I have read every nairalander contribution to this topic, but to some extent, I want to believe that homework is a waste of time, especially for children in some private school between the basic one to basic three. Most time their home work are things that are too big for children of their age to understand. At the end of the day, their teachers end up testing the parent/guardian knowledge, rather than pupils themselves.

I don't agree with the position of the teachers!, homework was key to my little princess's being able to catch up with her school work last term having missed a whooping weeks of school work because she went on holidays! Someone should warn those Liverpool teachers before I do something,

or its could be a motivation for more research??

well at least in my case.

So you guyz don't want your children being disciplined at all at all abi?

Are you ppl serious?

No. It is not a waste of time.
This shouldn't even be up for discussion.

did a primary school student create this topic?  i understand it gets in the way of fun sometimes. but pls go do ur homework   it's for ur own good!!

You need to read this great article from The Economist.



The underworked American
Jun 11th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic
AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson
A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.



http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13825184

It's a total waste of time. the kids dont even do d homework. it's done by parents and guardians. while d kid copy and paste! most times it becomes very difficult 4 d parents to make out time to do d homework. therefore, i believe it's a waste of time.

homework for primary school students are usually done by mothers or father with the child giving the mom or dad oppoturnty to know how intelligent his child is.he can discover discover that his child cnt write even a word then do smthing to help his or child

so, if teachers in Liverpool decide that homework is not good for British children, should Nigerian children follow such things blindly? Are Nigerian children the same as British children?

Homework is VERY GOOD for children.

homework is not a waste of time and it will never be. because it helps the parent to know their children performances and it also allow the children to understand the subject they were taught at the classroom even better.

NEVER! Homework is not a waste of time for primary school children but rather it complements whatever they are doing at school. It is very necessary in so many ways such as keeping them busy at home, developing them to be studious and giving them better comprehension of whatever they might have been thought at school as parents can also come in to their aid.

It is not a waste of time. It some people to learn more and without doing homework, they might easily forget what they have been taught.

No way.
Enough said on the subject.
Homework rules, for those of us who have kids.

It is never a waste of time, in fact without it, few pupils can remember what they were taught within 2 days.

Homework is good for the primary school student. I was given homework and it helped me well. Like not playing too much games. Then I construct wooden gun to do police& thief almost everyday. But with homework such activities will be limited. But what i hate is primary school now employ school cert leavers to teach their pupils. I have a neighbor whose kids attend primary school and what they use to team them english language is YORUBA. The little kids cant even speak english. This is the fault of sending your kids to public schools because they dont gain much. I love Private school no matter how expensive it is. Your kid should be able to sit for WAEC once and pass with flying colours and it starts from when they are still in primary school

Imagine this scenario,

In primary sch. you don't get to do any home work and Gbams! You get into secondary school and somebody begins to have you do home work.

Imagine how well you would adapt.

Of course you will adapt since you are used to home work since primary school

Why must we comment on what some stupid, good 4 nothing teachers in LIVERPOOL said? I sure say na becos oyinbo man make d statement hence its this sensatioanl. If it was here in 9ja, u guys wld have been asking 4 their heads. Those guys are leaving a high-tech life. Soon na machine go dey go school 4 dem and do all acada work. I have a feeling that declaration was made 2 further decieve all especially nations of the 3rd world to think that home work is a waste of time. Virtually everyone on this forum experienced it and has paid off. They should simply have said they are too dull to teach because no more ideas. lets end this discussion and move to other important matters like  the current ASUU strike and the minister of education spending N120m to celebrate 25yrs marriage anniversary jo.

For God's sake, how can HOMEWORK be a waste of time?, those liverpool guys need to get their heads checked. Home work is certainly not a waste of time, i can't count the benefits, they are too many!!!

It is never a waste of time. Rather, an investment for greater future for your kids. What you impact on your children when they are young is what they will grow to become

Whoever said yes do not understand the deal. Home work is parent-child thing. It goes a long way to bring a child to the parent(s) the idea of what is going on in the class room.

Fear, low self-complex or otherwise may cause a child not to ask questions in the class room. This is something he can simply bring up to a caring mother and get a full understanding from step to step explanations on the part of the parent. This also create an atmosphere for a healthy child-parent relationship, by and large. And also, let a parents realise his/her child's abilities and capability

The simple truth is that:
Even when the parents are doing the works themselves, it gives them the insight on what the child are being taught at school;
It clears the ground for child-parents relationship;
It encourages a free time studies on the part of the child;
It creates a teacher-child-parents relationship (ie the teacher provides the parent the tools and guide to formally educate the child in a more domestic way, and the parents helps to reduce the burden on the part of the teacher which in turn speeds up the processes in educating the child.

Homework is useless 4 lil kids imo.

Krayola:

Homework is useless 4 lil kids imo.

Are you serious? Is this a joke?

Forget about the children, that goes without saying. Homework is good for the parents.

H/W should be meaningful to the child

XTRA CLASSES lecture for chidren (such as after school lesson or tutorial classes ) should not be mistaking for homeworks. even in my days in the university, i dont really go well with homework. there was a time when i was absent from the campus for about 3 weeks, it was my close friends that did my homework and submit them for me. i was never happy about this. this applies to many tertiary students also. considered this course offered by lagos poly student "business mathematics by DR Shogunro", it is a course offered by over 15,000 students in accounting, bus adim e.t.c. The lectural every year asked the student to do the exercises in the handout which numbers over a thousand question. what i have is that many of those students which are closed to me brings the assingment for me to solve for them and they submit it. this is a real tidious exercise for me, but cant say no because of my relationship with them. at the end of the day, they had not learnt anything from the intended exercise (homework). this is also the scenero in our secondary school. it should be interesting that in my secondary school days, i do not even have a physics or chemistry notebook not to talk about doing homework, but there is hardly any topic i dont understand in them. i attend almost every lecture and listenned to my teachers, that i felf is enough for me with the backings of what i read in textbooks.

It may not be a waste of time but its definitely too much. I remember the time wey i dey primary skool dey come give me 4 different homeworks. Haba for primary skool dis one too much naa.

home work is good for the kids

I dont think homework is really a waste of time really, Come to think of it:homework given to students promote their academic perfomance and keep them busy. Some students ezpecially primary school kids after school play around with no caution. Instead of these they will do their homework knowing fully well that if d homework is not done, they will be punished at school.

One way to look at it would be, Would your child be at a disadvantage compared to the children who do homework?