We’ve been to Finland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and Denmark many times. At the end of the month, we’ll be leaving for Finland again.
When we return with our experiences etched in our memories, we enthusiastically share them with parents who are about to choose a school for their children. Parents of children entering elementary school, informed by those who already have children enrolled in the school system, when they arrive at our Daisy, immediately ask for information about the Finnish method and what it means for their children to belong to an Italian school system that has quickly become similar to those in Northern Europe. Secondly, they timidly ask how the homework is organized, which, normally, is assigned to the children to do at home. Even parents who are approaching the idea of enrolling their children in our Holden Middle School ask us midway through the interview whether the homework is really that much, as described by friends who are undertaking this process with their children, who normally study together until 11:00 pm and even on Saturdays and Sundays, inhibiting any family socializing, trips, free time, and walks.
Our travels and observations have always led us to a clear position: it’s not a question of not giving children and young people homework, since the exercises are important, but rather the underlying organization that is important.
Deepening our focus, we try to understand the issues surrounding homework by asking a question: will a child or young person who stays at school from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm still have homework to complete until 11:00 pm? This seems like a silly question, devoid of integrity and foundation. My natural response is that if students still have homework, it’s because school time has been wasted, wasted, and unused. And at this point, we’re referring to Finnish teaching: with classes no larger than 20 students and trained teachers, students shouldn’t spend the rest of the day completing homework; at most, they might have a few pages to read. In your opinion, shouldn’t eight hours spent at school be enough to do exercises, plan work, create diagrams, practice quizzes, write essays, and do math and English conversation exercises?
Harry Cooper, a psychology professor at Duke University, states: “There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary school students.” According to the teacher, there is no correlation between homework completion and improvement in students’ skills. A student who has spent eight hours sitting in class, still having to endure the late-afternoon immobility, will certainly not develop a love for books and learning, but will end up hating school. The idea that the acquisition of knowledge must necessarily involve flogging is deeply rooted among Italians, a medieval concept completely alien to the international school system.
If we want to exaggerate, we can cite ISTAT, which depicts Italy as the European country with the highest number of returning illiterates. And if we want to play with numbers, we can cite ISTAT again, which states that 57% of Italians don’t even read a book a year.
Functional illiteracy reflects a society that doesn’t participate in political life and doesn’t exercise its rights, a society that, therefore, doesn’t view the school system as a path to growth, education, or a real focus for its children’s future, but rather as an obligatory and disorienting transition.
What can schools do to respond to this alarming trend?
Streamlining after-school homework and greater parental involvement in the school system could be an important first response. Just as in international schools, where parents are an integral part of the school’s backbone, making suggestions, building, and engaging with one another, Italian schools should also become a hub for ideas.
During our afternoon teas with parents, we often discuss afternoon homework methods and, in particular, the implementation of a new morning teaching approach, where students truly become an integral part of the lesson. This approach adopts new methodologies such as Peer Education and Cooperative Learning. In the former, one student guides the other in completing a task or learning a concept, while in the latter, a group works on a wide variety of tasks, such as reading and comprehension exercises, problem solving, and discussions to produce papers.
From experience, I can say that both Peer Education and Cooperative Learning are effective.
