I am under very strict instructions to share this with “the whole world” so I though that the blog was as good a place than any to access the “whole world” from. The reason and what is below. My son Angus was requested as part of his school work to do a piece on “Should Children Do Homework?”. This is what he wrote:
“Should Children Do Homework?
I don’t like homework. It stops people doing what they want to do. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense how kids are supposed to learn with it. We also do enough at school. Maybe we should go to school for longer to do our homework at school. Homework is a bad thing especially for people to learn.
By Angus Gray”
Personally I don’t think it needs to any more than that Angus. Who I might add has some pretty valid points. I might decide that there is some merit in learning discipline but then I had a hard time accepting that homework was good for me.
Angus; I hope that this was “whole world” enough for you. But just to be sure I’ll post it on facebook and share it on twitter as well!
I also added a poll, I thought that Angus might be interested in the opinion of the world:
Rooster's Rail 
May 15, 2011 at 9:55 pm
My view may be one sided as I still need to do homework myself, but I agree that children should not have to do homework set for the purpose of dong homework, only if they did not finish the work in class.
May 16, 2011 at 2:30 am
Hey Angus,
The reason that you get homework isn’t because there wasn’t enough time to complete the work in class. A large part of “learning” is figuring out how to do things for yourself. You learn a lot better and quicker if you’re forced to work out how to get from A to B to C on your own. Most of the time the answers don’t even matter, it’s how you got to the answer that matters.
Part of the problem the “whole world” educational process is having today is that everyone is being told how to get from A to B to C, either by their teachers (who only read the “approved” version from a book anyway) or from the Internet. They don’t have to think about the process, someone has given them the answers. People get more intelligent if they learn to do things their own way, not by being told how things should be done.
How did you learn how to ride a bike? By doing it.
May 18, 2011 at 5:45 pm
Thanks Herne I’ll be sure to share your thoughts with mini-me 🙂
June 23, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Angus, I didn’t enjoy homework very much either. I guess there are ways to make ‘home work’ more like ‘home fun’. Imagine if you could learn by experimenting, or discovering things in the backyard, and bringing what you learned back to school. That’s my idea of what homework should be when you are young.
When you get older, there’s just not enough time at school to learn everything you need to learn, so sometimes you need to do some learning at home.
I wonder if there’s a way to turn ‘home work’ into ‘home fun’? Can you think of any?