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Who Invented Homework?

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Re: Who Invented Homework?

#61

Post by fiatjaf »

nibs wrote: post #30

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. The…

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

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#62

Post by bendykstra »

auxym wrote: post #29
lordnacho wrote: post #20

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."…

>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.

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.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#63

Post by fiatjaf »

coldpie wrote: post #42
nibs wrote: post #30

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. The…

> my friends had to spend it training to be slaves Oh, get over yourself.

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

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#64

Post by saint_fiasco »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #43
hmottestad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"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.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it.

I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#65

Post by emidln »

nibs wrote: post #45
Jtsummers wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Part of this is that parents alone don't shoulder the burden of paying for their children's education. All taxpayers share in this. Exemptions or credits along these lines are short-sighted.

You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child.

I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#66

Post by coldpie »

fiatjaf wrote: post #63
coldpie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my friends had to spend it training to be slaves Oh, get over yourself.

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

I need to refute the claim that public schooling is "training to be slaves"? Really?

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#67

Post by nibs »

fiatjaf wrote: post #61
nibs wrote: post #30

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. The…

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

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.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#68

Post by jxdjsks »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #55
nibs wrote: post #30

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. The…

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.

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.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#69

Post by Jtsummers »

nibs wrote: post #44
hmottestad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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 learning to read until I was 11 would have been strange. I had no specific need to read, but being literate at 4 allowed me to program at 7. It allowed me to explore mathematics beyond what most of my peers did because I read every bit of the book. And then there were the scores of books I read and the interaction with friends using encoding schemes lifted from my Boys' Life subscription.

This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies).

I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#70

Post by JulianMorrison »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #55
nibs wrote: post #30

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. The…

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.

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.
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