If you have a lot of Facebook friends who are parents you might notice a common theme in their posts when the school year ends. Roughly, it’s “I’m free! I don’t have to do homework for 3 whole months!” The relief that parents feel to not stress out over their kids doing their homework is palpable.
There’s been a growing movement, which sounds like it might have been started by kids but is actually the result of frustrated parents, calling for an end to homework. Totalling around seven hours per day, a child’s school day is the longest stretch of time that they spend doing anything. So why then, has it become the norm to send the kid home with hours of homework on top of that?
Why indeed.
The backlash is at least in part because children’s homework has become so extensive and complicated that it involves a parental component. We might not have heard of a call to end homework when we were kids but we also likely didn’t have parents pitching in the way they do now.
Karl Taro Greenfeld writing in the Atlantic in 2013 had a provocative piece called “My daughter’s homework is killing me” where he tried, and failed, to do his 8th grader’s homework for a week. The mantra of the week was “memorization not rationalization”- advice his daughter gave him on how to get through the workload. That’s the real problem here: the homework isn’t helping our kids learn or absorb information, just be able to repeat is back for a short time.
A study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Educational Psychology last March found that homework might help somewhat with retaining information learned during the school-day but that after an hour and a half of doing homework, most of the benefit would be lost. The stress and agitation that accompanies a large amount of homework, coupled with the limited downtime possible after all that work, negates any positive that doing homework would have provided.
The culprit of all of this is the incessant testing that kids are now subjected to. Even if you agree, as I do, that we need a way to measure whether schools are meeting a certain standard, testing and the fear of the tests for both students and teachers do little to accomplish this. As teachers aim their lessons at the tests, lest they be judged for their class underperforming, actual learning gets sidelined.
We need to see our kids’ homework time as an extension of their school-day and ask ourselves whether it makes sense that they’re at “work” for upward of 12 hours a day. For younger kids especially, it’s a no brainer that they need time to unwind and play after a full day of absorbing lessons in schools. For older kids to develop interests and hobbies to be interesting, well-rounded people, we need to ease up on the work they bring home.
We all want to see our kids do well but we need to rethink the path to success that we have been encouraging them to take. It’s time to end the practice of homework. Let kids be kids again.
