I had unreasonable amounts of homework, and my teenage sister and cousins do, too. Even though they already go to a damn Free School.
I always did my homework, but I often did it crying. I was a good student, but the sheer pressure of all these exercises was too much, after a long day at school. In the Winter, I routinely got up in the dark. Then, I spent my day in a classroom. The two hours of sunlight left when I got home were spent walking the dog, which was followed by dinner, hours of homework, and far too little sleep. Repeat. Try not getting depressed on a schedule that completely forbids autonomy. Try growing up to make your own decisions.
We plan out our kids’ lives, and school is the highest priority for the majority of children. One of my students, a fourteen-year-old, just had to give up her piano lessons and her dancing. She loved both, but couldn’t manage to stay on top of schoolwork.
When they’re eighteen, we ask our kids to make their own decisions. “What are your interests? What are your strengths?” the career counsellor says, and we wonder why the kids shrug. It’s because we don’t leave them alone long enough to find out.
As an English tutor, I can attest to the detrimental effects of homework in language studies. My students routinely get writing exercises. Now…when a student tries to piece together sentences in a foreign language, the result is, for the most part, disastrous. We wouldn’t advise students to read horribly written books in the foreign language of choice, would we? Yet, we frequently set them up to immerse themselves in their own mistakes. Believe me. It does not work well.