Who Invented Homework?

http://geekandnerd.org/who-invented-homework/

by Coliba • 10 years ago

85 118 10 years ago

kefka• 10 years ago

I've heard teachers say "Well I suffered through it, so you can too."

I'd like to see empirical studies to see if it actually makes for better performance as students, or if it's useless. I'm guessing the demagogues would never let 'no homework' happen, at least in this country.

It'd probably also be good for the teachers, considering many complain about having to grade outside of the paid teaching day.

carsongross• 10 years ago

The research is not conclusive but it points to homework not being effective:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...

hdctambien3• 10 years ago

It points to homework not being effective in elementary school

KON_Air2• 10 years ago

I thought geeks an nerds enjoyed homework for the fact it is mental exercise if nothing else.

Bazinga generation nerds and geeks get out of my cyber-lawn!

AndrewDucker• 10 years ago

Nope.

If I was doing mental exercise then there was always more interesting things to do it with than the homework my teachers set.

Morgawr2• 10 years ago

I thought geeks an nerds enjoyed homework for the fact it is mental exercise if nothing else.

Not really. Obviously there are different types of "geeks" and "nerds", but generally those type of people enjoy tinkering and playing around the stuff they care about. They certainly don't like being forced to perform menial and repetitive tasks (as often homework is) because somebody else told them to.

cholantesh• 10 years ago

What about people who are motivated by the prospect of academic achievement?

bpchaps3• 10 years ago

When I was failing classes for not doing homework, I was enjoying the company of other nerds from all over the world on IRC and learning to code by writing (awful) mIRC scripts instead. Pretty sure there's room for some middle ground in there. ;)

KON_Air2• 10 years ago

Mind you (and AndrewDucker) being occupied with something else which is more interesting to one is not the same thing as thinking it is torture.

xyzzy42• 10 years ago

Some of my best teachers would give us optional homework.

kasparsklavins• 10 years ago

There still can be pressure from parent-figures to complete this "optional" homework.

xyzzy42• 10 years ago

True, but being pressured by your parents isn't as bad as having a tarnished academic record from not doing homework.

coderdude• 10 years ago

I fought tooth and nail against homework to my own detriment. Those counselors just did not know what to do with me.

Is There a Bright Future if You Don’t Do Any Homework?

Heh. Nah, not really.

ownagefool2• 10 years ago

My physics teacher attempted some reverse psychology on me and banned me from doing homework. After a while, I think when he figured out I was happy with that, he got fed up with that routine and started asking for the homework again but I still didn't bother.

In hindsight my grades probably suffered, but only as far as the fact I didn't have all this still drilled into my memory. I doubt it made me any less smart, and instead of doing said homework, I played with my computer which blossumed into a highly paid career.

c1641287• 10 years ago

I'm still waiting for the "highly paid" part.

LukeB_UK• 10 years ago

I only ever did the homework I was interested in and quite a few times it helped me understand it better.

Morgawr2• 10 years ago

As somebody who's never (or almost never) done homework, I have to say that I regret not doing it. I've always understood most of the material being taught and I've always seen homework as a waste of time (this is also a good excuse because I simply was lazy), however I have to admit that the very few times I've managed to sit down and do some homework, it really was useful (but I never admitted it).

Just practicing math problems, or typing out notes and essays, or even practicing a new language... That's all stuff that is useful. Sure you can go without, and probably schools assign way more than they should (I know it was the case for me), but homework itself at least is not a negative thing.

Bretlei• 10 years ago

My brother is studying to be a teacher (In the UK) and I asked him what his opinion was on homework.

He told me that it's a good way to get students to do some study/open up the text book when they wouldn't have without a punishment if they didn't.

This, in my opinion leads to more stress and more work on those trying hard to study AND do homework. Each subject wants at least 1 hour of your home time and a student can have anywhere from 2-8 subject to study a night.

dingaling• 10 years ago

I concur with your perspective. If students aren't opening their text-book outside school-hours then that indicates a lack of inspiration being imparted.

I used to sit and read my Ecce Romani! text-books at the weekends because my Latin teacher was such a wonderfully eccentric and inspiring person that I wanted to learn more for myself and to please her. I don't remember her giving us homework other than 'learn the conjugation of this verb'.

I didn't open anything else unless forced to by homework.

timthorn• 10 years ago

Interesting - my Mum was a Latin teacher and in the end moved away from Ecce Romani to the Cambridge Latin Course so the Classical Civilization element got brought out more.

