HOMEWORK AND DISCIPLINE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23221, 15 December 1938, Page 14

HOMEWORK AND DISCIPLINE

Those who would sweep away all homework for both primary and secondary school pupils have been given something to answer in the observations on the subject by Brother Borgia, director of Sacred Heart College. With the criticism of excessive homework it is easy to agree, but that does not necessarily mean accepting complete abolition as the only remedy. There is surely a golden mean between a system which burdened the pupil with hours of study after school and that which would permit him to forget that such things as work existed once he had passed the school gates. Brother Borgia suggested that homework had a greater value than that of completing what was done in class —it was necessary to develop habits of self-discipline and self-reliance. To this there should be ready assent. Suppose the secondary school pupil proposes to go further, to take a University course or qualify himself by study for some profession ; either will mean a great deal of work on his own responsibility, without detailed direction or supervision. Surely it is only common sense to assume that the student who has had the preliminary training of a judicious amount of homework will have a tremendous advantage over one from whose life such unpleasant realities have previously been removed. But there is also a deeper significance in the disciplinary value of such work. In a great deal of the world to-day discipline is imposed on the mass of the people from above. The democracies repudiate such systems as intolerable to their spirit of freedom. They are right, but the only way the unreasonable discipline of autocracy can be matched is by the self-discipline of free peoples. It is essential to survival, and if the first principles are not absorbed early, they may never be acquired in later life.