By Staff
With the first month of school safely passed, it's time for a pop quiz.
What do Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic have in common?
Besides outperforming the United States on student achievement tests, these countries tend to assign less homework than American teachers.
Question two: What do Iran, Thailand and Greece have in common?
Those countries score low on those same tests, but burden their students with more homework, Time magazine reported recently.
If you've spent an evening grappling with some subject you don't remember studying in your own classroom career, remember, you could have been reading for pleasure such recent releases as "The Homework Myth" or "The Case Against Homework."
"The Homework Myth" is a book by Alfie Kohn, a critic of test-driven schools who claims, "Homework … may be the single most reliable extinguisher of the flame of curiosity."
The other tome was published by two moms, one a lawyer (Sara Bennett) and the other a journalist (Nancy Kalish).
Both books sling a stew of statistics, studies and surveys to support their contentions that dull busywork assignments not only conflict with family life, but threaten to teach students to hate learning.
Take the national University of Michigan study of 2,900 American children in 2004 that found the amount of time devoted to homework up 31 percent in 25 years – a homework ethic that certainly is not reflected in test performance.
Not only are some children going to be left behind, but they're getting younger. The littlest learners are being crushed under the weight of their bulging backpacks.
Where students ages 6 to 8 studied an average of 52 minutes a week in 1981, they were up to 128 minutes a week by 1997.
Another investigation found that elementary students averaged 78 minutes of homework a night.
There is a scholar at Duke University, Harris Cooper, who has studied homework exhaustively, only to conclude that heaping mounds of it do not measurably improve academic achievement for grade schoolers.
In fact, it's a delicate balance.
Pile on too much and returns diminish.
Cooper found that students who do some homework in middle school and high school score somewhat better on standardized tests, but more than an hour to an hour and a half a night in middle school and more than two hours in high school actually lowers scores.
Cooper's rule of thumb is 10 minutes per night per grade level.
Succeeding on standardized tests was never meant to be more than a measure of what students know.
Extensive preparation defeats that purpose.
Educators defend homework for instilling self-discipline, building study habits for college and honing lifelong time-management skills, but not if it quashes intellectual curiosity and sours students on learning before they even get started.
The obvious solution in an America with 71 percent of mothers in the workforce would be to scrap the outdated agrarian school calendar in favor of something relevant to our lives.
There would be no need for homework if school lasted longer than mid-afternoon nine months a year.
Students could complete their assignments in school, evenings would be free for family activities and youngsters would not learn early on to be burned-out workaholics.
When we demand kids tote school work home and do it at the expense of family, we set those kids on a path of bringing office work home at night and doing it at the expense of family, losing the lifelong love of learning for learning's sake that we ought to nurture.