Ideas - Should homework be banned for students?

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

A hundred years ago homework was described as a 'sin against childhood.' But the practice is still a staple of our education system. Some parents like Dawn Quelch took a stand and banned it from their home. IDEAS examines the ideological roots of homework and the shift in thinking about child psychology and development.

It wasn't too long ago that much of Canada's political class was united in their embrace of immigration to help grow the population and with it the economy. Now, many of those same people are singing a different tune, arguing that Canada's immigration consensus is broken. I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News podcast Frontburner, where we recently took a closer look at the political 180 on immigration. Check it out on the front burner feed wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Okay, I've got some pasta here for anyone who needs it.

You're not to meet anymore. You're good? Thank you. The school morning rush, packing up the lunches, pulling together the backpack stuffed with homework. Describe to me what is your backpack. It is heavy. It has a lot of computer, like books and binders in schoolwork. So, Mirro, how much in that backpack would you say is useful homework?

Uh, how much of it is useful? Hmm. The worst kind of homework you can get is when teachers don't know what to assign you, so they just give you this random worksheet makes me frustrated. Then I'm stuck at the table working on this pointless homework, and that's just frustrating. Sometimes I start getting a little bored because it's just repeating the same thing, but you have to do it all. Or maybe you don't have to do it all.

Maybe you can just say nope. I used to grit my teeth and roll my eyes and have conversations with my husband about Why is this my job again? But now homework's not really an issue for me. Homework isn't an issue for Dawn Quelch and her family because they simply refuse. I started a couple of years ago when Cordelia was in grade one. And upon receiving a package of photocopied worksheets,

a busy work from the teacher told to do over a week, I wrote back a note. I just said no, I'm not doing it anymore and you can't make me. The debate over homework goes back 150 years. The basic debate from the start, pretty much without stop to the president, has always been quite polarized. You've had extreme positions on both sides. There's definitely a power dynamic there, and I think it's because of this power that's embedded in that institution, in that expectation that you will tow a line, that you will do what you are told.

Ideas producer Nicola Luxhitch. explores the minefield that homework has become. Oh, would you like to feel the heaviness of the backpack? Okay, feeling the heaviness of the backpack. Oh, my God. That is insane. This is ridiculous. That's like carrying a human being on your back.

That's absurd. It's good lifeguard training. Good lifeguard training. Okay, have a good day. Her documentary originally aired in 2016, So we begin by rewinding the clock a decade or so when her kids, now in high school, were just starting their pedagogical journey.

Can you bring your reading folders to the couch, guys? No, I can't. I don't want to. My kids were in junior kindergarten and not quite four years old when they got their first homework assignment, reading. This one's easy, easy, easy, mom, it's crazy. Hey, I can do that by myself. Once a week, they got paperback books to help them learn the sounds that letters make.

It's easy, peasy. It's about the letter. V. And what sound does V make? V. So it's all V letters here, V words. Van. Vegetables? There was also a sheet for us to record which books we read and whether or not we enjoyed them.

And then I can read. To be honest, I just went with the flow. We'd do it when I remembered. And when I forgot, I'd feel a bit of anxiety, panic, or guilt. But it hadn't even crossed my mind that I could refuse to do it until I met Don Quelch and her daughter Cordelia. My name's Cordelia Quirte. And I live in Kingston.

I'm going into grade three. What do you like about school? Learning most of all recess, because that's when you just, like, it's done. This period is done. And my favorite subject in, like, the reading part would be probably spelling and, like, writing stories. When Cordelia says she likes writing stories,

she really likes writing stories. Sometimes I write spooky fairy tales and sometimes really happy fairy tales. Um, I did write a story about a fairy and a fox that live in the sugar candy world, and they have to find these sugar keys to unlock another dimension. And once they get into the other dimension, they have to get some of the candy treasure back. And they have to escape the terrifying gumdrop master.

He's made out of gumdrops, and he shoots gumdrops that make you stick to the, the floor and it's a hundred years before they actually dissolve and you can get out of them. The fairy and the fox, how did they get out of the gumdrop master spell? A unicorn comes trotting into the cave and the unicorn has magic to make the gumdrops disappear. So how many of these kinds of stories do you make up and compose? Usually we get to write two in the morning of school, so I would be writing a lot. Wow, like two a day?

