Schools worldwide consider homework ban, partly to ease burden on pupils, teachers
Parents like homework because they believe it reinforces learning at home, reveals what children are learning in school and establishes good routines. Those against assigning homework say it reinforces a sedentary lifestyle, leads to frustration, exhaustion and stress for children, gives them little time to do other constructive things, can lessen children's genuine interest in learning, burdens teachers to design and grade homework and is pointless, since there is no evidence it leads to improved performance later in school.
Homework is so inextricably linked to school it's hard to think of one without the other. But increasingly, educators and child development specialists are examining the practice of assigning homework to children and considering whether it is beneficial or potentially harmful.
The Guardian reported recently that one of Britain's most prestigious schools, 162-year-old Cheltenham Ladies College, is considering banning homework to "tackle an epidemic of teenage depression and anxiety". Public School 116 in New York recently banned homework for students up to grade five, having found no link between assigning elementary school homework and success in school. The Kino School in Arizona has a no-homework policy for all grades even in high school.
Many books on the subject are cropping up on bestseller lists. The most prominent of these include The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell, and prolific author Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth, described in the Atlantic Monthly as "a stinging jeremiad against the assignment of homework which the author, a prominent educator, convincingly argues is a wasteful, unimaginative, and pedagogically bankrupt practice that initiates kids into a soul-sucking rat race long before their time".
The primary arguments against homework are that it reinforces a sedentary lifestyle, leads to frustration, exhaustion and stress for children, gives them little time to do other constructive things, can lessen children's genuine interest in learning, burdens teachers to design and grade homework and parents who have to monitor and often spend time doing homework instead of more engaging activities with their children and that it is pointless, since there is no evidence that it leads to improved performance later in school.
Parents like homework because they believe it reinforces learning at home, reveals what children are learning in school and establishes good routines.