Is Homework Hurting Our Children?

Homework is fine. I'm 40 and had *lots* of homework (book reports, math, sentence diagraming, science projects, etc.) all through gradeschool and highschool. Granted, I attended Catholic schools the whole time -- it's quite possible that the kids in the government schools at that time did not have to much work. That gave them more time to watch Match Game and play Atari I guess.

Well, I'd like to think that the government schools woke up and started pushing the kids a little harder. I doubt this is the case though as they seem to have mostly eliminated the system of trackinig kids according to their abilities and now lump everyone together and teach to the lowest common denominator. So, it wouldn't surprise me if the current homework is valueless time-eating drivel.

I guess I would need to see the specific assignments to decide if they were worthless busywork or something valuable. The curricula today are rife with a lot of krap and pretty low on the 3 Rs. My kudos to the prior commenters who have taken the huge sacrifices to homeschool their kids. The government schools are (largely... yes, there are excepts) a disaster.

I agree that homework is bad. Teachers have failed our children.

well, let's prepare them for world's reality. when your boss is asking you a late and mandatory assignment, you don't go on strike, you do it.

and don't forget that 7 was the age of reason, the age it used to be ok to go to work, hard work. a little homework can't be bad compared to that.

on a last note, I agree that sometimes some homework seems to be a litle too much for no gain.

I am absolutely convinced that kids are given unnecessarily heavy workloads in school. I was homeschooled (unschooled to be precise) from a very early age and didn't have any traditional "homework" assigned to me. I went to public school for a brief time during fifth grade to see what it was like and ended up having to drop out halfway because I was so unhappy and had lost the will to learn (one of my favorite things to do in the world). Unfortunately, it's not like it gets any better in college. Classes are still rife with "busy work" and people keep trying to shove more and more into one's workload. The fundamental structure of school doesn't change as you get further up the ladder. My experiences have left me sickened with the state of our educational systems, though I am not against teachers themselves by any means. It's just that the way in which they are used to doing things seems to me to have an incalculable number of problems.

This is exactly why i pulled my kids out of school and began homeschooling. They were stressed out, unhappy and frankly most of the day in school and after with homework was a waste of time. Most of it seemed like "busy work". School now seems more like subsidised day care for working parents than a place to really learn.