At some point in our lives we have all done homework, but was it beneficial? Did it help? Was it easy? I want to talk about our school system, when it was made, and more specifically the homework system.
Now to start, the schooling system we know was made in the early 19th century. Our modern system was made by Horace Mann, who was secretary of education in Massachusetts. In 1837, he started one of the biggest education reforms in American history. Since the first iteration of public education in the early 1900s, how students are taught has not radically changed, and the primary ways it has is to include more people and offer more necessities like food, etc.
Now that we have looked at the history and how schools changed, we can talk about how school and homework can benefit children. School helps people because it teaches kids social skills and other common skills that every person needs, and it helps teach students about what they want to do in their future.
Even with all of these ways school benefits people, I think that school needs to change. Not every kid needs a classic education for what they will do in the future, and most kids struggle with homework whether they can’t understand it or it’s too much to handle. In modern society, students spend 6.8 hours on homework every week.
This is too much considering almost every student is focused on the grades they get, not what they are learning In order to make homework more relevant I think that we need to lower the amount and instead of making it all about the grades, we should make homework more about reinforcing what we are learning. Don’t make it harder than the classwork; rather, make the work more interactive and engaging because it can be hard for students to choose to do homework instead of other things when outside of school.
