Homework

They are the summer passion for parents and children. Passion understood not as a great desire, but as a necessary misfortune. August is the month of rest for those who work and a ritual to be expressed for those who do not work because they can afford it. But there is one thing that unites everyone in misfortune: “homework.”

Children and teenagers would like to do nothing and have fun, without thinking about school, early mornings, discipline, things to listen to, quizzes, grades, exams, and everything that is wrong in the world. The same goes for parents, with the stress of getting their children to school on time, filling their afternoons with activities just to keep them out of the way, birthday parties, school plays, teacher meetings, and — when they are very unfortunate — the damage their children cause at school and outside, which makes “good” people very angry. But the worst nightmare is the holiday homework. Many call for it to be abolished because it only serves to make life even more complicated for students and families. Why do homework at home when ten months of school and five hours a day are already enough to learn what is necessary to live?

It is said that homework helps kids not to lose what they have learned during the year and to prepare for what awaits them after the long summer break: a kind of training so they don’t have to start from scratch. But those who train know that you never really start from zero. Muscles have memory too, and it’s certainly not periods of inactivity that erase what has been built before. So why insist?

It must be said that homework now seems like a sort of ingrained habit, increasingly less applied by the teachers themselves (who are certainly not to blame for what they have always learned or what they are obliged to do). School is a job, and students must perceive it as such, with all the good and bad that comes with work. We have to deal with it! It’s better to face it with patience and, if possible, to take advantage of it.

School is an exercise in knowledge. Teaching means transmitting the taste and pleasure of knowing: understanding that there are explanations for the things and events that surround us; recognizing the difficulty, but also the necessity, of communicating what we know and what we do not know; prompting us to ask questions, opening our minds to doubt and curiosity. Knowing that the world is made up of people like us with whom we must relate — and deriving pleasure from this, as well as learning to endure indifference or malice. Looking up to adults, who are not just our parents, but older people who, rightly or wrongly, ask us to listen to and respect them. Knowledge, relationships, respect, patience: all of this will nourish the memory of our future.

Homework for the holidays is like picking up a book that you read a long time ago and wanting to find a new meaning in it. It’s like rereading the Aeneid or The Betrothed at seventy: they seem like different books simply because we have changed, but that doesn’t make them useless. What we thought when we were taught the meter of Catullus or Horace, mathematics or geometry, now appears to us in a new light, and we can derive that pleasure from it that we hadn’t experienced back then.

One day, we will know that the sacrifice of holiday homework was not in vain. A word from the elder.