This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:
Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.
Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.
As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test. But here’s an interesting observation:
Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.” Everybody’s “phoning it in.”
But here’s the really salient point:
The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.
Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate? Just a thought.
Then:
The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.
Hmm. Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.
Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).
The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem: engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.
My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time. (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)
Here’s the thing. As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions: fear and love.
- Fear: if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
- Love: this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.
We don’t have to worry about the “love” part: as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.
What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.
The phenomenon of American students getting lots of homework is said to have started in 1957 thanks to a certain Soviet Satellite that went around and around the world beeping and scaring the west, until the battery went flat. Later satellites continued to scare the western countries, so the idea that western students, particularly Americans and particularly boys would continue to have unstructured time at home to make discoveries about interests and develop interpersonal skills was dead.
Beyond that, I don’t know how much homework students before Sputnik had to deal with.
One thing Karl Hess, Speechwriter for Barry Goldwater during his 1964 Presidential Campaign and one of the founders of the Libertarian Movement said was that the educational system was set up on the assumption that everyone wanted to become a Professor of English Literature, and all the classes, degrees, classroom assignments and lectures were directed at that goal. He thought extra-curricular interests (hobbies) of the youth combined with apprenticeships were better indicators of what trades and businesses they should go into.
As my ol’ gray haired uncle once said, “Teach a kid to read, then get out of his way.”, and he was right. Kids are learning sponges.
We homeschooled our son (taught him how to learn) and my wife wrote a book on homeschooling. She was interviewed by the WSJ and Rush Limbaugh.
Me, “The best learning takes place AFTER public schooling ends.”
After all, it’s a lifelong journey.
For me, public schooling was an enormous stumbling block and I graduated in 1972. It has become much, much worse since.
I too describe myself as a Public School Survivor. That was in a rural area, in the 80’s. The teaching staff had a gamut of some good, mostly incompetent, educators. The one thing I will say is the teachers had to live in the same community as the rest of us, so they had to interact with the parents at the grocery store, or church, or whatever, and there at least was a certain “give a shit factor” if for no other reason than embarrassment.
I look at at what happened to my offspring in the Public School System, and my biggest regret is me NOT homeschooling them. Terrible mistake on my part. In an urban area the staff at all 3 levels of public school did not give a shit. We had one or two that were exceptional, but for the most part the school staff was focused on getting kids to turn blue in a very red state, and if they actually learned anything along the way, it was incidental to the indoctrination.
Whenever anyone tries to get sentimental, and Mr. Chips-ey about our public education system, I remain unmoved. There are a few hero’s, many more villains, and many more who are content to just be cogs in the machine.
PR,
I agree with you completely. The teachers I had in public school varied from barely adequate to dreadful and incompetent with the latter two groups over represented.
there’s a huge, not-very-well-researched gamut here.
in the mid to late ’50s non-college-bound high school males took “shop” courses which had little to no homework though spending after-school hours (under teacher supervision) was not discouraged
college-bound males were encouraged to “go out and play” whereas college-bound females (and a few males) were strongly encouraged (and aided) to stay in and write long essays, even though not required by the teachers for homework, in subjects like history and English
this resulted in the very strong asymmetry we began to first start seeing in the ’70s and ’80s
I am going to disagree on the efficacy of homework*. The HS I attended was built around that as a principle (founded in 1947, so not exactly trendy). There were 2 hours of classroom instruction a day, absolutely no wasted time it was either instruction or quizzes/testing.
However, everyone is expected to put at least 1.5 hrs per class minimum prep per class and it was usually more (4 academic classes at a time, art, music, athletics were all side/extra stuff). We also had outside reading/writing assignments that went every day all year, including holidays and summer break. No one got on you about doing the work, you did it or you failed and were gone. There were teachers available for help if needed, but you had to go to them.
The idea was to prepare one for college, where most of your learning has to be on your own and towards high achievers for whom a lot of instruction is often a waste. I will say it certainly is not for everyone, but it absolutely works in terms of my preparation for college vs my peers.
