Irish President Michael D Higgins made global headlines last week by calling for a ban on homework, arguing students would benefit more from spending their after-school hours developing friendships and playing.
“It should get finished at school [and] people should be able to use their time for other creative things,” Higgins told Irish radio station RTE. However, Higgins doesn’t have the power to change Ireland’s education policies, and Education Minister Norma Foley has vowed to leave the decision up to principals.
As most Australian students return to school this week, it’s high time for a debate about the merits of homework. Should Australia consign it to the proverbial dog’s bowl for good?
Homework gets a D-
There is little correlation between global test scores and the time students spend studying at home. Fifteen-year-old students from Shanghai (who do a whopping 14 hours of homework a week on average) and Singapore (seven hours) score higher than Australia (six hours, one more than the OECD average) on tests by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). But so do Finnish students, who spend fewer than three hours on homework each week.
This is because the educational benefits of homework are small, according to academic studies, and only kick in once students hit their mid-teens.
Australian academics Richard Walker and Mike Horsley, authors of the book Reforming Homework, conclude: “Homework has no benefit for children in the early years of primary school, negligible benefits for children in the later years of primary school, weak benefits for junior high school students and reasonable benefits for senior high school students.”
Why? Recent UK research suggests younger children are often “[unable] to complete this homework without the support provided by teachers and the school”.
Even for older students, only a small amount of homework is beneficial. The OECD surmises that “after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested … has a negligible impact on performance”.
Relying on work outside the classroom also exacerbates educational inequality, as students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to receive help from family members who may be out working or busy with caring responsibilities. Just like increasing private and public school fees, homework shunts more of the burden of education on to individual families, leaving children more reliant on their parents’ resources.
Long hours on the tools crayons
There is also a broader question: why, when we (theoretically) limit the adult work week to 38 hours, do we think it’s acceptable for kids to work 41 hours a week on average (35 hours in school, six hours of homework)? When adults work such hours, they’re usually meant to be paid overtime (again, theoretically).
Homework normalises a culture of working late hours into the night, which conditions students to expect an unhealthy lack of boundaries in their working lives. Spending time with family and friends, keeping active and exploring hobbies and creative pursuits are relegated to afterthoughts. This is especially the case for high-achieving students, who often move into professions with toxic overworking cultures such as medicine, law, finance and consulting, which they’ve been conditioned to accept.
It’s one reason we’ve seen the rising acceptance of unpaid overtime in the Australian economy, particularly among young workers. The average Australian works six weeks’ worth of unpaid overtime a year, losing more than $8000 they’re rightfully owed, according to a November report by the Centre for Future Work. Young people work the most unpaid overtime.
Even if you think the link between homework and overwork is a long bow, it’s clearly a short one for teachers. Teachers rarely have enough time to properly mark homework and provide feedback. It’s thus unsurprising they work 15 hours of unpaid overtime on average a week, according to a 2021 union survey — more than double the national average. Much of it is spent marking homework.
Teacher, leave those kids alone
As our work and home lives have become increasingly blurred through the pandemic, establishing a healthy work-life balance is an important standard to impart to kids from a young age. It will ready them for their economic futures, in which work emails will haunt them digitally if they don’t set strong boundaries.
We should start by heeding Higgins’ call and resigning homework to the history books, at least for primary school students. For older students, we should cap their expected hours at 38, in line with the adult work week. They’re in school for roughly 35 hours a week, and three hours a week of homework fits within the amount the OECD deems beneficial.
It might offend “old school” teachers and parents, but as any teacher marking papers will tell you: for a persuasive conclusion, you must follow the latest evidence.
Homework: who needs it? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
In the 80s, I attended a full time boarding school (home weekend every couple of months).
We had 3 hours of mandatory supervised silent homework 6 nights a week. 1700 to 1800 then 1830 to 2030.
Often some sort of infringement would result in the entire student body (200+) copping “late study”, ie an extra hour on top of this. Saturdays off (very lenient /s).
So we were doing 18 hours a week (plus bonus time on the whim of the study supervisor ) on top of our longer than average school day of 0845 to 1530. 50-55 hour weeks……
BTW, between 1545 and 1645 was *mandatory* sport.
Anyway, back then, my school annual magazine was in the habit of publishing year 12 results from the previous year…..so years later, I found a copy online with my year level results and perused the academic outcomes of all this study time.
Gotta say, there were not a lot of academic high flyers in my cohort (self included). In fact, the results were kinda substandard.
Still having study/homework nightmares though, so I guess there was some impact.
I have ADHD, and loathed homework to the point where I simply didn’t do it and bore with the consequences. It wasn’t just an intrusion, it was punishment. The idea that it exists to condition us into a powerless, overworked and underpaid role as employees makes sense; in the ultimate neoliberalist paradigm we should all be on-call at every moment of our lives.
On the arguments above, music practice of hours per day would seem to be equally punishing and even more pointless. Yet for centuries past, parents have seen value in committing their children to music homework. Their arguments must be worth considering.
Not at all. Practising more does make you a better musician. The article says that homework doesn’t necessarily help.
