This isn’t anything new. In my 90s middle school and high school, the official policy of my school was that we would have an hour of homework per academic class each day. We got out of school at 3:30. With 5 academic classes, a typical bedtime of 10 o’clock, commute times from school of half an hour, and an hour for dinner, that theoretically left zero time for recreation. I’m confused about how they ever thought that was healthy or reasonable.
I had to re-read your comment. At first I thought you were saying you had one hour of homework per night. One hour per class per day is insane.
I regularly avoided doing homework throughout my school life. The only thing I think that suffered was my understanding of physics & chemistry. I doubt I would have better understanding now in any other subject area if I had done more homework, including maths and the foreign language I studied. Maths because we were given enough time in classes to do exercises in which to learn the concepts; foreign language study because it just wasn't taught terribly well and the homework was in the same vein.
I also never did homework at home and I agree that it was probably for the better.
The only bad effect is that homework got associated with bad feelings (anxiety, stress), because I had to find ways to still get them done without doing them at home. Going into university this was hard to undo.
We also had the rule of one hour per class per day. The funny thing is that this scales up the more time you spend in school, instead of scaling down. In 10th grade, our school days were longer than my parents' workdays and of course every teacher likes to assign homework on top of that, so you can imagine what the expected load was.
In my opinion, homework should be abolished completely. Work should not be taken home. If you want kids to do extra work, have "schoolwork" classes after regular classes, where they can do exercises that teachers provided them that day. At the very least this provides a direct measurement of hours spent on school, provides a clear expectation and forces a cap on how many hours kids spend on school per day. Of course no school would do that because it would be a nightmare.
> Of course no school would do that because it would be a nightmare.
In France if you are a dorm resident in high school you do have such mandatory "schoolwork" classes. You start with a mandatory 10 hours (IIRC) of classes of study that you have to do each week. These are done in specific rooms at specific times, but you can choose when to go (usually there is one hour open during lunch period and 2 to 3 hours in the evenings).
Depending on your grades the amount of mandatory hours goes up or down. If you are good enough it can go down to zero. When I was in high school these hours were largely enough to finish all homework, including the mandatory reading assignments.
I would rarely do any homework, because I was way more interested in using my Amiga, but I paid close attention in class. For many classes, the way the grading worked out would be that I would get an A for participation, an A for all of the quizzes and tests because I was paying attention knew the material, and an F or D homework, which would work out to a D (65%) in the class. It doesn’t really make any sense considering that the tests proved that I learned the material.
Seconded about Amiga. Who knows which factory I would be earning wages to survive payday to payday today if I didn't have that Amiga at that key point in time.
I did well in school regardless, because school is about surviving without becoming dumb. The more the effort put into a program that's designed for the stupidest kid, the dumber you become. It was about efficiency, better results than most with minimum effort.
Refer to Taylor Gatto's The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher[0].
School is not about learning, it is about ranking. Usually it's about ranking people by some weighted sum of intelligence, conscientiousness and conformity. Obviously your school placed a high weight on conscientiousness and conformity.
I agree with you in general, but on the other hand, my sister got the short end on tests and quizzes.
Unlike me, she'd do the homework. On time, even! The teachers could verbally ask her anything on the test and she'd reply with the answer. Yet once the test came, she'd do poorly nearly every time. A few teachers were able to work with her, but otherwise she'd simply do poorly in a class if it was weighted for the test instead of other things.
I was more like you and nearly failed due to homework not being done. I got better when I got older, but I also weirdly had less homework the last 2 years of high school than I did in middle school.
Of course, both situations really are illustrative that education is mostly punitive and it doesn't really matter if you can prove you know things.
One of the few benefits of the terrible school I went to was that we never received homework. The teacher's rationale was that 75% of the class wasn't going to do it, so they couldn't rely on that as a learning mechanism.
We were probably years behind other schools by the time we left, but that meant from 2:30 every day we had free reign. Obviously some kids went down the dealing/thieving route, but I learnt a lot about finding my own entertainment. I honestly think homework is the scourge of childhood, even more so than testing and exams.
I was class of 03, middle school and high school was NOTHING like that for me. I had maybe 45 minutes of homework a day, total, which I often got done in class at the end of the period or in my next class once I got done whatever I needed to in that class. Plus I had study center periods most of the time, instead of taking stupid electives that I had no interest in, which I'd usually spend reading for pleasure the entire time.