Yeah, two a day. Not bad for an eight-year-old, but when she gets home at the end of her school day, she's pretty much done. Tired and very sickly, like, wiped out, like, I'm so tired. So Cordelia has a very long day. That's Cordelia's mom, Don Quelch. She's a criminal defense lawyer with her own practice.

She's the kind of lawyer who takes on legal aid clients and gives free legal clinics to anyone in need. She and her husband also have a two-year-old enrolled in daycare. So she's busy. Usually we leave the house here at about quarter to eight in the morning. My husband usually drives Cordelia to school and I take her other daughter to daycare. And school starts at 9 and ends, I think, three something.

I mean, I don't even know dismissal time because I can never make it there for it. And she goes straight into the Y program afterwards and gets picked up by either my husband or I'm, or usually him than me, because I don't control when I get out of court. And that's usually five, sometimes even 5.30. And that's an awful lot of scheduled learning for a kid. It's a lot of time of work. And so when we get home, we're all done with work. And I do my best to try and keep my client's business out of my kids' recreational time.

And I'd appreciate it if the teachers tried to keep their business out of my kids' recreational time too. It started a little bit in junior kindergarten and senior kindergarten where I'd just laugh and be like, yeah, I'm not even going to bother sending this back. Like that's just ridiculous, the kindergarten. But once we got into grade one and there was actually some accountability like at the classroom level where Cordelia was being challenged as, you know, well, why didn't you get this done? Then I thought, well, no, we'll formalize this a little bit. And, you know, if not to put too fine a point on it, but if if the public school board's going to accommodate some parent that thinks that they don't have to vaccinate their child, because contrary to their belief system to have their child inoculated against polio, you know what? You can accommodate my belief that, you know, work-life balance is important, and family time is family time, and we're not doing homework.

At the beginning of each school year, Dawn lays out her terms to the school, in one crisp, concise note. Either a post-it or written right into the school agenda saying, in our home, we don't believe in homework. And so please don't send any home because it will not be completed. If you need further explanation, this is my cell number, let's chat. And most of the teachers do get back in touch with me. And I explain to them that if the reason Cordelia is not keeping up with the curriculum

is that she's spending time chatting with her friends or not getting onto the task that's in front of her, then yeah, it should come home. I don't view that as homework. That's a consequence of poor time management. That's you made the choice not to focus on work while you were at work. unfortunately, sometimes that means you have to give up a bit of your other time if you don't manage your time properly. I mean, that's how my life works. If I spend all day gabbing with colleagues and not actually, you know, writing a factum or something, then guess what? Saturday

morning I'm down at the office writing the factum whether I want to be there or not because it does need to get done. I don't see that as being inconsistent. Similarly, if there's something that she's not getting, a concept that, you know, for whatever reason, you know, she needs some remedial help or it simply needs to be reinforced, then absolutely. I mean, I don't want my child not to succeed. I just wanted to see that there's a purpose in it. She says the wrote homework they were getting, those packages of photocopy fill-in-the-blank type assignment sheets, fundamentally undermines the kind of worldview she wants her daughter to embrace. I'm not a big fan of blind obedience in any context. In my undergrad, I encountered that phrase

that, you know, of any liberal university, ruthless criticism of all that exists, right? That's, that's the goal here. Let's have a look at what we're doing and why. I don't want to raise a worker be. And watching kids get pummeled day after day with just no, well, no matter how hard you worked today, no matter how much focus or preparation you put into doing your job as a student, when you get home, you get to do more. And we're going to give you more just so you get used to doing more. So when we give you more, you're ready for it. And that's not the message I want my daughter to have,

that forever she's beholden to her employer. You know, I wouldn't want to have a life as an adult where I gave everything I had to my job for a full work day. And on my way out the door, my boss handed me a stack more and said, have it done for tomorrow when you get here. and to have the expectation be that I'm going to say, well, thank you, sir. Yeah, I'd love to do that, you know. That's not the lessons I want my child to learn.

