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发布时间：2006年09月06日
原文链接：The End of Childhood
原文作者：Mary Anne Abramowitz
翻 译：
审 校：
工作组织：益学会>教育中文翻译
My daughter does her homework at our kitchen table at 5:30 p.m. while I cleanse lettuce leaves and roast asparagus for dinner. There are tears, very occasionally, and, more often, annoyed rants at social studies worksheets. She's lucky if she gets an hour of play in the backyard.
下午5点半，我女儿在厨房桌子上完成家庭作业。我在洗莴苣菜叶，为晚餐炒着芦笋。（……？）如果有一个小时可以在后花园玩耍，她会很幸运。（danny）
Today children are overburdened and overscheduled, and so they are, in effect, losing the freedom to be kids—that is to say, losing unstructured time to run around and play. In four books published over the past year, we see that the calls for reducing homework and increasing playtime are reaching a crescendo. But these books also remind us that we as a society are still very far from bringing our day–to–day lives in line with these lofty goals.
今天的孩子们负担过重，也被过度计划所累，作为结果，他们失去了孩子的自由－－也就是说，失去了自由自在可以四处奔跑玩乐的时间。过去一年，我们在四本书里看到，呼吁减少家庭作业和增加娱乐时间的声音正在逐渐增大。但这些书同时提醒我们，我们这个社会的日常生活离这些高远巍峨的目标，依然十分遥远。（danny）
In The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Alfie Kohn vigorously documents the extent of today's homework craze, and its impact on children and families. (Full disclosure: Kohn is a member of Greater Good's editorial board.)
在《家庭作业迷思：为什么我们的孩子要承受如此糟糕的事情》一书中，Alfie Kohn大量记录了家庭作业所带来的疯狂结果，以及对孩子和家庭的冲击。（揭密：Kohn是Greater Good的编辑委员。）（danny）
"The most striking trend regarding homework in the past two decades is the tendency to pile more and more of it on younger and younger children," he writes, citing a long–term national survey of several thousand families, which shows that "the proportion of six– to eight–year–old children who reported having homework on a given day had climbed from 34 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1997, and the weekly time spent studying at home more than doubled for youngsters of these ages."
"过去二十年间，家庭作业最显著的趋势是逐步将越来越多的作业量，压到越来越小的孩子身上，" 他写道，引用了一项涉及数千家庭的长期国家级调查的结果，该调查显示，“6至8岁的孩子在指定一天内被布置家庭作业的比率，从1981年的34％上升到1997年的58％，同样年龄段的孩子，每周花费在家中学习的时间，增长了一倍还多。” （danny）
One mother quoted in Kohn's book illustrates the real–life impact of these abstract statistics: "School for [my son] is work, and by the end of a seven–hour workday, he is exhausted. But like a worker on a double shift, he has to keep going" after he gets home, completing worksheets and exercises for school. Just as parents struggle to balance work, family, and their own private needs and desires, so our children must now struggle to find their own balance.
在考恩的书中，为了说明这些抽象统计数据对现实生活的影响，引用了一位母亲的话，“对我儿子来说，学校就是工作，完成了每天七个小时的工作后，他已经筋疲力尽了，不过还得象双班倒的工人一样，得继续工作”。他到家以后，还要完成学校留的作业和练习。父母们挣扎着寻找工作、家庭以及自身需求的平衡，我们的孩子们也象我们一样，必须努力找到他们的平衡。（tyro）
It's a long–term trend confirmed by the Brown University historian Howard P. Chudacoff in his new book, Children at Play: An American History. He frames the history of play as a struggle between children and the adults who wish to use and colonize their playtime—sometimes for the protection and edification of children, but more and more for corporate profits. Chudacoff shows how once upon a time, children played with toys like blocks and dolls that encouraged the free reign of their imaginations; today, play is a multi–billion dollar business in which every toy comes with a backstory from a movie, comic book, TV show, or video game, or has a strict educational purpose.
布朗大学历史研究人员Howard P. Chudacoff在他的新书《玩耍的孩子：一部美国史》中证实这是一个长久的趋势。他认为孩子玩耍的过程就是孩子与大人做斗争的过程，大人总是希望占用或者管理孩子们玩耍的时间，有时是为了保护和教育孩子，但是更多的时候是为了大人和孩子之间的平衡。Chudacoff 说以前孩子们玩积木和玩偶这类的玩具，可以自由发挥他们的想象力，现在玩具是一个资金数以亿计的商业，各种玩具要么来自电影、漫画书、电视剧或游戏，要么有严格的教育目的。(tyro)
Thus children's free time is attacked on one side by schools that wish to utilize every spare moment for rote learning, and on the other by toy and video game manufacturers who would have children pay to play. Chudacoff argues that children have ably defended themselves against the latter, still managing to create their own autonomous spaces for play and successfully imposing their imaginations on new electronic toys. But Kohn shows how they are far more helpless in the face of homework, which threatens real–world consequences against any child who dares to resist doing it.