You weren't in the Berkshire area for school?

clentaminator• 10 years ago

I'm sure the countless hours of homework in every subject that I was never interested in (of which that number was a majority) has helped me in my current career in not-any-of-those-subjects. /sarc

I feel like the most important things in school at that age are:

- Exposing people to a broad range of subjects that they might be interested in (and thus curious enough about such that they end up learning by themselves)

- Having teachers that can teach their subjects with enthusiasm, so that other people can see what the teacher finds exciting so that they too can (potentially) share in that enthusiasm and curiosity.

samsolomon• 10 years ago

Good teachers teach, great teachers inspire.

jib• 10 years ago

Homework can be a good bridge to university studies imo. I would certainly have benefited from learning self-disciplined study earlier on rather than coasting through the Swedish equivalent of high school and then swapping straight into university.

For under 12s or so I dont see a reason for homework. For 12-18 year olds I think gradually moving to a more self-driven study environment would be a good thing given that most people will end up going to university by now where that is the norm.

aninhumer• 10 years ago

Homework doesn't really teach self-discipline, because it is an external motivation. If anything, I think it can work against that goal, because once people finish their mandatory work, they have no energy or enthusiasm left to learn for their own sake.

Perhaps I'm projecting, but mostly homework taught me how to do the minimum possible so I could get back to playing video games.

bitJericho• 10 years ago

Learning a new trade here in my adult life and finding a tremendous amount of information I learned in school all coming back to me. It's allowing me to speed through learning what i need to know.

elcct• 10 years ago

That trains you to work outside your agreed working hours and to make you feel bad if you don't do it. Essentially this is how you train slaves.

mac01021• 10 years ago

I've only ever had two kinds of jobs. In the first I was paid hourly and only ever worked the shift agreed upon. In the second I was paid a salary and there was never any agreement about what my normal working hours would be.

Jtsummers3• 10 years ago

Or you learn to work efficiently and finish your homework in the minutes between classes, the bus rides to and from school, and perhaps 1-2 hours immediately after getting home.

Unless things have changed substantially (and they may have), that was all the time I needed for everything but research papers and projects requiring more thought.

Self-discipline and time management can solve most of these problems. My parents forbade video games and TV until my homework was done, and I was honest as a kid (most of the time). So I got my shit done so I could do what I wanted to do (watch Batman and Animaniacs, run through the woods like a mad man).

Homework doesn't train you to be anything other than what you (really, your parents at that age) allow it to.

kaitai• 10 years ago

I don't think slavery was about making people feel bad if they didn't work outside your "agreed working hours", unless you mean whipping or beating them until they feel really bad.

A more nuanced discussion of what you seem to be trying to get at can be found at http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/. But please don't use the slave analogy unless we're really extracting economic goods out of a working group by force.

lordnacho3• 10 years ago

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework.

- If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield?

- It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."

- If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.

- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.

- Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.

contravariant• 10 years ago

I think the occaisional project would be fine, that also teaches planning and other skills.

Large amounts of homework exercises probably don't teach much. Actually I'm not even too sure about large amounts of exercises, for reasons similar to the ones you listed.

auxym• 10 years ago

burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a

I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.

noxToken• 10 years ago

I wonder how kids who aren't interested in rote math (e.g. 10 quadratic equations 5 nights in a row) bother to learn anything with tools like Wolfram Alpha available for free. I spent so much time on Wolfram Alpha for parts of Calculus II, Chem I and Chem II while in college. Those classes gave mountains of homework, so after I understood how to do them, I just plugged the questions into W|A for a quick answer.

In high school, I would have never had the restraint to learn the material first. All of my homework would have been copy-paste jobs from W|A.

bendykstra• 10 years ago

I did that too, though in BASIC on a TI-83+. When I showed it to my math teacher, she said that I could use the program on any future homework and tests as long as I turned in a paragraph explaining step-by-step how the program worked.

ghaff3• 10 years ago

Some of us didn't have the option of using either computers or calculators :-)

branchless2• 10 years ago

So sick of my 7 year old getting math work and asking him what he did that day only to hear much of it was little more than coloring in.

They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.

danielweber• 10 years ago

As a parent, let me say that your seven year old isn't a reliable narrator.

pflats4• 10 years ago

If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction.

