The trouble with being clever

By JOE BENNETT

OPINION: Did you see the clever child? Oh it was awful. He was so precocious and so very unwisely happy. But let me begin at the beginning.

"For homework," says the teacher to her class of 11-year- olds somewhere in America, "I want you to write an essay on, um, something you are passionate about."

The children groan but, at that moment, the bell rings and the sunny little darlings snatch up their satchels and run from the classroom into the arms of mom with her American teeth and her recreational vehicle the size of Nebraska.

Next day teacher collects the essays, and after dinner she heaves the pile on to her kitchen table with a sigh like a drain emptying. She opens the first exercise book.

It looks as though small animals have swum in ink, wandered the page and then died. Teacher sighs again and reaches for the red pen.

At the foot of the essay she writes something mildly encouraging. She doesn't mean it. It doesn't matter. The boy won't read it.

In the second essay the handwriting is round and careful. The sentences are complete. But what the essay has to say is about as lively and passionate as a butcher's window.

The essay is simply obedience on paper. Teacher writes, "Good work, Samantha," but doesn't mean it.

Weary already, she turns to the third essay, reads the first paragraph, and her eyes widen. She checks the name on the exercise book.

Sure enough, it's the clever child, the able, confident and articulate one, thrilled by his own facility with words and numbers, the sort of child that school could have been designed to please. Were it not, that is, for the bullies. He is born bully bait.

"I am passionate," he writes, "about homework. Homework is unpaid labour. But if you don't do it, you can be punished. So homework is slavery, by definition, and slavery is a crime. So homework is a crime."

Here is trenchant argument, verbal fluency, independent thought, everything you could want from an essay.

The teacher gives it 11 out of 10, several gold stars and reads it to the class the next morning. Proud as a rooster, the child tells his parents.

At their suggestion he sends the essay to the local paper, which prints it. Child then takes the fatal step. He launches a campaign to outlaw homework.

Local TV interviews him. He proves perfect camera talent, smug, quick and clever as clever. The networks grab him. Soon his image is beamed around the globe.

He wows the world and seems destined for success, a future corporate lawyer, perhaps, who in his spare time performs cello solos at the New York Met, or neurosurgery on African orphans.

On television he expands his argument. Not only is homework slavery, it is also unproductive. He asserts that there is no correlation between success in homework and success in adult life.

He runs rings round his headmistress who appears in the studio beside him. It's winning television. So young and so intellectually pugnacious.

Entranced by his performance, no one bothers to ask whether he's right.

Well, he has a point. There is indeed little correlation between success at school and adult success. Many people who've done badly at school have gone on to great things, and many who haven't haven't.

And a lot of homework serves no purpose. I know so, because I have taught. I have set essays to the young of various countries and the results have rarely varied.

In any pile of essays, some have been neat and dull, others illegible and dull, and the remainder, the sparkling, thought-drenched, original ones, have been by and large missing.

Kids have written the essays grudgingly. And I have marked them in the same spirit. All the exercise has achieved is to tighten the straitjacket of compulsion for both of us.

You do things because you have to do them. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.

But is homework slavery? No, clever child, it isn't. Slavery benefits the slave owner. Homework is meant to benefit the slave. The idea is that the slave suffers a thimbleful of present pain for a bucketful of future gain. We call it education.

Does it work? Well, one point the child failed to observe is that, if the teacher hadn't set the homework, he wouldn't have been obliged to think.

If he hadn't thought, he wouldn't have written the essay. And if he hadn't written the essay, he wouldn't have achieved his sudden global celebrity.

Not that that's going to do him a fat lot of good. I taught several kids who were as precocious as he.

Two went on to suffer breakdowns. It's tough to know so much so young. Bullies threaten from without, psychosis from within. The world can be cruel. Homework is the least of it.