You know, we only get to go around on this planet once. And to have, to train kids from a, to condition, it's not just training, it's conditioning, to condition them from a very young age that top priority over anything else is your work. So when you're a student, it's not actually work for pay, but again, following through, it's your job, going to be your job down the road, that because, that's your job, that's priority number one, and it can stomp over everything else that you're interested in, over all of your other relationships, your other obligations, and over your need for self-care. To me, that's counterproductive. And I see homework as basically a tool

for conditioning children to prioritize remunerative work over other aspects of their lives, other aspects of interest. And I don't think it's necessary. And when the homework stopped, it was a real relief. There were a couple of weeks where because of whatever else was going on in our lives, whether we'd had plans for the weekend or whatever, the homework hadn't gotten done. And that moment on Monday morning where we felt like bad parents for not having scheduled it in and not having enforced it and that guilt of, oh, we've let our kid down. And then her feelings of guilt of I didn't remember it and I'm going to get in trouble.

and that stress that would come in of we got to get it done. Why? Why? What is the point of it? Why are we so caught up in it? Why are we all stressed about this? Why is it ruining our Monday morning? How meaningful is that three-minute slap dash effort to put a piece of pencil mark on every single spot on the page so it looks like it was done?

I mean, really, that's not meaningful. It's not helping anybody. So I just decided that we weren't going to do that anymore. Of course, Don and her family aren't alone. In 2015, a school board in Quebec passed a no-homework policy. Back in 2009, another family in Calgary sent shockwaves across the country with their refusal to do homework. One of the loudest voices in the anti-homework movement is Edda Kralvik. I'm the 2015 distinguished outreach professor at the University of Arizona,

and I'm the head of a secondary teacher training program for teachers in schools on the Arizona-Mexico border. She's also co-author of a book called The End of Homework, How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning. Homework continues to punish poor kids for being poor. There's no way if you live in poverty. that you're going to go home to a well-lit study place with two well-educated parents just sitting there waiting to help you with your algebra. That's not going to happen. And educators who work in these communities know that. But it's the people that set education policy and who want to demand that schooling

is the centerpiece of a parents and a family's life. I think that it needs to be questioned. Let me just give you a poignant story. And there was, when my book came out, I was doing an NPR radio show in Maine. And a parent called up, and this man said that he was a single father, and he had a son who was in the fourth grade, and he was supposed to read to his son every night. That was the required homework.

And he got very quiet, and he said, well, my son can't read, and neither can I. And what should I do? How can I do this work with my son? I'm so ashamed. I don't want him to know that I can't read. I mean, and I'm on this interview, and there's tears rolling down my face,

thinking this unbelievably humanitarian father who is shamed by his child's school because he can't read. And, you know, adults in this country who can't read don't need to be shamed by their kids' schools, frankly. And there's another issue, even if parents are able to help their kids with homework, that doesn't necessarily mean they do a very good job of it. Two linguists did a conversation analysis of families when they were doing homework together.

And one of the things that they found was that when homework comes out at the dining room table, the parent becomes basically a school teacher and takes on the role of a school teacher. and usually they take on the role of a not very nice school teacher. And then the kid has to become their kind of quote-unquote student self. So they take on the role that they have all day long in school as a student. And it really complicates what is already a complicated relationship, the parent-child relationship. We know that's complicated.

And to then impose upon that relationship this role-playing, basically, that happens during homework. is detrimental to the structure of that family. And why is it so important for a child to have a clear distinction between home time and school time? Well, I mean, I think that all, I think that most parents know that the child that they see in the home is a very different child than the child that's at school. And I know as a teacher, I would have parent-teacher conferences, and the parents would come in and start talking about their child. and I would think that's not the kid I know. So kids are very different in school than they are at home.

And school is a very difficult social environment for kids. So they need a break from the role playing that they have to do when they're at school. They need a break from posing. They need a break from accepting an identity so their friends will like them. I mean, the kids that are authentically themselves at school are very few. So when you hear of three or four-year-olds having homework sent home to do with their parents, what are your immediate thoughts? My immediate thought is, oh my gosh, how sad that is.

I think that in many ways, certainly in the United States, and I don't want to speak for Canada, although I suspect there's some of this there too. The culture that we currently live in, especially upper middle class striving families in the United States, have a belief that if kids work harder and longer at school, they're going to be more successful and get into better colleges. And I think those are misplaced values, and I think they're very, they're sort of wreak havoc on elementary school kids.

who need to have free time and time to learn how to be their other selves other than just literacy and numeracy experts. Here's where it begins. Kindergarten, the ground zero of homework. Mr. O, as the kids call them, is known to everyone else as James Ogden. He's my kid's junior kindergarten teacher, the one who sends them home with the weekly homework packages in their backpacks. And what would you say is the goal of this homework that you send?

