TEACHER, why do we need so many books? They’re so heavy! Teacher, why are you against a no-homework law? Do you enjoy checking so many workbooks day after day?
If it’s true that an organization of teachers sees a ban on homework in the grades and up to high school as promoting wrong values, what do they have against children enjoying their childhood? Given the circumstances under which the contemporary educational system operates, kids are being pressured by too many subjects and too little time (much of it wasted in traffic, waiting for a ride, waiting for mama to come home and prepare dinner, help out in the homework).
Even teachers need a break from their back-breaking job – election duty, cleaning and fixing classrooms, collecting and correcting students’ assignments, supervising extracurricular activities, etc. Cutting out their pupils’ homework will work for these overworked, underpaid heroes, too.
In our time, we walked to school carrying our bags without breaking our backs. We didn’t have computers but our teachers opened the doors of the universe to our senses (including imagination). When we got home, homework was minimal, such as memorizing a poem or looking for a flower to illustrate its parts the next day. The subject that needed the most time to prepare at home was, ugh, handicrafts, specifically needlework which I could easily pass off to the maid.
A generation or two before mine, the editors and writers whom we installed on a pedestal didn’t sport M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, they were self-taught after the war interrupted their studies, but they went on, like Emilio Aguilar Cruz, to speak and write in English, Spanish, French. The educated class learned for the love of learning, “discipline” was not their style. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.
Imposing a ton of homework five days a week on a 10-year-old is punishment pure and simple. Thanks to the competitive atmosphere, somehow justified by the ridiculously high tuition charged by private schools, parents cannot stand the probability of their kids flunking, so they hire tutors – there goes another chunk carved out from their free time. I don’t blame the tutors, but if a teacher knows her subject well enough to communicate it to her pupils, a tutor is redundant. Tutoring has become so lucrative that you’ve to wonder why more teachers have not switched to private tutoring.