From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame, you'd fill in 1 full 10 for the 17 and have 7 left over. You'd then fill in 3 full 10s for the 35, and have 5 left over. You can take 3 of those 5 and fill in the missing spots on the 7 out of 10 ten frame, making a 5th full ten frame, and leaving 2 lonely chips/colored squares in sixth.

The goal is to eventually get students to do all that mentally. 17 + 35 = 10 + 7 + 30 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 10 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 50 + 2 = 52.

You might have figured out that kind of mental math trick on your own. If so, the lesson's not there for you. It's for all the people out in the real world who didn't develop it on their own and will readily tell you that they're "not math people".

The same technique will be revisited to work with fractions, first with the same denominator and then dissimilar denominators, and similar techniques will be used for multiplication, the distributive property, etc.

apercu• 10 years ago

"- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics."

Profound.

pflats4• 10 years ago

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework.

Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't.

There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not reinforcing old ones.

When would you prefer students read books for a literature class? During the school day, during lit class, taking time away from discussion/analysis? During the school day, during a study hall, taking time away from electives? In reading sessions before school/after school, taking time away from sports/extracurriculars and requiring additional costs? Or at their leisure, where their free time allows?

If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations.

Yes, you do. Understanding is only the second domain, out of 6, in Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Application—properly using a formula to solve an equation, which you're probably actually referring to—is the third domain. And being able to use the quadratic formula to solve a problem doesn't signify that you know anything more than how to memorize a formula and plug numbers into it.

There are some incredibly bright students out there who can master a concept in a single lesson without reinforcement. You might be one of them. I was. That doesn't mean all students are like you. Most of them require more practice than can be given in a single class period to master a topic. Some "get it" in the class period, and require practice to cement it in their memory. Other think they get it, struggle with the homework, and then get the help they need the next day. Every student is different.

You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.

That would be nice. Unfortunately, it's impossible. Family life affects far, far more than just whether or not students do their homework. It's hard to get a student from a loving home whose parents don't care about <subject> to care about <subject>. It's hard to convince a student who doesn't have a safe, secure, loving home life that literary analysis is worth studying. It's hard to convince a junior who got a job at Starbucks and is making more money than his parents ever did that finishing school is important.

Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.

But K-12 is not University. We educate young folks, the same people we don't trust to vote, drink, smoke, or choose whether or not to attend school in the first place. The same people who pay through the nose for car insurance when they can drive. K-12 students are not good at weighing short-term and long-term decisions. Their brains aren't fully developed.

Given the option to not do homework with no obvious penalty, most of them… won't do homework. I ran a junior/senior Precalculus class once with optional homework. Some students did well on the assessments. Some did not. Many more than usual failed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, test grades correlated strongly to homework completion. Failing a test did not encourage students to study more in the future.

Halfway through the year, I put an end to the experiment and required homework. Test grades and student understanding improved.

It's our responsibility as teachers and as the adults in the room to ensure a student learns. It could be an excellent life lesson for a student to fail a high school class because he or she did not do the homework. You might be okay with that. I'm not. The end result is that the student has spent a year in a classroom and has not learned the material, which will have cascading consequences on that student's education. That's a lot to trade for a life lesson.

teslabox• 10 years ago

John Gatto used to send his 7th grade students out into the real world, to learn from adults doing real things. He would have them write a report about what they'd learned. [1]

[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time.

The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by teachers of children who were learning English. The story told of how the class was reading a book abou a dog. Some of the kids didn't get the word 'panting', so the teacher imitated a panting dog. I wrote a letter saying that languages are actually easy to learn, and that a human acting like a dog is no substitute for a trip to the dog park.

lordnacho3• 10 years ago

Good to get the input of a teacher on this, I appreciate it.

Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study.

In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the ones towards the top of the class. Anyone who did middling or worse definitely won't remember the quadratic formula let alone calculus. The top section will have some kids who really cared and learned it properly, and some who were good at doing as they were told but never really cared much, and won't have retained anything either.

What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years. I don't mean that people inevitably forget a few things (can I solve competition questions I used to do? Probably not), I mean that it is as if they never even knew that certain fields of knowledge existed and that they actually possessed some of that.

You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.

kirykl• 10 years ago

doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics

There may well be more of a correlation with drunk and academic than not

Caring/not caring would be a better comparison.

