Who'd have thunked it? Andrew Bolt and I agree on something! The debate over whether to have homework or not has resurfaced. Many are arguing homework should be abolished, and they're not all students or even necessarily parties who stand to gain from this.
I remember being set so much homework in Year 6 that I was up past my parents' bedtime. It was the year I learned the least. Not only that, but it robbed me of a year of my childhood and contributed to it being the unhappiest year of my life, hopefully ever.
This was not because homework is an inherent evil.
The teachers I had set far too much of it for a start. It's important for young people to develop independent study habits in our society but it's also important for them to enjoy other aspects of life. Actually it's important for them to enjoy learning too. There are things to be learned through homework but too much homework leads to young people feeling weighed down and antagonistic towards their learning. If students begin to resent the work set by teachers, they will apply this attitude in the classroom (as I did for the only time in my schooling history pretty much). Everyone needs a break once in a while. There has been plenty of research that has shown that people actually get more done if you give them more breaks and chances to refresh themselves. This is because working for too long makes the mind go muddy, but also because people lose interest and start becoming angry about work when they are given too much of it.
The other problem was that it was work I was incapable of doing owing to poor teaching. Homework, if it is set, must be relevant to the learning going on in class. It has to support what is going on there.
But it also has to be work that is more achievable than the classwork. If students are going to have to work without the teacher's guidance, then the work can't be as hard. Now you might argue that they will have the parents' guidance. And I say good luck to you people who live in FairyWorld where only nice, smart parents bring up their children down the bottom of the rosegarden with help from all the garden gnomes. For those of us who want to acknowledge the problems that exist in our society, this is a flawed assumption. A lot of kids have abusive parents. And this doesn't just mean the parents who are abusive in an illegal way. There is no license required to procreate. A lot of really awful people have kids. The existence of Barbara Bush is proof. They will get yelled at for their levels of achievement on homework tasks. Not only that, but many parents won't sit down with their kids and go through their homework at all. They're too interested in what's on the box tonight and "honey can you get me a beer cos Ive had such a hard day at work" to bother with raising their own children. (This by the way is where Bolt and I are in a slight disagreement. We both acknowledge this is a problem, but I'm a bit more realistic than he is and see that this is a situation that is not exactly about to change anytime soon, no matter how much we "look at parenting methods").
The other extreme of course is where major assignment work becomes a competition between the mothers. Which Mum can do the prettiest picture for their child's assignment. The all the work comes in to the teacher and she notices that her students have suddenly acquired great research skills and artistic abilities, even though they've never been able to demonstrate this in class.
So yeah I think the debate over homework is a valid one. I think probably more often than not, homework is not done in the optimum conditions. And to be useful, it pretty much needs to be. It at least needs to be homework that is relevant and educational, and not too challenging. Teachers probably need to cater to the kids who won't have supportive home environments when they set the tasks. They can do this by helping the kids out in the classroom a bit more or by setting different tasks. As to parenting: a lot of changes need to be made to a lot of home environments. But there's not much that can be done about this. So we need to remember that when setting homework.
Unfortunately though there is not really any way to work out whether teachers are setting good homework, nor good classwork. This is simply something we have to do through good teacher training to ensure that the people going into the classrooms are highly trained professionals with a concern for the welfare of the students.