Volume 13, Number 6
November/December 1997
Rethinking Homework
by Roberta Tovey
In 1901, the state of California voted to abolish homework for children under the age of 15. The ban wasn't repealed until 1929. In 1994—nearly a century later—a district just north of San Francisco entertained the same notion when a member of the school board proposed banning homework from the school curriculum. This time the proposal was rejected: the 3,700 students in the Cabrillo Unified State District still have to do their homework.
The controversy about whether to give kids homework will go on as long as there are teachers to assign it and students to complain about doing it. Even now, while many parents and educators today are demanding more homework, an equally vocal group worries that we are placing too much of a burden on kids, especially the youngest.
"We are [so] anxious to prepare our children for this uncertain future... [that we don't realize] we might be taking away their childhood in the process," one parent writes in "H Is for Homework Hysteria," an article in Chatelaine magazine.
This is an excerpt from the Harvard Education Letter. Subscribers can click here to continue reading this article.