Just prior to 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. 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 staff room that day got me thinking. How does academic rigour fit in the modern post-COVID-online-learning-accessible-to-everyone-A.I.-dominated education system?
Homework: The canary in the coal mine
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 the lower grades.
This argument led to a brief respite for students on the homework front, but by the mid-twenty-teens, demands for more homework became part a wider ideological movement for increased school accountability. That led many jurisdictions to re-affirm the value of homework and to solidify rules around homework in policy, despite the research. (In Nova Scotia, this was part of the McNeil Liberal’s failed Education Action Plan of 2015.)
The pandemic, of course, changed everything, and in the midst of that moment, the pendulum once again arced back to the side of less is more. When schools returned to in-person learning, teachers were slow to return to the homework-as-king model, much more aware of student mental well being than in the pre-pandemic days.
That might be part of the reason we are currently seeing an overall decline in homework. In fact, according to a recent article in Education Week, the amount of time spent on homework by American 8th graders decreased by 17% between 2021 and 2023. American 10th graders time on homework decreased by over 20% in the same time period.
Quiet quitting comes to school
This reduction may be part of a much broader post-pandemic trend called “quiet quitting”. This is when employees, fed up with waiting for their employers to address untenable work-life balance demands, take it on themselves to establish strong professional boundaries. For many, this has meant working to the letter of their contract, and refusing, quietly, to go above and beyond for their employer.
Writing for Forbes.com, journalist Elena Stefanapol pointed out that the term is unnecessarily negative, giving the sense that somehow employees are coasting or not pulling their weight at work. The reality, she argues, is that “employees are starting to set and protect their boundaries at work around work-life balance and how they want to be treated at work”. They are not quitting, they are simply refusing to do any work for which they are not being paid.
This trend of looking at work differently may be trickling down. Recent data shows that when it comes to our students, fewer and fewer of them are willing to put in extra hours at work. In early 2020, data from a group called Monitoring the Future reported that 54% of 18 year olds were willing to work overtime. By 2022, that number had dropped to 36%. That is a relative drop of 33%, and it was the lowest rate seen since that survey started back in 1976.
It would seem, then, that students are not simply content with doing less homework, but perhaps with doing less work overall. If this is all true; if young people are actually changing their view towards the idea of work, where does that leave schools?
Learning from history
In many ways, our classic understanding of what determines rigour has been driven by education’s unhealthy obsession with standardization. Starting in the mid-1990’s, policy makers, primarily in America, decided that a school system’s success was best measured by how well it taught a pre-determined set of skills. Students’ knowledge in these skills would be measured by a standardized exam, with those results being connected to everything from district funding to teacher employment status.
Warnings that this type of an educational approach would limit deep thinking and critical thought were widely ignored, and, well, here we are today wondering if any thought, let alone deep thought, goes into much of anything anymore.
Over that same time period, however, the climate in which teaching occurs changed substantively. From the advent of cellphones to increasingly divisive culture wars to inclusion policies to the transformational impact of AI, the modern day classroom is, quite simply, an impossibility of contradictions.
Public discourse has been reduced to rage inciting click bait, so the need for schools to promote deep, critical thinking has never been greater. At the same time, schools must be cautious of creating climates of “toxic rigour”, where things like high stakes exams and rigid deadline policies have been shown (quite convincingly) to be counter-productive to learning.
Issues unresolved
Perhaps not surprisingly, the conversation in the staff room came to no firm conclusions. The extent to which the relative hardness of school benefits students remains very much a chicken v. egg debate.
Still, as our collective understanding of the value of hard work evolves, schools will need to adapt. As we enter 2026 with the world essentially on fire, finding ways to help all kids think deeply, work ethic aside, has never been more important.
In the modern post-COVID-online-learning-accessible-to-everyone-A.I.-dominated education system, our understanding of academic rigour may be due for a serious re-evaluation.
Originally published in The Chronicle Herald, January 8th, 2026
frostededucation 