*Maybe the “home” part is iffy because it is a boarding school.
I think (and readily admit I have ZERO evidence to back this up) that the trend is due in part to the teachers who are part of my generation finally reaching a level of seniority where they can influence the curriculum.
When I was in high school, our teachers generally expected us to spend an hour or so on homework. For their class. And their homework assignments reflected this, with zero regard to the fact that all of the other teachers were giving us similar workloads. With 6-8 classes a day that assigned homework (gym generally didn’t give homework, and some electives didn’t bother), that’s an additional 6-8 hours of work on top of the 7 hours we spent in the classroom. So between 13-15 hours of work a day, and that’s before the myriad of extracurricular activities many of us were burdened with to bolster our college applications.
We remember how miserable we were (is it any wonder that Millennials struggle when they have unstructured time?) and my guess is a lot of teachers aren’t going to subject their students to that stupidity.
Maybe because my experience is deeeeep STEM ( chemical engineering), I don’t share our host’s scepticism about the efficacy of homework. I had the good fortune to be mentally wired to understand the principles quickly but could not have remembered nor used them in my career without the practice provided by doing homework. Even more benefit came from working in groups to solve VERY challenging homework problems in grad school. This experience taught me how to work in teams and also gave me insight to my strengths and weaknesses; I am a less than a stellar mathematician but better than average at translating the physical world to equations. (I can set it up but can’t solve it.) Yeah, I benefited from homework.
But what about the muscle/skill workers? I’d argue that they’d nearly all benefit from improving their writing skills and their abilities to think quantatively, and that those improvements require repetition, preferably early in life.
Do the early experiences matter? I am a data point on that, I think. The Tulsa schools wanted to examine whether algebra could be pulled down from 9th grade to 8th grade, so they randomly assigned students who were on the academic track to start algebra or do a year of story problems in the 8th grade. I was in the story problem group. See my comment above about translating the physical world to equations; that’s exactly the useful skill I was developing that year by doing a zillion story problems for homework.
Exactly, there is a very strong correlation between how much work students put in outside class and academic performance.
All public schools for me; my first encounter with algebra was in 1955 in 7th grade, my first real homework came in 9th grade in a math-technical high school, and it was a grind for the next four years; about 6-7 hours every day plus weekend project and term paper work for the next four years, plus a huge reading list for summer break. Our public high school’s motto was “Theory and Practice” so along with academics we had lots of shops – drafting, joinery, pattern making, foundry, forge, sheet metal, electrical and machine, where we didn’t just see instructor demos, but actually had hands on and made things.
The result of this intense work was that any engineering school in the country accepted us as sophomores. I didn’t crack a math book until the latter part of my junior year.
On the other hand, we also had a general technical course to prepare guys for work in the trades, with more and deeper emphasis on the Practice side of things.
What strikes me as special in this day where it’s de rigeur to have $200+million high school buildings with hundred acre campuses, is that we managed to do this in an old school in the inner city founded in 1883. And it was all male – no hormone distractions and a school spirit unmatched by most colleges.
In 1977, affirmative action and a black racist school superintendent who deemed our school discriminatory turned a great school into just another primarily black, coed diploma mill
All public schools for me; my first encounter with algebra was in 1955 in 7th grade, my first real homework came in 9th grade in a math-technical high school, and it was a grind for the next four years; about 6-7 hours every day plus weekend project and term paper work for the next four years, plus a huge reading list for summer break. Our public high school’s motto was “Theory and Practice” so along with academics we had lots of shops – drafting, joinery, pattern making, foundry, forge, sheet metal, electrical and machine, where we didn’t just see instructor demos, but actually had hands on and made things.
The result of this intense work was that any engineering school in the country accepted us as sophomores. I didn’t crack a math book until the latter part of my junior year.
On the other hand, we also had a general technical course to prepare guys for work in the trades, with more and deeper emphasis on the Practice side of things.
