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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

     Firstly, the idea that a parent should have control over 
     homework in any capacity seems like a misguided idea

Full disclosure I'm a parent so biased. However with that said I know more about my child's workload than the teacher. The teacher knows how much homework they assign for "their" class. They don't know what the other classes assign. What extra curricular activities require or what chores the child has at home. Asking a Teacher to figure out the appropriate level of homework for a child is asking someone with inadequate information to make a decision on priorities. The person best suited to make an informed decision here is the parent.

EDIT: unbiased to biased.

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I'll preface this response with the acknowledgement that the world is not ideal, and there are some fundamental problems underlying how classes are structured (largely due to the fact that evaluations are based on the achievement of the lowest performers) which poses institutional obstacles to efficient work assignments.

That being said, given the (in practice flawed) assumption that the work being assigned is something your child needs, it's a disservice to say some other home life takes higher priority than education. This is especially true given the additive nature of many topics. Imagine, in a contrived example, you veto the addition worksheet despite your child needing practice. How is he/she supposed to keep up in the next week's topic of multiplication?

In practice this falls apart if you have a high performing child, but, campaigning for funding for gifted programs or ,if you're particularly lucky, working with the teachers to get customized work is a far better investment than lobbying for the ability to just ignore the work.

it's a disservice to say some other home life takes higher priority than education

Schooling is not education, only a facsimile of it.

Perfect is the enemy of better. There is huge room for improvement in our education system, but that doesn't mean we'd be better off with nothing.

There's nothing about perfection or relative improvement here. Traditional schooling is simply not an adequate model for education, but rather persists as a quasi-day care environment for occupied laborers to drop off their children to.

We probably would be better off with nothing. For one, abandoning compulsory public schooling will lead to an explosion in democratic, free, Sudbury and other alternative school models, as well as decrease the regulatory capture for homeschoolers and unschoolers. We are at a far better position than ever before in history to suitably practice autodidacticism on a mass scale, potentially with decentralized study groups, apprenticeships and democratic schools existing to augment and pool one's skills. Private universities will still exist and be able to focus more on research and less on being High School 2.0.

Not to mention such an arrangement would be more organic, in the sense of not constraining people to the uncanny artificial environment of public schooling, which does not mirror any other oft-seen real life institution. It's an odd syncretic chimera of its own.

Which is not what the poster above was saying at all. Public schooling is a necessity because not everyone can afford to homeschool or hire a personal tutor for their children. That point is not under dispute.

However denying parents the input of their far superior knowledge regarding the workload their child has as well as implying (intended or not) that the homework situation does not need improvement is denying the very real problem that kids are stressed and overworked. Some as early as kindergarten.

One perfect valid grass roots solution to this is for parents to push back against the school. And unless schools start changing it's the only solution available to parents of those stressed and overworked children.

Giving parents veto power over associated work will not fix the problem that schooling is not education.

EDIT: I missed [lordCarbonFiber](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10459743 )'s comment, saying the same but better.

you're losing me with this. Parents, exhausted after work, kids already 7 hours of school, then there's this new set of chores to deal with instead of enjoying life, you know life, the finite thing that runs out.

that AND this goal of "education" you seem to have is not the actual goal for most people. My goal for me or my kids is not to "be educated" Just like a goal of a society is not to "have laws"

It's an investment sure and you're right in asserting that childhood is finite. Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child.

In my personal experience (and I suspect yours given you're on this site) my entire livelihood is dependent on my knowledge. For me, this was cultivated on the lattice of the public school system (K-12 to university) but I'll freely admit I was lucky in that respect. My personal dream is that every child gets the same opportunity.

Fortunately, the US is interesting in that they give you the freedom to home school. If knowledge isn't a priority we as a country give you the right to deny it to your child.

That you equate homeschooling with "denial of knowledge" makes me strongly question your intentions. If homeschooling is the denial of knowledge, we must also concede compulsory public schooling is the institutionalized withholding thereof.

I know a few people who've been home schooled. You would never be able to tell unless they told you (which is how I found out in every case)

I suspect the parent is referring to the nearly epidemic levels of religion driven homeschooling we have in the US. It's apparently totally acceptable to pull your child out of school and teach them dinosaurs didn't exist and that evolution is probably wrong.

Source: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statisti...

