There is a growing number of parents and organizations that are seeking to ban homework. Have you heard about this?
Individuals who are anti-homework explain their stance, pinpointing the following 3 reasons:
1. Homework doesn’t allow kids to be kids after school. After a long day at school, kids come home and must continue their day by completing assigned homework. This cuts down on their play time, when kids can run around and exercise. It also cuts down on the time kids can spend fostering their creativity, pursuing activities that are of more interest to them.
2. It takes away from the time they should be spending with their family. Rather than enjoying the rest of the day together, kids have to go to their room and study. Furthermore, even if their parents help, the experience isn’t a positive one as it can be frustrating if there’s a difficult task to complete – which brings us to our next point.
3. Parents aren’t teachers (well, at least many of them). Teachers are educated and trained to teach, but most parents have no qualifications. How can they help their child when they don’t know how to teach, or may not even know what their child is studying?
We hear many complaints and arguments from children who have to do their homework, including a recent news report about an 11 year old boy in California who went missing for 7 hours, just because he was afraid he’d get into trouble for not completing his homework (there was no indication of abuse at his home). Do you think it’s time we started listening to our kids? Maybe their complaints are actually valid, and we should eliminate or at least reduce the amount of homework our schools give out.