What strikes me as special in this day where it’s de rigueur to have $200+million high school buildings with hundred acre campuses, is that we managed to do this in an old school in the inner city founded in 1883. And it was all male – no hormone distractions and a school spirit unmatched by most colleges.
In 1977, affirmative action and a black racist school superintendent who deemed our school discriminatory turned a great school into just another primarily black, coed diploma mill
Me too. I have degrees in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
My father graduated in 1936 from Henry Ford Trade School and was automatically offered a skilled trades job (apprentice electrician) at the huge Ford Rouge complex in Dearborn. Admission to HFTS was by recommendation only, no racial quotas or political pressure, and graduation guaranteed a good job offer even during the great depression. The school started at the Highland Park plant, expanded to the neighboring St. Francis Orphans Home, and then to the Rouge plant and Camp Legion and Ford Motor Company supplied the instruction, machinery, tools and materials. When Ford received the contract to build B-24 Bombers in Ypsilanti my dad was transferred and was the head of the Electrical Maintenance Department.
“The Henry Ford Trade School closed in 1952. In its 36 years of operation, the school graduated over 8,000 boys from Detroit and the surrounding area. Students graduating from the trade school were offered jobs at Ford but were free to accept jobs elsewhere.”
Why can’t we do this now?
Disclaimer:
I have zero interest in nor patience for intellectual theory.
The instant somebody goes on about TheMasses®, I find something better to do.
.
Often, my ‘better’ is doing nothing.
That is the amount of value I place in suppositions.
.
*****
.
I cannot relate to government agents in government schools propagandizing about some alleged importance of government agents nor civilization in the abstract.
.
And ‘yes’, I was home-schooled.
I had the immense good fortune to grown-up on a farm, my four grandparents lived next door.
.
My Uncle Jesse (middle name ‘James’!) was a civil engineer.
He built dams in South America and railroads across Afrika.
He challenged us kids with practicals, such as my favorite:
* “The price of anything is 96% taxes, prove otherwise”
In the 1950s and early-60s, working individually or as a team, we consistently determined:
* taxes account for 102% of the cost of anything.
2024, I imagine that number would be much higher.
.
1966, at 14yo, I worked at a bakery, midnight to 7:45am, taking just enough time to get to official class at a government school.
And ‘yes’, I always brought treats for the Lunch Ladies, and in return, they always saved several tuna sandwiches for my breakfast.
Teamwork.
.
During that rare term at a government school, I realized the futility of parroting such inane blather as ‘in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’… so I switched to trade classes at the local junior college.
Welding!, fabrication!, engines!, plumbing!, electrical!.
.
1970, at 18yo, I worked the Naval Shipyards in San Diego, California.
Within months, I owned my home, a motorcycle.
I built a 1967 Jaguar XKE into a road rally racer, and a 1958 Bentley into a dragster by fabricating a frame then setting the body gently upon it.
These were in addition to my earlier project:
* a Shelby Cobra clone — my 1953 Austin Healey track star with a Chevrolet V-8.
.
During the 1970s, I owned over a hundred rental properties around Sacramento, California.
.
I shudder to consider the horrendous impact of slogging through the full thirteen years at a government school.
I would probably be on government welfare in some government housing projects, my numerous off-spring all addicts and convicts.
My workers and tradesmen find YouTube and similar videos made by their fellows and by the makers and sellers of tools and equipment to be much better and faster than any school they ever attended.
The Instapundit’s theories on disintermediation by internet are correct and the disintermediation of the education establishment is only just beginning. A brilliant teacher can now easily reach billions of people without the current parasitic classes of education intermediaries.
The path of knowledge and skill from genius to senior professor to junior professor to teaching assistant to school teacher to student with huge support costs at every step is getting shorter and cheaper every day.
homework keeps the little nippers off of the streets and out of trouble. They need more homework.
This works just as soccer tires out the little buggers and helps them burn off energy. It also turns suburban wives turn into winos drinking wine out of disguised cups.