventing modern trends by breaking away from conventional stage settings, said that the most crucial aspect of any performance is “rehearsal”. Significantly, he pointed out that the French for rehearsal is “répetition”.

“Be prepared” seems like a stuffy old Boy Scout motto, but I’ve learned, often through my own mistakes, that preparation is the key to getting anything done successfully. Perhaps I only came to understand the usefulness of homework in retrospect, but I certainly now think prepping is ­paramount.

Even those who seem to be able to “wing it” are usually drawing on the “repetition” which they have performed before. The cook who spontaneously throws together a fabulous meal is usually practised in the art. Picasso could dash off a drawing in a few minutes on a table napkin – because he had put in thousands and thousands of hours working on his art, including the figurative kind, over the decades.

I’ve sat through scores, maybe hundreds, of after-dinner speeches (and church sermons too), and the success of the discourse nearly always depends on whether the speaker has prepared effectively. Even the gifted orator has usually honed those witticisms previously.

So, to me, the issue of homework is more about life lessons in the practice of preparation, than about the strictly educational impact. It may also be about the discipline of learning to study alone. It’s a sort of character training, as much as it is about maths, languages or geography.

Obviously, burdening young children with a great pile of homework can be stressful, and excessive homework is unfair to a younger child.

One of my grand-daughters, who is a scholarship girl, seems to have to lug home massive amounts of stuff on her slender young shoulders to start doing her evening’s allocation of homework.

I expressed my concern that it might all be too much for her. “Don’t worry, grandma”, Eleanor replied. “I can handle it!” If homework prompts such a spirited and resilient attitude, I thought, it has already imparted its best lesson.