Posted on 12/13/2003 7:59:05 AM PST by Holly_P
At the turn of the 20th century, Edward Bok, the powerful editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, launched an impassioned campaign against homework, arguing that it crippled the physical, mental and emotional health of children. He branded it ''a national crime at the feet of American parents.'' The U.S. commissioner of education agreed, telling Congress that homework was ''a prolific source of abuse.'' A year later, in 1901, California - along with dozens of local school districts across the United States - banned homework altogether for any public school child younger than 15.
Today, concern about homework is again reaching a fever pitch. The most recent round is prompted by reports since the mid-1990s that the homework load is heavier than ever. The New York Times, for instance, reported that children are ''homework-bound'' by the ''gross tonnage'' of homework. USA Today reported that the nation was in a period of ''homework intensification.''
These homework wars are a familiar part of the nation's ongoing debate over education. Since Bok's day, the pendulum has swung back and forth. One generation of educators worries that students are not getting enough of it (this happened in the 1950s and 1980s). The next generation worries that children are overworked and overscheduled and that their social development is being ignored.
But today's war, like those that preceded it, is based on several false notions. The first is that there's a huge and growing homework burden. That perception is completely contrary to the evidence.
Two new studies - one by us and one by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution - make clear that the great majority of American children at all ages do only moderate amounts of homework. When asked, for instance, how much homework they did ''yesterday,'' most children across the country - in elementary, middle and high school grades - said they did no more than an hour.
And this is not unique to our times. It turns out there was no ''golden age'' when most American kids, willingly or unwillingly, did lots of homework. Since World War II, the proportion of high school students spending a substantial amount of time studying - more than two hours nightly - has generally varied from 7 percent to 13 percent. Homework amounts peaked briefly during the decade after Sputnik but, even then, not more than one high school student in four studied more than two hours a night. Little homework is the norm and has always been the norm.
Second, it's not true that most parents object to homework. Today, as in the past, most parents strongly support it. A Public Agenda poll in 2000 found that only 10 percent of parents thought their children had too much homework, while 25 percent thought they had too little and 64 percent thought the amount was about right.
A vocal minority can often manage to get the media's attention - as Bok did, and as happened again in the 1930s, when homework was branded a ''sin against childhood'' by opponents. But it's just that: a noisy minority, not a representative sample of the population.
Third, and most important, the homework wars - this time as in the past - are narrowly centered on the quantity that is being assigned: How much is too much, and how much is too little? Very little effort goes into figuring out how to improve the quality and value of the homework that teachers assign.
In our view, homework is the prime window into the school for parents to see, understand and connect with the academic mission of the teachers. It is the primary area in which children, parents and schools interact daily. Yet it gets less systematic thought and attention than any other key component of education. Other than the admonition that kids should do more of it, we pay almost no attention to how to improve its design and content. Nor do we do much to prepare teachers to use and evaluate homework, to hold administrators accountable for monitoring the homework load or to cultivate parents' collaboration. Homework remains an orphan child of the educational excellence movement.
The debate over homework must be redirected. Moral exhortation - accusing our kids and parents of being lazy, comparing them unfavorably with their counterparts in Japan (as in the 1980s) or Russia (as in the 1950s) - just doesn't seem to have much effect in changing long-term homework trends.
After a half-century of failure to increase student buy-in, it's time to rethink how to make homework a more valued part of the pedagogic process. In addition to promoting academic achievement, homework can inculcate habits of self-discipline and independent study and can help inform parents about the educational agenda of their school. We must find ways to make homework an interesting and challenging educational experience for students, instead of the uniform, seat-bound, memorization-focused solo exercise it has been. Otherwise, all our talk about high standards and improving student achievement will run up against the same roadblock that has stymied the pursuit of educational excellence in the past.
Gill is a social scientist at Rand Corp; Schlossman is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University; they are co-authors of ''A Nation at Rest: The American Way of Homework."
I hope you are able to do that if that's what you want.
Private schools are another answer for some. I believe just about any private Church operated school is better than public schools. I say that from the perspective of having attended both.
We give him additional assingments to do, makes him mad, but at least he is learning something - no thanks to the school system.
LVM
Yesterday I asked a nurse at the cardiac rehab center where I work out--a college-educated woman: "You have a calculator with no square-root key. Determine the square root of 5."
She had not the inkling of a clue how to approach the problem.
My friend's bright eldest daughter cannot solve a quadratic equation...indeed she does not know the quadratic formula even exists.
This is "education" in America, circa 2004.
--Boris
I'm a homeshool Dad, and I was VERY against homeschooling at the outset. Now I'm very PRO. Here's how we handled things and why I changed my mind.
We agreed to "homeschool" on an experimental basis during the pre-school years. Now, that may be too late to you, but you can still do some things. Tonto Junior wanted to read his own stories, so my wife taught him to read. He wanted to do crafts, so she did them. They did all sorts of learning activities at home, at very little cost, thanks to the Public Library and the internet.
I saw how he responded. The boy was reading at three. When first grade rolled around, we took him to local public school for a tour. I'll never forget that day. They were going to start out by learning the alphabet. At the time, Junior was half-way into a biography of Jefferson. Clearly this wasn't going to work.
Also, I liked that my wife didn't talk about "keeping him home" which implies an overly agressive "sheltering" of children. She spoke of "educating our son at home."
I was also concerned about the social aspect of homeshooling, and your husband may be, too. The key is to understand what you want in terms of social interaction for your child. Do you really want "socialization" if that means you child assimilates the values of children in the community at large? Or do you mean "socialization" in the sense that you want your kids to have friends, work and play with other kids, and so forth. If that's the case, there are homeschool groups in just about every community, church youth groups, Scouting... all sorts of ways to avoid the hermit syndrome.
Just a few thoughts. If you'd like any private insight, let me know.
I think it is called "special projects." You know the stuff you have to go to Hobby Lobby to get the materials needed. I was home schooled and I never did a "special project."
What a child is suppose to learn by building a model of a colonial farm is beyond me. And then the teacher called the farm we built, "inappropriate!" I think she didn't like the still we stuck in to show how the farmer turned his bulky low-value crop into a easily transported high value commodity.
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