My Son Won't Do His Homework (2007)

The authors observe that homework is disruptive to family dynamics because it is an ongoing source of conflict between parents and their children. They also observe that the primary reason schools assign homework to younger children is because parents demand it. Both of these observations are consistent with my experience both within my own family and my observations of the families of my child's peers.

On the other hand, I have no way of verifying or denying the author's claims about homework studies failing to demonstrate long term benefits from homework.

Overall, I am glad I read it because it gave me some perspective on the issue. My son still is responsible for doing his homework, and we as parents clearly communicate this to him. Anyway, if you're parenting, I'd say it's perhaps worth checking out.

As an aside, I strongly recommend Juliet Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture about the way corporations have come to market to children - and it's probably only gotten worse with them having online lives.

End of Homework: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/...

Born to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Cultu...

I do however agree with you about the last comment. If there were not already replies, I would edit it to make the point in another way. But the intention is still the same. The time not being spent on homework, in the case of the article, is being spent on entertainment.

My only secret for excelling at school was that my natural interests happened to coincide with the things school expects you to do. So I was intrinsically motivated to do most of them, and whenever intrinsically motivated people compete with extrinsically motivated people, it's hardly a competition at all.

Motivation dominates all other factors in learning. Nothing else comes close. People who want to learn something learn it orders of magnitude faster and more reliably than people who don't really care. Piles of psychological research back this up.

For example, if you actually wait to teach a child arithmetic until he or she expresses a genuine interest, a typical child can master all of elementary school math in about 20 hours of instruction. Reading is similar -- once the fire is lit, with a little phonetic guidance, a typical kid can become a fluent reader in weeks, not months.

So the real art of education becomes inspiring the desire, and then being ready to strike when the iron is hot. School actively thwarts this pattern.

> Second, the point of learning how to play the school system isn't to be good at school. It's to be good at handling systems in general. Different systems, different constraints, but there are meta-lessons to be learned in dealing with any of them.

That kind of general experience is something you get no matter what you're doing, so long as you're interacting with other human beings. The real question is whether school teaches better meta-lessons than other kinds of experience.

In school, all work is simulated. The worst and best possible outcomes are both abstract letters on a piece of paper. Contrast this with something as simple as putting a child in charge of planning a camping trip, and the variety of outcomes they'll experience and learn from. Nothing teaches responsibility like having to explain to your friends that you forgot to pack breakfast.

But that's a self-solving problem. Anything you truly use over and over again will become readily memorized. And people are demonstrably good at memorizing that kind of information.

My issue is with memorizing things that the learner has no intrinsic motivation to memorize.