My son is currently in grade four in a Catholic School. He brings home a fraction of the homework that I had when I was his age and I am grateful. He has enough extra-curricular activities that simply couldn’t be done if he had loads of homework.

I have hosted Japanese High School students in my home for many years, and I cannot say that the enormous amount of extra school does any good at all. All of my students have classes 5 days a week and 1/2 day on Saturdays, they only get a 4–5 week break in the summers and most of that time is spent in overseas language studies and cram school. Most of the students that I have hosted spend at minimum1.5 hours a day one way commute to school, 6+ hours at school, extra curricular, and then cram school, and then 1.5 hour commute home. The result is… “a bunch of robots with no knowledge of how to innovate”, that is a quote from one of my students. This is why the Japanese economy has been moribund for 30 years now. Similar problem in Korea and China. Its all about the grades and the tests to get into ridiculously competitive universities with no consideration for “Anything Else”. In the end, the university, for most will make little difference in lifetime earning potential.

We had one Japanese girl stay with us for 4 months, a 1/2 semester non-academic High School program. Not sure how that happened, I doubt it would be allowed ,and we have never had another student on that program in the six years since. She only took non-academic courses, Band, Culinary Arts, Art, Drama, & ESL. This poor girl had no idea how to handle “Free Time”, recreation was an unknown concept to her. She had no idea how to use unscheduled time.

Endless Drilling does not make better students. Don’t get me wrong, there are students than need extra practice and work, but nor all students. Learning theory suggest that periodic recall works best, not mindless drilling, and particularly not immediately afterwards. If we want to loose our innovative edge in the west, we continue on this path to exam results driven by homework overkill.

I am with the majority of those commenting that the concept of homework is driven by an industrial economy that no longer applies to our students. In my career, I have rarely taken work home so I fail to see the relevance to the world of work. Sure many people do take work home, they are mostly workaholics with little life balance that are often failing in other aspects of their lives. (IMHO). Also too many companies are running so lean that the only way to accomplish the work it to have employees work way too many uncompensated hours…but that is another rant for another day.