Indeed, as a parent, I'm ready as can be to side with those who argue that our children are given way too much homework—that what they really need are backyards, nearby playgrounds, and adults to keep watch as they play tetherball and create imaginary forts. But in a society in which no workweek can have too many hours and the price of failure is poverty and marginalization, it's very hard for an individual family to reject homework and all the values and pressures it represents. If we put more emphasis on playtime, we worry that we might lead our children off the conventional—and, we desperately hope, assured—pathway of success.
The tragedy, Kohn argues, is that "widespread assumptions about the benefits of homework—higher achievement and the promotion of such virtues as self–discipline and responsibility—aren't substantiated by the available evidence." The case Kohn builds against homework is damning, and in The Homework Myth, he successfully severs the link between the volume of homework and real academic accomplishment.
Kohn isn't alone in his opinion. In fact, he is reflecting the consensus of a large number of child development and learning experts. In Play=Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children's Cognitive and Social–Emotional Growth, leading researchers show that today's children actually play less with peers, which damages their health and development. The social scientific essays in Play=Learning dramatically extend Kohn's case and provide substantial empirical evidence in support of protecting children from the educational forces that structure their time so insistently.
There is something in all three books that feels almost dangerous. Their fact–based arguments collide with the deepest fears of parents in a capitalist society, who worry their children will fall behind other people's children. It's a testament to how solidly the values of conventional achievement get lodged in our minds—and the extent to which progressive culture, too, has embodied these values—that it seems vaguely transgressive to question the degree of work that we and our children are asked to do. To some ears, it sounds lazy, even neglectful to resist this work, given the fear of failure and economic marginalization hovering nearby. And so if we resist homework and scheduling every second of our kids' lives with lessons and activities, we walk an odd and intriguing line. It's nostalgic, in one sense—harking back to a simpler time—and yet forward–thinking in challenging our society's deepest myths and values.
Of course, the effects of an accelerated, hyper–competitive society not only define homework and play but the day–to–day existence of families in today's society as well. "In fast capitalism, parents become children in the sense that their needs come first and children become parents in the sense that they stay home alone and confront adultlike expectations," write University of Texas sociologists Ben Agger and Beth Ann Shelton in Fast Families, Virtual Children: A Critical Sociology of Families and Schooling. Agger and Shelton expand on the case against homework by providing a bigger sociological picture of the economic and cultural forces shaping the family, school, and society.
How might we counter the demands of "fast capitalism"? The vision Agger and Shelton propose is not simply to "restore" the family to a more traditional configuration. They aren't longing for a family structure built on the labor of women and the bondage of children. Instead, they propose a commitment to let children truly be children, unharried and unhurried. They dare to envision family and school as institutions that can be intimate, communal, and mutualistic, structures that can model a decent society—and perhaps, by their very existence, help bring one into being.
Instead of modeling schools on factories and shaping them to be prisons, with their codes of silence and surveillance, the authors argue, we ought to model our schools on American democratic expressions of freedom and self–development. In their utopian model, schools provide the meeting ground between work and family, a place that is slower and gentler and a refuge from overload. In short, "children need a bill of rights, schools need to be freeing, and capitalism must be slowed and rendered less invasive." At the same time, they argue, parents have the responsibility to avoid cynicism and rote learning, while also teaching social and political awareness, modeling good self–care and a healthy life–balance, and providing opportunities for children to have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.
Of all these books, Agger and Shelton do the best job of fusing social science with a broad, positive vision—and yet they still do little to show parents and educators how to journey from the world as it is to the world we truly want. I would love to see social scientists like the contributors to Play=Learning sit down with advocates like Kohn to discuss where parents like me can begin to foster change, and how.
Kohn does make a number of concrete recommendations for educators, arguing that "no homework" should become the default setting and each after–school assignment should face a high threshold of justification. His argument might be having an impact: Recently, the teachers at my daughter's school had an institution–wide conversation that resulted in lowering the amount of homework they assign. That helps me as a parent, and I believe it's good for my daughter. For decades, Americans have seemed to forget what was most important in life: fun, health, and time with family, friends, and neighbors. Perhaps today we are taking small steps toward a new balance, but we still have very far to go.
