Banning Homework: The School Day Already Lasts 8 Hours

Banning Homework: The School Day Is Already Eight Hours

Does it make sense for a child to arrive home after seven or eight hours in class and still have to sit down and do more work? That is the question behind every call to ban homework, and no one has an answer: neither the ministry, nor the schools assigning it, nor the families pursuing it at eleven o'clock at night. What exists is a clash between two incompatible ideas. One, that learning stops when the bell rings. The other, that some subjects require individual repetition to make any headway.

How many hours of work does an elementary student accumulate?

The first figure in any serious discussion is the school day. A child under eleven or twelve spends the morning and a good part of the afternoon at the institution, with a schedule that practically reaches eight hours. Adding homework extends that day into the home, without anyone paying for overtime or establishing an explicit right to disconnect.

The most compelling argument is not pedagogical; it is common sense. If an adult finishes their shift and the boss sends them work for the evening, we call it precariousness. With children, we call it responsibility. Half of this discussion has been built on that asymmetry, and it is no coincidence that many propose simply adding two more hours to the school schedule so that what needs to be done is done there, with the teacher present, and not in the home study.

Against this plays a critical detail: children's free time is already colonized by screens. Leaving them with an empty afternoon does not produce geniuses; it produces infinite scrolling.

Repetition is Non-Negotiable: Mathematics and Multiplication Tables

This is where consensus completely breaks down. There are processes that cannot be learned by understanding them once, twice, or even three times. Second-degree equations, multiplication tables, rules of signs, percentages, area formulas. They require putting pen to paper, and that doesn't fit entirely within a classroom with twenty-five students of varying levels and a working environment that, let's admit it, is not always conducive.

The nuance matters: nobody disputes the need for study; they dispute the volume and format. A light review of the essentials is not the same as three subjects with daily homework. Calculating where that line is, subject by subject, is probably the most useful thing to come out of this whole affair.

Anyone who holds that the brain works like a stationary bike—pedaling without getting anywhere, but pedaling anyway—has a problem with evidence: memorizing the periodic table at thirteen doesn't make anyone a better chemist, and forgetting it doesn't ruin a technical career.

Finland, PISA, and the Mirage of the Perfect System

The main argument used by proponents of scrapping homework was always the Nordic model. Few students per class, teachers selected among the top 10% of their cohort, zero homework at home. For two decades, it was the exportable holy grail. The fine print is that PISA scores in Finland have been dropping for a decade, and the Swedish example—closing classrooms, opening ghettos, and leaving those who can afford it to pay for private education—should serve as a warning to anyone copying headlines without reading the fine print.

An education system is not a method; it is an ecosystem. Importing one piece, such as the absence of homework, without also bringing societal homogeneity, class ratio, and teacher selection, is just having the wrapping paper.

AI Does the Homework Now, and That Changes Everything

The shift in recent times is not pedagogical; it is technological. Some teachers have stopped assigning homework directly: anything they assign for home can be solved by an AI in twenty seconds, so they transfer the work to the classroom and hands-on exercises, where they can see the process and not just the result. It has its logic and also its trap: the one who learns to cheat with the machine learns, above all, how not to learn.

Underlying this is an uncomfortable question that permeates the whole issue. If work goes home, how long does it go?

There are sectors that maintain that the habit of working outside of office hours is not training; it is preventative conditioning: future employees who normalize clocking in from sunrise to sunset and taking work home on the weekend.

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In the end, the only task nobody disputes is that of parents at eleven o'clock at night, correcting fractions they don't understand so the child doesn't arrive with a blank page. That is the assignment that arrives every day. And no ministry signs off on that one.