In early primary school (5-7 years old in France), we'd have around 30 hours of classes a week. We'd start homework in class, with the teacher there to help us understand the subjects at hand. We'd then go back home and finish that, which would take between 30 minutes and an hour every day of the week.
The number of hours of work at school and at home then gradually increased over the years, giving rise to more and more standardized, less personalized and "busy" teaching methods and assignments.
By the end of high-school (15-18 years old), I had an average of 42 hours of classes a week, plus about half of that in homework (so 60+ hours a week). It was brutal, which wasn't helped by the fact that I had chosen one of the hardest specializations (scientific), that my dad was a teacher, that my parents were generally pretty strict when it came to school stuff, that I had music classes, that I had insomnia, or that I was working in kitchens every so often. Expectations of academic success were very high, personal or social success, on the other hand, were out of the equation.
It was stressful and in my opinion, largely unnecessary. By the time I graduated high school (Baccalaureate, 9 subjects), I nearly instantly forgot pretty much everything I had learnt. Not that it wasn't useful, just that I was profoundly sick of it. I'm also much better at "learning in the trenches", but I suppose that's a personal preference.
If anything, this "training" made University (in Scotland) a breathe, while I saw other British students struggle with the amount of work in first year, I felt like I had joined a year-round summer camp (it got harder the following years but nothing at the high-school level).
This makes it somewhat hard for me to define what a good homework policy actually is. I liked my primary school of way doing things, it felt personal and somewhat enjoyable, but this simply doesn't work for some people. My high-school way of doing things was anything but enjoyable, but it had this military feel to it that does work for some (and has long lasting consequences, both good and bad).
My ideal homework policies would involve at least:
- cross-disciplinary projects
- non-standardized homework (all of my best teachers, without exception, wrote their own exercises and did not rely on books)
- some level of freedom/creativity, i.e. give the students a subject but give some leeway as to how students can approach the subject
- no forced group projects (not once have I seen this work properly), however encourage students to talk to each other (and not systematically assume it is the same as cheating)
- very generally speaking, make the students feel like they're doing this for themselves, not for the teacher, not for their parents, and especially not to meet a quota or check boxes in a bullet point list handed out to thousands of teachers by an unrelated bureaucrat