Posted by
Conservative in Paradise on Monday, October 09, 2006 12:32:26 PM
Here is a smart idea from the teachers of our defunct public education system, get rid of homework. Great idea so students can have more time playing video games, watching tv, playing online, or even having sex with teachers. Of course this article comes to us from the left coast. And maybe there is proof that not having homework may boost standardized tests, especially when teachers are only teaching them what is on these tests, but it does not foster the idea of lifetime learning. It does not spur our children to do more to learn and get an education through their own efforts. They will learn, as they have been since Dewey, that you only need to do the minimum in order to get by. And of course the elites want this, do you think they want educated people figuring out what is going on in society? Do you think they want students to hunger and thirst for education? Of course not. An educated society would be able to prove flaws in the, as Bill O'Reilly calls them SP's, secular progressive ideology.
After years of teachers piling it on, there's a new movement to ... Abolish homework"The preponderance of research clearly shows that homework for elementary
students does not make a difference in student achievement. It is hard to
believe that a strategy used so extensively has no foundation," principal David
Ackerman of Oak Knoll Elementary in Menlo Park wrote in a letter to parents
this autumn as he put the brakes on homework.
Two new books read like manifestos against what authors consider an
avalanche of unproductive take-home assignments. Their titles lay their beliefs
on the line: the research critique "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too
Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn, and the more anecdotal "The Case Against
Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by
Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish.
At the same time, an international comparison by two Penn State professors
has concluded that junior high students who scored highest in math tended to
come from countries where teachers assign relatively little homework --
including Denmark, the Czech Republic and (take note) Japan. Conversely, the
lowest-scoring students came from countries where teachers assign tons of
homework, such as Iran, Thailand and Greece.