PHOTO: bbc.com
One school in the Scottish Highlands has decided that homework just isn’t worth it. They’ve stopped sending home homework with their 175 students.
Why?
Well, the children and their parents voted it out. 80% of the school’s children, and 60% of the school’s parents decided that homework just wasn’t helpful. Instead, students are encouraged to pursue their interests, read more books and comics, and just to play and be kids.
For a while, it’s been an ongoing debate as to whether or not homework is helpful at all. In Spain, pupils across over 12,000 schools went on a homework strike, refusing to complete their homework over weekends. Spanish pupils average as having over six hours of homework every week, but they perform poorly in international tests.
On the other hand, students in high-performing countries like Finland have less than three hours of homework a week. Is this hard evidence that homework should be scrapped?
Probably.
Children in primary schools like the ones in the Highlands seem to receive no benefit from doing homework. It’s not until secondary school that any real benefit from doing some review and relevant projects outside of class comes into play.
One spokesperson for the Scottish primary school put it this way:
“Certainly, it is important that all pupils develop their abilities to study independently and homework is one – but not the only – method of supporting this type of independent learning. Ultimately, it is for individual schools and teachers to determine, based on teachers’ professional judgement and knowledge of their own pupils’ learning needs, how best to structure the delivery of all aspects of the curriculum.”
Do you think schools give too much homework? Why? Should we ban homework entirely? Let us know what you think! Don’t miss another perspective on this issue in the video below:
