Column
The Case Against Homework
My daughter’s schoolwork should be done during school hours
Like most nine-year-olds, my daughter hates homework. “My brain is exhausted,” she’ll tell me, as she slogs through that evening’s hour of assignments.
Generally, when my child doesn’t want to do something that’s required of her, I tell her what my parents told me: Life isn’t fair. We all have to eat our vegetables, go to school, be polite, and suck it up.
But when it comes to homework, she actually has a point.
American children have way too much homework these days. Younger children are sometimes getting up to three times the amount recommended by the National Education Association, and teenagers are doing twice as much as I did when I was in school in the mid-’90s. For kids with after-school activities, it’s even worse — just an hour of homework can become a mad, stressed rush for my daughter if she’s not home from school right away.
This stockpile of work causes stress and sleep problems and interferes with social and emotional learning. Worse yet, according to the most recent research, it’s not necessarily terrific for school performance, either.
America’s homework problem isn’t just about kids.