Woop, my experience both as a student and as a teacher (for 40 years) suggest that the article is rubbish. To say that homework does not help is to insult the intelligence of a moron.
Imagine if our footballers didn’t do training each week. Yes, I know they’re paid, but not all athletes are paid, they still go and train between competitions. It’s practice or don’t make the team. Music is the same. If there’s no practice between lessons, there’s little to no progress.
Most kids are in school 5 days a week. They get plenty of practice at school. Perhaps it could be optional for some kids. My oldest son had a teacher who would reward students with no homework for achieving some goal set in class… but one student he would actually give extra homework because that student wanted it.
I’m a teacher with 10 years under the belt and as a rule, I don’t set homework. A general end to the practice would be a positive across the board for students. It would reduce pressure on those who just cannot complete said homework. I’ve had students who have had to work part-time to support their family. They’re not completing anything you set outside of school hours and to create a curriculum with assumed extra knowledge is just folly.
One thing I have noticed is the increase in extracurricular activities that occupy students after school. So students will regularly finish school at 3:30 and then be playing sport until 6, 7 or even 8pm. So the added expectation of completing 2-3 hours of homework a night just isn’t manageable. I have had students finishing work at 1am because “well, I had homework sir!”. It then means the day at school might as well be write off as they’re just not mentally present. I have several students in my support group which I have mandated that they must have one night off a week to do a nothing activity (i.e. watch a movie with friends) because otherwise, they will burn themselves out.
Furthermore, unless you as a teacher actually review the work set as homework, it might as well not exist. There is no point spending two hours on problems for a subject if you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what needs to be done. All this leads to is stress or even worse, for students to message teachers after hour via Teams asking for help. This then puts extra pressure on the teacher to always be on and creates a culture of constantly being on the job.
I will say one general exception to the above is reading or another creative hobby. In my years teaching, the students who do well are often the ones with creative outlets or calming activities that let them just unwind. These students are usually the strongest students as they actually know how to work effectively and learn. And that’s the rub, despite one detractor in the comments saying that this would somehow create a culture of mediocrity in Australia, it really would have zero impact. The students who are high achievers will continue to achieve high. They are the ones who seek out extra work as they want to extend and deepen their knowledge. For them, it’s not homework, it’s additional learning.
Rob, I would contend that Australia has had a ‘culture of mediocrity’ in education for at least 50 years. I have personally observed it evolve over time. For me, it began in Victoria with the abolition of the external Intermediate Certificate Examination at 4th Form Level (that’s year 10 for anyone under about 50 years of age), then we saw the Leaving Certificate external Examinations go. Both of these changes occurred in the late 1960’s. The educational vandals then came after the Matriculation Certificate. These educational wreckers succeeded in dumbing down the Year 12 qualification when the HSC was introduced in Victoria, but boy, did standards plummet with the introduction of the VCE in the early 1990’s!! I know, Rob, I had to prostitute myself as a teacher and participate in this egregious process. For example, I studied the Matriculation chemistry course as a student, I taught chemistry at both the HSC and VCE levels. There was a clear decline in standards going from Matriculation to HSC and then standards collapsed when the HSC changed to the VCE compliments of Joan Kirner.
And as far as the primary school situation is concerned, I used to tell my students, if I was a parent and was about to send my children to primary school and I had the choice of sending them to a school that used the same approach as I had in the 1950’s, or to a modern primary school, then I would, without hesitation, send to the primary school that used the 1950’s approach. That is how much confidence I have in the modern educational system. Education these days is what you get when you put the clowns in charge of the circus. I understand that students are no longer taught to write cursively. What an absolute disgrace. How can you treat this system with anything other than complete contempt!
I disagree. Education has changed and generally for the better. Just because something worked when you were at school, it doesn’t forever make it “the” model for education.
I second you Rob. I did high school in the 70s. Twenty-something years later, I noticed my own kids in year 10 doing assignments set with expectation levels that approximated my year 12 level. Their year 12 math studies were at my uni-level. Now I have grandchildren attending a Catholic (but not posh) school in a rural town. The 10-year old talks about grammar terms and parts of speech that I didn’t learn until high school. She could teach most of today’s journos a thing or two, actually.
Hmm, maybe I need to back-track a bit after all, our media standards are evidence that modern education is letting some down… 😀
You make some good points there kmart60. I think that the ‘rot’ had actually become fairly well-established by the 1970’s. Completely idiotic ideas such as, “Oh, don’t put a red-line through that spelling mistake, you might damage the student’s self-esteem” and “Oh don’t make the students learn their times table by heart, that’s so boring” became popular at the time. It was like being at the Mad-Hatter’s Teaparty.
From my observations as an educator, the able students do the homework and reinforce the material being taught, the struggling students don’t know where to start and need to be supervised to complete their homework.
Homework serves to increase the gap between students who are coping and those who are struggling
Exactly! It’s also time better spent for everyone. Do something creative and constructive instead of just repetitive learning.
billie, in order to close that gap between the able students and the struggling students, we need to provide extra help for the struggling students; not to artificially restrain and obstruct the progress of the able students.
Is your idea of ‘education’ billie dumbing everyone down to the lowest common denominator level in order to close the gap?