To be honest, the poem book homework started because parents asked for it. I had parents that wanted work for their child to do. The main homework for kindergarten is reading with your child to continue having rich conversations. And when you're reading regularly with your child, they can pick up on so much. much information about directionality of text. They might even pick up some site words, the convention of going from top to the bottom. So reading with your child is the main homework.

And at what point would you say, like what's the tipping point when it becomes too much? The homework? I just think it's interesting that the pressure came from parents. And I think that's an indication of how competitive a competitive mindset that we bring to education. The kids are competing with each other. The kids are competing for progress.

There's a, you know, this homework needs to be done because we don't want to fall behind because we're trying to get as far as we can. So that's kind of interesting to me that that gets prioritized or pushed. Whereas some, you know, I think some of the most valuable things that we can do is, you know, go for a walk.

And that doesn't appear necessarily in the curriculum or, you know, just get outside. So that expectation about homework, is it really about what's in the best interest of the child? Or is it more about this fear that if we don't have this homework, we're going to lose in this competition that we're doing. We're competing with neighbors, other people's kids, parents, you know, that, that it's part of a larger anxiety. We need to make sure that also the teacher is doing his job or her job, that this homework is going to demonstrate to me whether or not my child is in professional hands

of somebody who knows what, you know, so I think there's a competitive element to it that especially in kindergarten, I have to be careful with it. What do you think is that root of that parental anxiety and demand for, homework? Well, this is where I think it gets really complex because it becomes structural, right? It becomes institutional. The school is the institution to enforce social norms, to enforce regular, whatever regular is. And homework is an extension of the institution into the private home. You're not just telling the student now, you're telling the family, you're telling the parents, you're telling the caregivers what they're supposed to do. I'm, I kind of am sensitive to that as well. I don't,

I, you know, you know, if it goes back, if it comes back and it hasn't, you know, there's no value judgment that goes along with it from my perspective. But I know it can be a trigger and I think it's because of this power that's embedded in that institution, in that expectation that you will tow along, that you will do what you are told. And there's definitely a power dynamic there. Every day, hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country navigate their way through this incredibly fraught dynamic. Well, homework is one of the more complicated strategies

that teachers use to teach students things. Over the past few decades, nearly 1,000 academic research papers have examined this complicated educational strategy from all angles. My name is Harris Cooper, and I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. And he's the author of a book widely considered to be a kind of Bible for homework researchers. It's called The Battle Over Homework, Common Ground for Teachers, Administrators, and Parents. His work is regularly cited by scholars from across the spectrum of pro- and anti-homework camps. Well, I'm delighted that everybody likes what I do.

But the reason why I like it is because the answer is in the middle. Homework can be the best thing in the world. It can also be a detriment to children. It's going to depend on how you use it and how much you use it. And that's what we as parents and as educators need to have a handle on. We can often think of homework as not unlike taking a prescription pharmaceutical. if you take it too little of it, it's going to have no effect at all. If you take too much, it can kill you. So the point of homework is you don't want to overdo it so it destroys the thing that it's meant to foster.

And you don't want to underdo it so that you've lost the opportunity to use the home as a place to learn, to generalize those academic skills outside of the school. The dosage has to be correct. But does homework, as some have claimed, simply perpetuate social inequalities? Well, homework is not the great equalizer. What that means is that if you go home to homes with different levels of resources, you're going to find it more or less easy to complete assignments properly. But what is an enriched environment? It's not just economics.

There are lots of parents of limited means who have a strong sense of the importance of education, and they put aside everything else to make sure that their child gets the best education possible and benefits from it. So we can't simply call it economics. It can deal with other things like whether both parents work. Is there somebody home? it can deal with how many siblings you have. All of those things are influences on how successful an assignment will be. It's important for educators to understand the kinds of families that they serve and what is and is not within their reach.

