Just before the holiday break, I was sitting in our school’s staff room chatting with some colleagues and the conversation turned, rather organically, to the topic of academic rigour.

Subscribe now to access this story and more:

Subscribe or sign in to your account to continue your reading experience.

Create an account or sign in to continue your reading experience.

The question, which elicited a robust and fulsome discussion, was essentially: “How hard should school be”?

In my experience, there are very few people who don’t believe that school has somehow gotten less challenging over the years. Ask any random citizen on the street and you will no doubt hear about how, when it comes to schools, “kids these days” have a much easier time of it.

It must also be admitted that for as long as I have been sitting in school staff rooms, I have heard about “kids these days” not working quite as hard as those of days gone by.

Still, the conversation around the room that day got me thinking. How does academic rigour fit in the modern post-COVID, online learning, accessible to everyone, AI-dominated education system?

For the longest time, academic rigour was measured by how much work students took home with them at the end of the day. The more homework a student was asked to do, the tougher the course.

Back in 2006, however, American educational guru Alfie Kohn blew open the notion that homework was effective for student learning. In his book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Kohn argued that there was no credible evidence that homework had any positive results for students, particularly those in lower grades.

This argument led........

© PNI Atlantic news