Living with my parents again for a little while has brought new insight into my life as to the education of children. After watching my siblings day-after-day and remembering my own experiences through private school, public school, and eventually college, I am more than beginning to understand why college aged students turn to partying to pass the time.
Of course there is the obvious, drinking is fun and seeing your friend do something stupid while wasted can be a treat, but when it is the prime entertainment for at least 3 days out of a week every week for several years, one begins to wonder what makes it just so entertaining. So often when I ask my friends why, their standard response is, "There's nothing else to do."
As I look back on what I was like in highschool as opposed to college, and then I look at my siblings and other children their ages, I begin to feel like I am seeing a little more clearly.
My youngest sister (of six of us) is only in the second grade. Each afternoon, she arrives home after 4:00, plays for a couple of hours and then settles down to work on homework and read or be read to. She has no extracurricular activities and an hour and a half of daylight to play outside in each weekday. On good days, a compliant 7 year old sits and finishes her homework quickly and is ready to be read to for a little while before being tucked into bed. Most days, however, are spent wrestling her into finishing her homework, taking several hours and ending finally with, "Time for bed."
The 12 year old has a few more extracurricular commitments. She spends less time on her homework, but then, she is a bit more diligent. Both of the high schoolers are swamped with extracurricular activities and homework. We're lucky if we get my brother down for dinner before he has passed out. Both of them are awake by 5:00 am and ready to get to school by 6:30.
I am most annoyed when I see my youngest sister sitting under a pile of homework. What I think of is when I was in the second grade: I went home and played outside and maybe had a bit of spelling or math homework on Tuesdays and Thursdays (this is fairly accurate of my 2nd grade year...no rose colored glasses). When I was in high school, I had a little bit of homework, but could usually finish it in study hall. I was very active in the arts, so there were a lot of extracurricular activities, but I had plenty of time to run around and do other things. Living in small town Kansas meant being inventive with entertainment, so we were always off having wild adventures.
The common phrase throughout is, "You'll have to do this when you are in college."
What the hell? Did none of these people go to college? It was like the weight had been lifted! All of a sudden, a new world of freedoms opens up to you. There are endless minutes of free time at your finger tips! But what was wrong with all of this time was no one to schedule activities any more. Sure, you could get involved in some things, but why be really stressed? Some intramurals and a job and call it good! The real problem with the free time for so many students is not knowing how to fill that.
Suddenly, students are faced with the reality that in order to be entertained they will have to find something to do. Well, what did they do before? Sports, theater, work, homework, music lessons, dance lessons...where are those now? The problem is that too many people reach college and don't know how to entertain themselves for longer than a couple of hours together. They have never needed to.
The theory that the more time one spends on the homework, the more they have retained has proven time and again to be false. An intelligent student can finish in 10 minutes what another student can't even in an hour, yet they may retain the same information. So why pile on the homework?
What a person learns as a child is to be inventive. How many times have you watched your children or siblings play and seen them invent something entirely new to them? Without the time to play and explore, a person loses much of that critical ability to be able to invent. Are summer and winter holidays enough to fill the void left by 2 semesters of school? Are weekends enough?
Apparently, I'm not alone in my thinking. According to an article written in 2009 and published on MSNBC's news site, yes, it might be too much homework :
A grassroots parents movement has taken hold in recent years calling for less — or at least better — homework. Books like "The Case Against Homework" (Crown, 2006) and "The Homework Myth" (Da Capo, 2007) have argued that too much of today's homework is mindless busywork that takes away from family time and does not improve academic performance. Homework's critics argue that kids should instead be reading for enjoyment, exploring and being creative. (
How Much Homework is Too Much)
Yes, piano lessons are wonderful, homework does need to be done, and books need to be read, but without time for play, childhood is kept as a distant thing. If time wasn't filled with homework and scheduled activities when younger, would it be drowned in tequila shots in college? What schools need to help children learn is how to budget time, not consume it for them.