If there are issues of resources, it's important for schools to consider how they can get those resources that are needed into the homes. Now, again, I'm going to say it. Homework is not the great equalizer. But we also have to ask ourselves, does that mean that we don't do it? Does it mean that nobody gets to benefit from it in order to equalize the playing field? That's when I mentioned my conversation with Don Quelch. I spoke with a parent who's a lawyer and she argues pretty convincingly that homework goes against her family values. that work should happen during work time, and they have pretty much a homework ban in their home.

What do you think of this kind of initiative? Well, there are a couple of things. First is if the parents won't support it, it's not going to work, period. What concerns me about what you said is defining homework as work. That's not a good attitude for parents to express or for teachers to express, and it is very important for teachers to attempt to construct homework assignments that aren't viewed as work, that are the kinds of things that kids will do at home, even if they weren't told to. After three decades of researching homework and researching the research, Professor Cooper says the basic formula that teachers have been using as a standard guide seems to be a good one. Multiply the child's grade by 10 minutes.

And that's roughly the amount of evening homework the child should be doing. So if you're in grade 1, you do 10 minutes. If you're in grade 3, you do 30 minutes and so on. What I hope to dissuade people on both sides from is the extreme. Don't abandon it and don't pile it on. Make it proper for the kid in his context or her context with regard to their age or developmental level and the home they're coming from and infuse it with the same excitement you have for learning that you want your kid to pick up. That's the most important thing. The debate over homework

and its utility is fraught. Proponents point to studies like one from Mississippi State University that suggested that students who do their homework learn skills that will help them out in the adult world, better time management, goal setting, and regulation of emotions. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. It's easy to know you want to make a change in your life, but it is hard to actually do it. How to Be a Better Human from TED is a podcast for when self-help feels too daunting or just not for you. I'm Chris Duffy, the host of How to Be a Better Human, and trust me, I do not have it all figured out.

But join me as I talk to experts about actually attainable ways we can try to improve our lives, whether it's facing fears, setting boundaries, cleaning your house, or all sorts of other topics. Find How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts. Love it or loathe it, homework is a fact of life. But how did it get so entrenched in our culture? Ideas producer Nikola Luchschich digs into the ideological origins of homework with this documentary originally broadcast in 2016.

The debate over homework, a public debate over homework, actually goes back about 150 years. Stephen Schlossmann is a professor of history and director of undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I think the basic debate from the start, pretty much without stop to the president, has always been quite polarized. You've had extreme positions on both sides. In the early 1990s, Stephen kind of stumbled into becoming a pioneer in the area of homework history. At the time, his son was in an elementary public school, which had a strict no-homework policy.

It was progressive in the extreme and kept parents entirely outside, and indeed made it impossible for me to get even to see the textbook of the, the school for fear that I might interfere with what the teachers were trying to teach and how they were trying to teach it. So he put his son into a private school for grade nine, and then the pendulum swung to the other extreme. The homework was so much, if you did it well, that essentially it was a work week, an entire work week that was filled only with homework, and which translated in our particular situation with the time in school, the bus rides to school, and the time doing homework, to zero time

for anything else other than eating. So it was like a 35-hour week on top of the regular school day? It was a 35-hour week from my son. One week I just decided I had to see what was going on here because it didn't make any sense to me. So I, for one week, essentially, abandoned my own professional career and started doing his homework. And it took me 37 and a half hours to do what he was doing in 35.

Wow. So maybe they're training them to be great. stockbrokers or something or corporate lawyers? Yeah, listen, in the end, we chose, particularly when I did complain to the school principal, or very quietly just to have a discussion about the fact this was going on, was this their intention and why were they doing it and got a response along the lines of, well, if your kid is really not up to the difficulty of these classes, we'll put him in a lesser classes.

We thought he was able to, but apparently he's not. So if he's a wimp, we'll just respond by putting him in less demanding classes. I didn't think that was quite the response. And the private school argued that they needed to assign this amount of homework because they want their students to get into Harvard or something? Yeah, they were really kind of pushing the limits. I think they were trying to establish themselves as the best school in the area. and that meant upgrading the prospects for access to top colleges

as a result of the schooling. But you'd see they were just making this simple equation. More homework equals higher achievement. Stephen and his co-authors started to scour the archives, going back to the beginnings of the public education system in 19th century North America, to find out how these two extremes. emerged. I'm going to oversimplify a bit, both in terms of content and chronology here,

