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Comment by tailspin2019 | Hacker News Reader

tailspin2019

In my early teens I was really frustrated by the amount of homework I had to do and how much time I felt it stole away from my outside interests and hobbies.

Looking back, I was right to think that way because my entire career has been built on things I taught myself via those hobbies and interests. Not even indirectly. Completely directly linked.

Even thinking objectively about the meta skills that “homework” may teach you, I still think it has accounted for 5-10% of my useful professional/life skills vs my own adolescent interests (programming, electronics, music production and entrepreneurial stuff) which I peg at 90-95%.

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If anything, the only thing homework achieves is to make children used to being forced to do something for the sake of doing it.

People learn what they want to learn, children that aren't interested in the material can finish homework assignments but not retain anything.

Teaches children to triage what they're required to do, to get the bare minimum done without hurting themselves too badly.

100%, and I'd go even further.

The time I spent playing video games was better for my development all round than my time spent doing homework. The time I spent reading was far better. The time I spent outside playing was likely even better again, in my particular case.

I question the legitimacy of a system which teaches the scientific method yet kills millions of years of child development with utterly unproven busy work.

> I question the legitimacy of a system which teaches the scientific method yet kills millions of years of child development with utterly unproven busy work.

Yeah this is a very good way to put it

There is even an xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/519/

On the other hand, the homework i hated the most was writing essays for english class. To this day i still kind of hate that sort of thing. On the other hand, that type of writing is very similar to the type of writing they ask you to do in "peer reviews" during performance evaluations. Who knows, maybe if i was better at it, it would help my career.

That XKCD is surprisingly spot on - in my case it was quite literally a weekend spent learning Perl that kicked off my early web development career!

I had the same experience in university. It felt like the workload got in the way of learning the stuff I was here to learn. I had no time to be curious.

I rarely had to do homework outside of school. Typically I’d just do it during the class.

homework teaches obedience, submit or get punished

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