Not being pedantic, its a great point I hadn't thought about, that shouldn't be held down by the drunk reference.

anexprogrammer• 10 years ago

It's an easy way for teachers to not teach

Especially as these days it's highly likely to be a simply photocopy of a page from some study guide. Quite often with printed mistakes and bad grammar in them. Much less need to put in teaching time.

I've nothing against homework in the run up to exams, say 15 years on, but going on my youngest's experience, homework has become common down to as young as 9 or 10. I don't see that as a benefit for anyone except politicians wanting to be seen to do something about ejucashun. :)

Sadly governments are putting too many other tasks on teachers that leave them with little choice. Form filling, over frequent testing, sus checks to make sure the student isn't a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant and so forth. Little wonder it was recently reported in the UK that >50% of teachers now want to leave the professions.

Pay teachers a commercially competitive rate and free them enough to teach. Of course that would free them to teach outside whatever dogma is de rigeur. Homework will remain a growing part of education until we back away from the production line and over-reliance on national standards for everything.

kamaal• 10 years ago

>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.

As some one who works in Data Analytics, I can tell you many people lack the ability to plug things into a formula properly, many have issues with even simple approximation and back of the envelope calculations. I wouldn't say, practicing this is a bad thing.

By the way if you think this is wrong. A little scaled up version of this is what is tested in current day interviews. Asking people algorithms is basically testing their ability to remember a heuristic and their ability to plug in numbers and demonstrate mental acrobatics.

pessimizer• 10 years ago

You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.

Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the square for a general quadratic equation just to remember it.

Plug-and-chug is pointless. People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.

ghaff3• 10 years ago

People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.

In an ideal world, you're absolutely right. In practice, it's hard to arrange. Assuming a US high school student even takes calculus, it's going to be senior year. So, if physics is taught senior year (don't know what the norm is), at best you're teaching in parallel. To be sure, derivatives are taught fairly early-on in calculus and they're probably most relevant to physics at the high school level.

But, you're right, there's a lot of plug and chug in physics without calculus. On the other hand, physics also helps get students into other things like dimensional analysis etc.

Also, to be fair, the issue of prerequisites comes up a lot of places. There are often facts in intro classes that have to be taken on faith until the topic can be dealt with more deeply later on.

sharmi• 10 years ago

Homework is essential when it is well thought out and helps you understand the material better, like problems that require you to apply multiple concepts in math or science to arrive at a solution. Or language essays that require new constructs or vocabulary, essentially anything that requires you to apply your mind in new ways.

Sometimes rote memory is also required (spellings, formulae, handwriting anyone?)

If anything, the education system in general and homework in particular makes learning very systematic and structured, glossing over broader issues of exploring topics on one's own, seeking out new resources and creating one's own structure and areas of interest. It conceals the deeper questions of education, handing the students only the low-hanging fruits of tests and homeworks.

The education system is so effective, once the pupil is out, learning anything significant becomes a daunting process. The inability to plan and structure one's own learning can lead many to give up early in the process.

forrestthewoods• 10 years ago

Sounds like you perfectly summed why our education system isn't effective. It fails to teach students how to learn on their own!

And there's nothing to say that _homework_ is essential. It's perfectly plausible to have students get everything done during the regular school day.

Well thought out assignments are obviously good. Why do they need to be done at home? It's not as if third graders are listening to lectures from 8 until 3.

bpchaps3• 10 years ago

I still can't help but hate the teacher who gave the honor's class an enormous mythology book over the summer and gave it less worth to our grade than a ten minute grammar assignment.

Camel's back, etc, I failed the class, got kicked out of the mostly white honor's program to being the only white kid in most classes. I got picked on less there and enjoyed life significantly more after that. Probably the best thing to happen in my life, actually.

hdctambien3• 10 years ago

Math isn't the only class that gives homework.

Should Spanish class-time be spent memorizing vocabulary and conjugations, or practicing communicating in the language?

Should History class-time be spent reading from the book so you know what happened, or discussing those topics and their implications?

Should English class-time be spent doing silent reading, or talking about the books/authors/time periods that you read about?

danielbarla• 10 years ago

Given infinite time, the latter.

lucb1e2• 10 years ago

It doesn't need to be class time. The issue is that "home work" invades our private lives (evenings, weekends and holidays) due to its very definition.

If I work from home for a company, it's not called homework because it is under the same conditions as normal work: there are set hours, I receive compensation, the only difference is that it's not on-site.