but still into the 19th century, a rather traditional view of the child as what some call a miniature adult was the prevailing one and structured this kind of rote learning process that had become the norm for centuries. And the view of the child and the child's mind was there, was one of absorption through repetition. You learned by hearing things repeated and by learning them yourself. And gradually you applied them, but first you learned the rules of the game before you actually were asked to apply them. And that kind of Trinity of still 19th century pedagogy of drill, memorization, and recitation was the reigning one, and in part because it was consistent with a view of the child as simply a tabula rasa as a blank slate

on which to be written. And the knowledge that you wrote on his mind was knowledge that they internalized. So certainly one of the great wonders of 19th century education was that average students could recite pages and pages by memory of poetry, of literary passages, of great speeches throughout the history of the world. That's one of the ways you learned, but you also learn mathematics and geography that way and even literature too. So that kind of learning is memorization, learning is internalization. That's what a child's mind was good for and because they were miniature adults that we kind of filled them with knowledge, they would be ready for adult life through the knowledge that they learned by

internalizing, received wisdom through school. This view of the mind as a tabla rasa, a blank slate, goes back to ancient Greece. It later became a cornerstone of monastic education during the Middle Ages and found its way into the thinking of enlightenment figures like John Locke. The memorization of text was crucial. It filled the students' mind with information from proper authoritative sources. By the end of the 19th century,

parents who could afford to send their children to school, instead of keeping them on the farms or in the mills, could expect about two to three hours of recitation and wrote learning exercises every evening. Some students did their duty, often out of fear of corporal punishment in the classroom. But others, along with their parents, began to protest and saw homework as a kind of beast devouring their home lives.

And the school trying to extend, if I can vary the beast metaphor, to extend its tentacles into the home in ways that were upsetting of normal family routines. So that group established its position clearly that way. On the other hand, were those who viewed homework as simply an essential component of schooling, even if the in-class routines were to be changed a bit, if progressive education ideas for the classroom were to be adopted to some degree,

still, I felt homework was absolutely essential as a tool for training the intellect, for training character, for preparing kids to be job-ready and attentive to whatever demands were made on them to be well-prepared for whatever they're, their job might be in the future. And to a limited degree, homework from the start was considered to be

an essential component of kind of building the strength of the nation through the strength of its individuals who were well-versed in following orders and carrying them through. And the escalating debate was fueled by a crucial shift in the way a child's mind was understood. Influential psychologists started picking up on ideas from the romantic movement,

which elevated the inner life. over material obligations. Where a child's innocence, rather than kind of his miniard for adult status, his childishness came to be prized in ways that certainly from earlier generations of parents would have found rather appalling. But the celebration of the child's innocence, childishness, and his right, in a sense, to be a child and to remain a child as long as it was good for that to happen, for that child, that began to influence broader thinking about child psychology. And by the late

19th century, that romantic notion had kind of been incorporated into what came to be known as a child study movement, really the invention of the field of child psychology, and often associated with the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who would become president of Clark University in Massachusetts, but whose influence was nationwide in being really the sponsor, the director of hundreds, hundreds of these child study clubs that middle-class women, high school-educated and then the early college-educated women flocked to and droves to learn about these new views of the child in the late 19th century. And also to absorb some of G. Stanley Hall's psychological principles more generally,

and the long and the short of it, for our purposes, as we're kind of talking now, would center on his view that genetically, by nature, children were not ready. He was really inventing the field of developmental psychology. Children were not ready to learn in the traditional ways that schools had tried to teach them. They didn't learn effectively through memorization. In fact, it went counter to child nature to try to teach them that way. So two major forces, both practical, converged to push back against the institution of homework. On the one hand, there were parents who needed their kids to work, and on the other, middle-class mothers who wanted their children to be raised with a more

progressive attitude towards education. The combined pushback spread like wildfire in prominent women's magazines like the ladies' home journal and into newspapers and public debate. It was at this historical moment that the rhetoric got pretty heated. And these are actual quotes from articles at the time, from writings at the time. They used the actual quote that homework was a sin against childhood, okay? That's very much in the Hall end, the G. Stanley Hall mode. That homework did such harm against children that we could call it legalized criminality in regard to a form of child abuse, really, to children.

