At a recent dinner, my boss asked me how I was able to routinely wake up before dawn. As I quickly thought through, I realized that I had developed this habit since I was in middle-school back in India.
Why? Homework.
Consider my automated routine as a student: Waking up at four in the morning; completing my homework; biking for my six am private math tutorial (anywhere from thirty to fifty students used to show up to learn from the tutor); rushing back home; getting ready for school (my indefatigable parents made it all easy for me); school till half past four; rushing back home; attending my private physics and chemistry tutorials from six to eight pm; rushing back home for dinner and trying to get as much done before bed. There were “special classes” for me over the weekend when I needed the extra push.
This was my life for several years leading up to college. How come? Competition—at every stage, every year, and every conceivable scale.
I had to do better in my sixth grade to get in to a good section of my class; I had to excel in my tenth grade to get into the computer science major; I had to gear up in my eleventh grade to better perform the following year, and of course, to get into a good engineering school, one needed a top state rank and a solid “entrance exam” score; I had to be robotically devoted to preparation, preparation, and preparation.
Fortunately, this was not just my routine but of hundreds of thousands of my peers. For the most part, this tradition still persists in India. And what more, now the competition is demanding a lot from even primary school students.
This truly scares me, even though I’ve reaped a residual benefit from a homework culture. Namely, discipline.
But those who listen to my story here in the U.S., frequently fire back: “but wait, your homework system doesn’t really fuel creativity though.”
My simple response: India will get there. More than creativity I think a discipline toward a goal is what will make a country competitive.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen at a recent conference in Kolkata, India presented an interesting rationale to abolish homework. He said: “A somewhat counter-productive overloaded curriculum, incomplete education during school hours and necessity of homework are the reasons that there is a perceived necessity of private tuition since the parents try to supplement at home the education which could not be completed in school.”
In a related op-ed in The Hindu, Sen continued: “the students’ success at examinations and school tests should not have to rely on what they have to do at home, outside the school. This is the way Europe and America have educated their children in primary schools when they were at the same stage of educational development as India is today, and this is how they still do it across the world right now to make basic school education accessible to all, even though the ability of the families themselves to help young children with home work has grown as the overall population has become more and more literate.”
I admire Sen’s thoughtfulness and impatience toward terminating homework; however, banishing them could just make parents and teachers grumpy and PTA meetings more animated. And that’d just kick start an international controversy.
Day in and day out, my policy colleagues inside the Washington beltway keep making raw comparisons of India’s ongoing economic accomplishments—and of course, that of China’s—with that of the U.S. Perhaps of some value, I’d suggest, might be to examine how the homework culture has historically helped shape India’s discipline and development.
If we are to reinforce a culture of discipline—such as waking up every day at dawn—then we should also be thinking of many supplementary non-homework ways to accomplish that. As an Asian proverb goes “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”—in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success—may be discipline is what we need to fuel our journey to competitiveness. And homework is an important instrument toward that goal.
Guruprasad Madhavan is a program officer in policy and global affairs at the National Academy of Sciences, and co-editor of “Career Development in Bioengineering and Biotechnology” and the forthcoming “Pathological Altruism.”