So should Spanish class time be spent memorizing vocabulary? No, at least not in large parts, but neither should it take more than the time allocated for the subject[1]. It's nice that we can choose to do it either in school or at home, but the way it presently works, homework takes up more time than it should.

[1] Again, I don't mean allocated class hours, I mean the total number of hours students are expected to work on something. In Dutch terms, SBUs, or "hours the course takes from your life, class and homework and everything together". All courses should have SBUs that add up to 40 hours per week, give or take 5.

germinalphrase2• 10 years ago

Then - perhaps - this is an argument about whether homework should be compulsory or not. We are constantly hearing about company cultures that require more than 40 hrs/wk due to competition. We seem to (at least tacitly) accept this as a price to pay for success. Should it then be that you can receive the basic skills by merely showing up and working hard in class (which is often true + the primary problem with low performing students) and reserve homework for those who have higher level personal/professional goals (and structure the work accordingly)?

adrusi• 10 years ago

Fwiw, high school language classes are very easy and slowly paced, to the point where I aced the standard curriculum purely by showing up to class and doing no out-of-class work, nor any memorization at all.

So either the curriculum should be made more challenging, or homework should be optional for everyone, like it was for me.

And something I regret more, but still wouldn't have done differently if given the opportunity to do it again, is I never read any of the books for my English classes. I would come to class and integrate what the teachers and other students said and come up with answers to questions that sounded insightful (and probably were, I guess) and learn enough just from class discussions to do well on tests.

Both my English and German classes were considered "honors" level classes in a highly ranked school district. I avoided AP-prep classes outside of math and science because the English and language AP classes involved significicantly more homework, to the point where I couldn't get away with not doing it and pass the class, even if I could pass the test anyway.

If the school can't offer classes that actually require students to do regular homework, then they shouldn't demand that students do regular homework.

ae_keji• 10 years ago

I think your problem is avoiding AP classes. They claim to be college prep, but from my experience (no citation, sorry) they're more the level that the entire education system should be working on. I do not remember learning a single thing from my honors/traditional classes (other than ohm's law in Electronic Tech, which is no longer available), however I can confidently say I did learn and still remember what I've learned in my AP and IB classes.

Unfortunately that is due more to excessive memorization and general work required than anything else, but I still find it better than the alternative, which is learn nothing at all.

nibs8• 10 years ago

As an unschooler who went to school and did "homework" or any kind of "schoolwork" for the first time when I was 12, it took me about a month to catch up to my peers in terms of abilities to do the coursework, and about a year to catch up to my peers in resentment and disengagement.

Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. There is no reason for the strange masochism that is mass schooling. It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people.

hmottestad2• 10 years ago

"It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people."

I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned.

Like you, I just have anecdotes.

But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school

hmottestad2• 10 years ago

Also, from one time when I was a temp at a primary school for 2 weeks. I saw a kid who had come to Norway at the age of 10 or so, and now one year later he could still not add double digit numbers. Worse yet, he didn't see how a problem could be solved by adding two numbers. So problems along the lines of "I have two apples, you give me three, how many do I have now?" where beyond his ability to solve without assistance.

He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.

guard-of-terra2• 10 years ago

"I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school"

You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned.

Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.

nibs8• 10 years ago

That is an interesting point. I only learned to read when I was 11 (never had any need to, before that) which is strangely late. When I went to school at 12, I found I was the fastest reader, and tested as "University +" reading level, which is the highest there was.

By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development.

My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth.

Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.

fiatjaf4• 10 years ago

Your anecdote doesn't even count, because you're assuming, without any reason to, that you're right about the counterfactual.

Jtsummers3• 10 years ago

Thanks to the economic state of the US, most families can't afford the time to dedicate to their children to properly educate them in the breadth of subjects that schools (attempt to) cover. And this assumes that the parents are either educated or capable/willing to source proper materials to provide information (or the tools to access information) for their children.

nibs8• 10 years ago

Agreed. Which makes me sad. The funds do exist, but it all goes to public education. One cannot opt-out of school taxes, even when one opts out of school. It is not just an issue that is purely economic, the money exists, it just does not exist in the hands of the parents.

antisthenes2• 10 years ago

I agree with you about the economic state of US, but "not having enough time" excuse has nothing to do with the economy.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics...