Another phrase that kind of struck my fancy as I went through literally hundreds of writings on this subject in the early 20th century was to call homework a form. form of mental abortion. I'm not quite sure what they meant by that, but it was powerful regardless. And so there's that kind of language, but if I may, I think I can capture the, in a sense, the excitement, but also the anger and the power behind the position, the anti-homework position and its roots in this progressive education movement. If I read from you what is arguably the first really important document on the subject penned by a man named Edward

Bach, who was editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, which was at the turn of the century, one of the most if not the most popular of journals aimed at upper-middle class and upper-class women, and that regularly addressed a variety of political topics

and education was one of its main concerns. So let me see if I can quickly locate for you this quotation that I want to read. Here we go. and this is from the year 1900. And here, Bach is saying that homework was a severe hazard to children's mental and physical health, and he called it the most barbarous part of the whole system.

And now I'm going to read more directly. He said, The merest novice in mental science knows that the last work given the brain to do often continues to exercise it during sleep. And yet there are thousands of mothers and fathers throughout this. enlightened land of hours, who wonder why their children toss themselves about in bed, why they mumble and talk in their sleep, why they are frightened by their dreams, and why they are so afraid of the dark. Now, all these are simply the results of unsettled nervous conditions.

Is it any wonder that children have to be called over and over again in the morning, and that they at length rise unrefreshed and without appetites for their breakfasts? Let me just turn the page here if I can and get the next continuation of it, if I can find it. Okay. Then he continues, when are parents going to open their eyes to this fearful evil? Are they as blind as bats that they do not see what is being wrought by this crowning folly of night study? That is homework? Is all the book learning in the world worth this inevitable weakening of the physical and mental powers?

Wow. That signals a lot of rage. Where was that rage coming from? Well, I think that it was really a battle of the old against the new, progressive education more generally, which wanted to transform what went on in schools, not just eliminate homework from the routine, but radically transform the classroom. For example, to make it real simple, unbolt those chairs. They shouldn't be bolted to the floor.

Give kids chairs that they can move around. in that they can walk in the classroom, let's make kind of a natural children's activity central to the classroom, and let's not have any attention devoted, any time devoted in the classroom to simply having them memorize things or recite things, let them rather discuss, play, make things, whatever. There was a language of so-called laboratory education, not really unlike some of the, what we call in the U.S., I assume you're having it in Canada, too, the so-called maker movement in education. all related to child study principles that G. Stanley Hall had helped develop, but in a more

sophisticated formulation were related to philosophical and pedagogical ideas that the great American philosopher John Dewey was responsible for popularizing in the early 20th century. So the rage really was, to some degree, seen as a battle of generations, the old fogies versus the new scientifically trained individuals. But yeah, I think you're right, that there was a fair amount of rage. And when you have terms, when you have people daring to call those who support homework in the schools as supporting a sin against childhood or legalized criminality, you do get a feel for that rage that help polarize communities debating the subject. Yeah. And the, just the, the, the, the, the blood and gore of the rage, too, when referring to mental abortion. Absolutely. They're hoping

to incite a revolution. Absolutely. And arguably, there was a revolution in one. what went on in classrooms for the first half of the 20th century, and homework was part and parcel of that larger debate over progressive education. For the first half of the 20th century, the backlash led to a decline and even outright ban of homework in some jurisdictions, including the entire state of California. A few decades pass, and then this happened. On October 4, 1957,

While the Americans were still finalizing their plans, Sputnik was launched. And the Cold War panic kicked in. The number of kids doing two hours or more of homework a night doubled. Then came the 1960s. And the anti-establishment anti-homework voices rose again. And then, in the 1980s, the Reagan era took over and a fear of what was called the rising tide of mediocrity. And the pro-homework voices rose again.

My fellow Americans, I'd like to talk with you today about a subject of paramount concern to every American family, the education of our children. We must act now and with energy if we're to avoid failing an entire generation. So there's been a kind of ebb and flow that plays itself out in 15-year cycles. Now, since the 2000s and the advent of the Internet,

this is homework guru, Harris Cooper again. You can find any opinion, you want somewhere online and some group of people who will feel the same way you do and also want to help you increase the amount of homework that kids do or decrease it. So kind of that ebb and flow has changed a bit with the internet as has everything in the world. And so now you can find either attitude expressed. Wow. So it's like being amplified. both sides are being amplified loudly in a way that hadn't been seen before. Both sides have been amplified, but the parents who are concerned that their kids are doing too much homework have the louder voice.

