Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.
Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!
So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.
There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.
Idk, when I was in middle and highschool I didn't do homework because noone made me and I found it boring, and I was able to coast with C's and occasional B's if I forced myself to do a little of it. I built basically no work ethic/culture of after class work and ended up getting kicked out of college as a freshman because not doing homework/after school study there resulted in me failing a ton of classes.
It's only one data point but I think being forced to do the homework in secondary school would have helped me a lot.
Developing the ability to sit down and apply oneself to something not intrinsically interesting is a real positive, and I can definitely see homework being part of that.
A lot of homework is busy work and there's too much even of the helpful stuff, but I don't think the best amount of homework is zero. And it makes sense to think in terms of the type of homework and the assessment of it as much as it does to look at the amount.
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I've always held this pet theory that if you need to enjoy the field of study before you're ever going to successfully grind it out. My prime example is in our bjj academy we encourage fundamentals students to only practice a move on one side. If they're doing a choke with their right arm, they'll only do it with their right arm. The main line of reasoning is that it's better to be okay on one side than mediocre on both. My theory is that if you can get a glimpse of what it's like to be good, to feel competency, and see what bjj is about, then you'll start to like it. You'll have a massive gap in your technique and when it gets exposed by a better grappler, you'll have the investment and desire to put the reps in and practice a left handed choke. If we made students grind from the get go they'd get bored and leave.
In that same vein, if you could show a previously uninterested child how to build a computer generated image of a higher dimension(al shadow) then you'd then have their patience and desire to learn Python and mathematics. If I got to see the experiments that culminated in the discovery of DNA being a double helix first, I'd be much more open to learning my AT-GCs. Give them a piano and show them how to improv with the black keys and then teach them about sub tonics.
The flip side of this is that people really need to be able to push through at least some stuff they aren't interested in. Some things just kind of suck but need doing.
CW millennial linguistic depravity
spoiler
Think of what people mean when they use the term "adulting"
I think certain classes homework makes some sense. Math? The repetition is helpful for understanding. Social studies? those fill-in-the-blanks worksheets aren't doing jack. So many classes, so many worksheets. Language classes are better when you're speaking and listening. English classes don't really have time to read the whole book in class, but reading on your own is a good skill to have.
I want to say I did about 70-80% of homeworks in high school. In college I'd be busy from 8am to 10pm between classes and homework but those assignments were actually crucial in understanding what tf was going on in the lecture.
Yeah, Math is definitely the one I get the most having to do homework for. That helped me understand the material better.
Conversely, I wasn't forced at home to do homework in middle/highschool, and I'm forever grateful I wasn't. It bred in me a better ability to refuse unreasonable asks and set reasonable boundaries on work/leisure. If I did all the homework I was set, I would've been even more miserable than I already was, to an excessively problematic degree.
It's possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but if nobody was attempting to make you do homework, how did you learn to refuse homework like tasks from that uh, like absence of an event?
Like learning to say no requires something to say no to right?
EDIT: saw your other comment, I did misunderstand, please ignore this comment.
No worries <3 Yep, I refused at school, basically thanks to my parents enabling my attitude.
I always got As in middle and high school with bare minimum effort. Never learned to study or do work I didn’t want to do. Now I’ve failed a few classes in college which costed several thousand dollars while people who weren’t in the top 2 every year like me have already graduated and started their careers.
Similarly, I used to love reading. Long books were fine too. But then around 8th grade, my English classes stopped mandatory reading time at the beginning of each class. Things became more difficult in college because I didn’t have to read shit for like 5 years lol