Homework, as much as we hated it, instilled discipline and time management skills which are severely lacking in most of the students in public schools today.
I had a class in HS called Pre-Law. We had to hand in "briefs" that ran 10 or more pages. Not only that they had to be typed. Freshman year everyone had to take a mandatory typing class. After that almost every homework assignment in every class had to be typed. Most of could type 60 words a minute with very few mistakes. This was way before computers.