Essay Arguing Against Homework
By: Daniel Summerstay
Anyone who wants to save trees, enhance children's creativity, improve family relationships, and take down some schoolchildren’s stress should look at homework. Although educators have traditionally felt that more homework created more learning, research has shown that the amount of homework has virtually no effect on the amount learned.[1] Students and parents alike are protesting against the use of homework in school in the United States. It is one of the main things that causes stress in children. Not assigning homework could solve all of these problems, therefore it should be very easy for teachers across the nation to decide to stop assigning homework.
Let’s imagine teachers assigns 1 homework assignment per day for the entire school year. that’s 179 days in the United States. That would be approximately 179 pieces of paper per student per teacher. The average number of students per teacher in all grades is 24. There are 3,099,095 practicing teachers in the U.S. alone [2]. From there on out it is simple math. 179 times 24 is 4,296 that times 3,099,095 is 13,313,712,120 pieces of paper wasted on homework per year. In tons of paper that’s 66,568.5 tons of paper. It takes about 12 trees to make one ton of paper so 798,822 trees could be saved if it weren’t for school homework assignments.
Also many homework assignments affect a child negatively for long periods of time. Take the story of Emily Scott Card, for example. She enjoyed reading for pleasure, she would read all the time. Then one day she was assigned to read a book and at the end of every chapter write an entry about her feelings about the chapter. She never got out of chapter one. “Now it didn’t just kill her reading of that book, it killed her reading period. It was quite a time before she could read for pleasure again.” [3]
Now Emily isn’t the only child to be robbed of joy in learning by the education system. It happens to nearly every child who goes through the system. Homework for some people is just the things that the class didn’t get to in class. This is understandable. However there is this assumption nowadays that says that the amount of homework for children is ten minutes per grade.(so ten minutes for first grade twenty minutes for second grade etc.) There is no study, no research to back this up. It was just made up out of nowhere. Speaking of studies, there is no proof that homework directly affects test scores at all. Any research they’ve found that shows homework affects score shows that tons of homework affects the score just a wee bit. [4]
Then there is the fact of the time price of homework. That tons of homework that gets your test scores up a couple of points is tons of less time to have time with your family and have time to actually have a life. A lot of the time that modern parents spend with their children is in yelling at them to do there homework. And also when they’re not trying to get them to do their homework, whatever they are doing with the kids is overshadowed by the kid knowing that he has to do homework. So if any parent wants to take their 12th grader somewhere in the 5 hours of daylight left after the schooltime, they can only plan for three hours. Then there’s the matter of stress on the students. Sometimes the best students do every assignment to the best of their ability, because the teacher wants them to do them and learn well. However when they’ve done that many assignments and they have a lot more to do because the teacher has been assigning homework by the ton, because this student has to do an hour and twenty minutes of homework a night and study for their test, eventually they just give up. They say “I quit”. And when that happens suddenly the teacher’s method is counter-productive. The student has completely given up on everything because of stress from homework.
The people who fight for homework say that it improves the child’s thinking. Isn’t that what the seven hours children give to school every day is for? Also most homework is just useless worksheets full of information that the children already know-- question after question with obvious answers. When all the time is just spent writing, there’s little thinking involved. Another thing that they say is that it encourages students to use resources to find information. This is clearly something that can be accomplished at school. All you need is a computer and if you want to add extra you can have a school library. It won’t be any different than how a child would find resources at home. They also say that teachers plan homework so that the students can have the information more drilled into them than classroom time permits. This is odd considering that parents give them seven hours of every day. Are they not using those hours? That is plenty enough time to cover what a child actually will need to know every day. They also say that it helps students by applying skills to new situations. I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing here, because the homework I know is worksheets asking the same sort of questions about the same topics that the students learned in class. And that can’t possibly be defined as “applying skills to new situations”. Now there are some points that they make I may agree with, such as that it encourages children to work independently. Which I guess it does. However, they also say that homework helps parents know what the child is learning about in school. Which they shouldn’t be able to know if the students are “working independently”, so one of these arguments is false. Now here is a direct quote from blog.eskool.ca: “It encourages parents to spark your child’s enthusiasm” Now as any sane person knows no one likes homework. I don’t see how you can get your child “enthusiastic” when you’re yelling at them to stop playing board games and do their freaking homework.
In conclusion I think teachers should stop assigning homework unless absolutely necessary for the sake of all the students in the next generation and partly for the environment. As people always say “Practice doesn’t make perfect; working to be perfect makes perfect,” which I think can be perfectly applied to homework. Imagine a world where hating school is the exception rather than the rule. In order to make that a reality you simply have to do one simple thing: stop assigning homework.
1. Adam V. Maltese, Robert H. Tai, and Xitao Fan, “When Is Homework Worth the Time? Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math,” The High School Journal, October/November 2012: 52-72. Abstract at http://ow.ly/fxhOV.
2. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics. 2011 Table 77. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_077.asp
3. Creative education--how to keep the spark alive in children and adults | Orson Scott Card | TEDxUSU youtube.com
4. Valerie A. Cool and Timothy Z. Keith, “Testing a Model of School Learning: Direct and Indirect Effects on Academic Achievement,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 16 (1991): 28-44.