How much is too much? Debate has simmered for 100 years

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Valerie Strauss

A new study says kids today don't really have that much homework. Plenty of students who spend hours every night with their books certainly wouldn't agree. Homework, it turns out, has been a controversial subject for more than 100 years. Read on ...

	Cathy Tigano Gianella

It's November, and school is in high gear, complete with quizzes, tests and homework. And more homework. And even more after that.

Homework, after all, is supposed to be good for kids. It helps them learn more and fosters good study habits. That, at least, is what teachers tell their students.

But teachers haven't always said that.

About 100 years ago, top educators in the United States began to think that homework was not only a waste of time, but was unhealthy, too.

No one is quite sure how much homework was given back then -- but historians believe most assignments involved memorizing lessons. And historians, such as Brian Gill of the University of California at Berkeley and Steve Schlossman of Carnegie Mellon University, say they are quite sure that kids and parents fought about it.

Toward the end of the 1800s, some educators started to feel like a lot of parents do today: sick and tired of having their kids labor over hours of homework.

In the 1880s, Gen. Francis Walker, a Civil War hero who became president of the Boston school board, thought that hours and hours of boring homework was making his own kids nervous and tired. He persuaded the board to order that math homework be given only in extreme cases.

A little later, a famous magazine editor called homework "a national crime," and at the turn of the century, educators began to get even tougher on homework.

It was better, they said, for kids to frolic in the sunshine rather than to sit in a stuffy room and memorize spelling words. Some doctors said homework caused nerve damage and deformed spines. Other people said homework was terrible for family life.

Many more schools began to limit -- and even forbid -- homework. The California state government set rules saying that no child under 15 should have to do any.

Homework didn't really get back in fashion until the 1950s, after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and sparked the great space race with the United States. That's when American schools decided that kids needed to learn more math and science, and had to study harder. Re-enter homework.

Today, many kids do hours of homework each night, even if a new report by the Brookings Institution shows that time spent on homework in the United States has increased from 16 minutes a day in 1981 to slightly more than 19 minutes.

A debate over the benefits and drawbacks of homework continues, and some school officials have tried again to limit the amount.

Meanwhile, researchers keep trying to figure out what to do about homework.

Harris Cooper, an education professor at Duke University, probably knows as much about the subject as anybody. Cooper once looked at dozens of studies done on homework to see if he could find any pattern -- and concluded that homework "is neither good nor bad."

Cooper and other educators say there is no proof that homework helps elementary school pupils learn more. It can help somewhat in middle school and a lot in high school, but young kids have short attention spans and don't know how to study on their own.

That's why some educators, such as David Davenport, former president of Pepperdine University and now a law professor there, have called for a change in attitude about homework, with only manageable amounts at all levels.

"I don't think we are improving family life, or even the kid's education" by piling it on, Davenport said.

Valerie Strauss writes for The Washington Post.

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