And those concerned voices often look elsewhere to make their case, places like Finland. So here's what happened. Back in the day, Finland's schools sucked on the level that our suck on. This is from Michael Moore's documentary film Where to Invade Next. He goes to Finland to find out how they consistently achieve such high international education rankings. He even met with Finland's education minister. Before I could say anything, she blurted out their top secret. They do not have homework. Wait, so you reduce the homework you've given them in schools?

Yes. They should have more time to be kids, to be youngsters, to be. to enjoy the life. So they have no homework. What if all they want to do is climb a tree? They could climb a tree. Yeah. They can climb a tree, then they'll end up while climbing a tree,

probably finding out about different insects and they can come to school next day, tell me about what they found. But Finnish education experts like Pasi Sahlberg have since had to do a lot of clarifying. Yeah, well, this, you know, Michael Morse's documentary is not the only one. done a lot of kind of a cleaning based on very serious journalists and even scorers who have

been writing about Finland and completely wrong things. About three decades ago, Finland started to revamp its educational system, from the more standardized model Canada uses to a model that's more child-centered. Yes, Finnish kids do have homework. In fact, it ramps up a lot when they're in high school. But the educators there are more exacting about the type of homework they will assign. We should not talk about this homework question as something that is either or. The whole criteria of this homework thing is that if schools, and often if the textbook authors, if they can invent a smarter homework, something that would really require kids to not only think

individually and critically, but also collaborate now with the, when they have social media and technology and all these things. If the homework, for example, would trigger a need to collaborate, that's what I would call a smart, meaningful, good, high-quality homework. And on a broader philosophical level, what would you say is the ultimate goal of education? What should it be? The ultimate goal of education.

It's almost like asking what is the meaning of life. This question has been with me for as long as I remember as I studied as a young teacher, went to teacher education. And it has changed a little bit. Now, you know, knowing what I know from my own country and I've been working in Canada, I would say that the main purpose of schooling today should be to help every child, every student to discover, realize what their own talent, where their own, passion is what they do passionately, regardless of what it is. It can be ice hockey or math or

politics or journalism, whatever it is, help everybody to realize, kind of discover what they what they would do passionately, what they want to do. And then the school should support and further advance those things rather than, you know, standardize everything and expect that everybody, every child must be given exactly the same amount of different subjects and that's a good education. I'm often saying that the outcome when the kids, when the children are leaving, for example, middle school when they're 15, 16 years old, that education has been successful for them or system of education has succeeded if these children honestly would say that

because of the school, I want to learn more. And that they should also be able to feel that they have a kind of a sense of what they really want to do in their lives. I'm not a big fan of blind obedience in any context. That expectation about homework, is it really about what's in the best interest of the child, or is it more about this fear? I mean, I don't want my child not to succeed. I just wanted to see that there's a purpose in it.

Homework can be the best thing in the world, and it can also be a detriment to children. So maybe the war over homework doesn't have to be an either-or proposition. Maybe it's more a question of defining what it's supposed to do. Pazzi Solberg is clearly onto something. And so is Don Quelch. Maybe instead of running anxiously around and around on the hamster wheel of homework, we should be measuring academic success by a principle. And if that principle is heightening the degree to which a child is inspired to learn more,

who could disagree with that? Once upon a tent, there was three little pigs. He said, ah! No, you forgot it that I half and I puff and I'll blow your house down. A three puff and a puff and I'll blow your house down. That was our documentary, Homework, A Sin Against Childhood by Nicola Luchitch. And an update from Cordelia and her mom, Don Quelch, who you heard from at the beginning of the episode, they successfully maintained the no-homework rule in their household all the way through high school.

It was up to Cordelia to decide whether the homework assigned was meaningful or not. Cordelia is now heading to the University of Ottawa for a degree in political science and communications, with an eye to becoming a lawyer, just like her mother. We are back to school this week as our theme for ideas. So stay tuned for episodes about the evolution of schooling and the role of the university. If you're listening on podcasts, do give us a like, add us to your favorites, share with a friend, or post a review. We love to hear from you. Technical production by Dave Field and Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.