Perhaps if the average American cut down their TV watching time in half, they'd suddenly have time to spend more on their children and help them through the subjects studied at school.

Going by the provided statistics, is it any wonder Asian Americans (least amount of TV time) do better in school than other demographics? I have no doubt that parents in those households spend an above average amount of time helping their kids with schoolwork and make absolutely sure they don't fall behind.

coldpie3• 10 years ago

my friends had to spend it training to be slaves

Oh, get over yourself.

nibs8• 10 years ago

... where I am from, elementary school is basically obedience training for high testosterone boys. It is a battle of wills that the boy almost always loses. Eventually, they rebel hard. I upvoted you though because it was hyperbolic, this subject is just very passion-inducing for me.

fiatjaf4• 10 years ago

Why do you disagree? Please explain and clarify your point.

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

I think the primary function of mass schooling is to warehouse kids somewhere off the streets and out of the workplace, avoiding having to adapt adult spaces to kids being around. There's a secondary function as a meaningless token mill, for use in pseudo meritocracy. And a tertiary function, much underfunded, of education.

jxdjsks• 10 years ago

This. It's about economics. It's about extracting value from the parents. It's about making the children, who are the workers of the future, more compliant.

You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

To the person who deleted their comment that it's about compliance. That's an often heard conspiracy theory, but IMO, the main strike against it is that it doesn't work. The USA, compared to eg: Singapore, does not turn out particularly compliant graduates.

fiatjaf4• 10 years ago

Do you have more stories about your education like this? A blog or something? I would like to read it.

nibs8• 10 years ago

No, but I have considered it. All four of my grandparents are gradulate-educated educators and they learned and researched education and the various issues surrounding it. So based on their anecdotes and research, my parents kind of were convinced that school was not good and would make our lives worse, and just let us do whatever. I would recommend reading John Holt if you are interested. I'll email you. It is one of those things that is dangerously simple - no structured learning, but there is tons of nuance, I guess.

robto• 10 years ago

I would check out the book "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray - he goes into why "unschooling" or democratic schooling can be effective. It really changed my outlook on education. I had previously read "A Mathemetician's Lament"[0], an essay by Paul Lockhart that made me start to question the value of regular schooling.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

jamespo• 10 years ago

What do you do now?

nibs8• 10 years ago

I have a company that makes a system that runs on the plant floor of food processing companies to track production data.

lucb1e2• 10 years ago

If I work somewhere and it's 5pm, I'm off unless there is some important deadline the next day that can't be moved. And if I work extra hours, I'll get something extra (usually money but it might also be holidays or something).

In school, teachers have the power to invade our private lives, even our set holidays(!) with pointless tasks. Apparently 40 hours a week is not enough to spend on school, we also need to give up part of every evening, part of most holidays and part of many weekends.

I really hate that system. It's completely unfair, especially if you're in school just to get that shitty piece of paper in the end. I can code already, I taught myself perfectly well, but the prerequisites for HR usually include a diploma, and your salary and career opportunities is often dependent on which diploma you have. I'm just sitting it out and hate almost every assignment we get. It's outdated and moreover, boring stuff that nobody would ever want to use in practice.

ghaff3• 10 years ago

You're in for some very rude shocks in the work world.

avalexandrov• 10 years ago

Relevant clip from Michael Moore's "Where to Invade Next" (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRJ1hgN7uAU It's about the Finnish education system based on having no homework.

lr4444lr• 10 years ago

This whole article is U.S. centric. Is there any meta analysis of global PISA scores and hours spent on homework?

Ryuuke• 10 years ago

When the time machine comes out, i'll use it to hang him so that humans could live happily :D

brudgers• 10 years ago

A few years ago, I found The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing an interesting read. It shaped my views on homework [context: US public schools].

http://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/

Avernar• 10 years ago

Massive amounts of homework is the perfect training for future work in North America. When kids get used to doing 60-80 hours worth of schoolwork for the same education that can be done in 40 hours they won't complain when their future boss demands 60-80 hours of work for the pay of 40 hours.

petetnt• 10 years ago

The article sources an another article that states that Finland doesn't have any homework, which is a statement I have no idea where it comes from. As a finnish guy, I can ensure you that there's homework being assigned on every grade from first grade to the last course you take at a university. Unless I have participated in some sort of twisted experiment where I have been given homework to do while others just pretend there are doing them.

Who Invented Homework?

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