I was homeschooled and I'm on this site. Homeschooling in fact is why I'm on this site and well employed in the lucrative world software development. Without homeschooling my education would have been far less than it was. In fact I was homeschooled because my parents saw that I was getting lost in the system and pulled me out of it.

You make a lot of statements without supporting evidence in this conversation.

> In my personal experience (and I suspect yours given you're on this site) my entire livelihood is dependent on my knowledge.

So does mine. And almost everything I know about tech, and about the science and the world came from avoiding learning in school and reading books instead, or playing computer games for 8 hours straight to the point I learned English, and then decided to make my own, and then bye bye homework (and grades) and listening to the teachers because I have programming books to read (I ended up having bad math grades for a while, but I caught up - getting into game development tends to make you very good at school-level math very quickly, sans the bullshit they usually teach you instead of actual understanding).

I don't want to say here that school is pointless - but the best people I know are either ones totally ok with discipline and systematic assignments, or people who ignore all that stuff and learn their own way. Most kids get neither full-in or full-out, so they get all the disadvantages of rote learning with none of the benefits of systematic practice.

You are assuming the education of a single class takes precedence over other classes, the education of extra curricular activities, and the education of chores at home. That is a large assumption that I'm pretty sure is invalid.

The crux of this problem is that time spent in school is poorly spent for a host of reasons. If you child spends close to 7 hours at school and none of that time was available for the work that is expected to be done at home then that imposes an undue burden on the child and the family.

Rather than insisting that the needs of a schools poor use of time should supersede the families needs perhaps the solution is to fix the poor use of time instead.

The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home?

Im not sure where you get the idea of poor time use from. Out of that 8 hours you need to fit lunch, recess, cumulative transition times, and at least 4 major academic topics (Math, Science, History, Language) plus hopefully a rotating time dedicated to the arts. And you want that to fit into 8 hours on top of the practice required to achieve mastery?

Finally, this is me making a value judgement. Just picking one class, math, I'll go out on a limb and say mastery of basic arithmetic is going to resonate much farther in a child's life than participating an extra hour in extra curricular or chores.

"The metaphor that resonates with me as a musician, would you expect someone to get better at piano only by attending lessons but no practice at home?"

If they were at lessons for 7 hours a day, five days a week... yes! Yes I in fact do.

Except children don't sit down at school and begin a "school lesson". Basic education is going to cover Math, Science, Language, History and hopefully Art. So in a given subject there might be 5 hours of lesson time week. When framed that way, asking for another hour or 2 of practice time for mastery doesn't sound so unreasonable.

Assuming that the homework is "practice" and not "instruction". A good bit of my older kid's homework is continuation of the instruction at home without the benefit of the teacher. Not that I fully blame the teacher for this, I blame the district for it as much, if not more.

But to continue the metaphor, I would expect a child receiving five one-hour lessons a week on piano to be proficient enough to show they have received lessons within a decent amount of time. Without extra practice. But what's the criteria to consider it a success? What amount of time? Do we consider whether the child has a natural talent for it in the equation? Personally, I don't think it's a good metaphor.

1 hour a day, every day, of each of the subjects you listed should be plenty. Anyways, anything longer than that is difficult for adults to pay attention to, let alone children.

If you had an hour per day of instruction/guided practice at the piano, you would absolutely get better. You probably wouldn't become a virtuoso, but the school system isn't designed to make people into virtuosos. That requires more practice.

> You are assuming the education of a single class takes precedence over (...) the education of extra curricular activities

I think this is sort of in the name, extra-curricular - as in, "in addition to the stuff that's the priority".

> and the education of chores at home

Here I will have to agree with 'lordCarbonFiber. You can't have teachers asking kids to do something and then let parents arbitrarily overrule them. One of the point of public education system is that the kid gets to learn something regardless of what parents think of it. You're probably a very responsible person, but the general population is a mix of people, some of whom have ideological reasons to reject parts of science, others simply don't like math, and many are just so overworked that they'll let the kid take a break at the first sign of difficulty. It's such a random mix that you have to enforce some rules, or else the kids will propagate further the faults of their parents.

> The crux of this problem is that time spent in school is poorly spent for a host of reasons. If you child spends close to 7 hours at school and none of that time was available for the work that is expected to be done at home then that imposes an undue burden on the child and the family.

Totally, 100% agree.

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