French President François Hollande has attracted considerable international attention in his new tax policies including a 75% tax rate for super wealthy citizens. Now, Hollande is moving to eradicate another inequity between wealthy and non-wealthy families: homework. Hollande believes that homework exacerbates the unfairness since wealthier parents have greater ability to work with their children at night than do average working parents.
Hollande stressed that “[a]n education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home” to alleviate any unfairness.
There are good reasons to question the utility of homework and the loss of free time for our children. I happen to believe strongly in homework but I share the concern over the loss of time for our kids to simply relax and be kids. However, the suggestion that homework is yet another socio-economic unfairness is wrong in my view. Plenty of working class parents spend time with their kids on homework. Indeed, there is a well-based view of many immigrant and working-class families pushing their children harder to excel in schools. Affluent families often do not reflect the same sense of urgency and commitment. It is also, in my view, bizarre that France would seek to “even the playing field” by shrinking it. Homework allows kids to work under the supervision of their parents who have the greatest levels of influence. It is not easy. With four kids, Leslie and I find it increasingly tough to get through everyone’s assignments. However, it keeps us informed of their progress and allows us to address gaps in their classroom learning. With large public school classes, such gaps are common as teachers are spread thin in class.
To Hollande’s credit, he is also calling for more public teachers and resources — as opposed to our country which continues to diminishment our commitment to public education.
Source: Washington
Sounds good to me. If one goes to school all day, why must one go home to do more schoolwork? Viva la France!
I was a stay-at-home parent; my then-wife and I believed it was best to allow our children to be responsible for their own homework, while we were available to them when they wanted help. I have seen parents push their kids to do their homework the way the parents want it – and even seen parents DO their children’s homework in order to forestall a bad grade. The homework, in my opinion, is the children’s work, not that of the parents.
J’aimerais m’installer en France, dans un battement de coeur ….!
Rove voter education plan in effect in France…..
Are you kidding me? What a putz. Equality would be to require each kid to have two parents at home and a work study room set aside for the kids. Next he will say it is unfair for one kid to have just one parent so all kids must have one parent. You want to put it all on the teachers. Dumb down you dumb clown. Go back to Holland where you came from and they will laugh you out of Amsterdam. Students in America should be aware of this. In ten years the results will be in and France will need to import college grads to do things that they cant do anymore.
AY if you are mixing up political awareness with basic educational deftness I believe the French have it way over the US….
As a student I consistently never let my homework interfere with my after school life, consequently I finished in the bottom quarter of my HS class, yet won a full tuition college scholarship based on a standardized test. In college I graduated with a low cum average because of utilizing maximum cuts and minimum homework,, but immediately found work afterwards. I also went to Graduate School on a full tuition scholarship. However, twixt College and Grad school, I attended Law School for 2.5 years at night. At Law School I discovered to my dismay that one needed to do extensive homework to succeed. My dismay was flunking out after devoting considerable time. This taught me finally the importance of doing the work assigned in order to succeed ad helped me in my future endeavors.
While I understand the concept behind this ruling, I think it is ass backwards. Inequality of opportunity is not correctable by treating the symptoms, it is curing the cause. If your society is set up on an unequal basis, then the results will be unequal. The first step is eliminating the poverty, not its results.
Actually, President Hollande has a valid point. Professor Turley falls back on a commonly held myth of the liberal coordinator class, “Plenty of working class parents spend time with their kids on homework. Indeed, there is a well-based view of many immigrant and working-class families pushing their children harder to excel in schools.”
And plenty do not. Every once in a while an exceptional student will rise from abject poverty and, once discovered by both coordinator class bleeding hearts and free market fundamentalist, paraded round as his/her academic success is the rule and not the exception.
Affluent parents also have the financial wherewithal to boost the academic credential of their dunderheaded progeny by hiring private tutors, think Sylvan Learning Center, and/or SAT/ACT prep lessons. A working single-mother, even one working for, say, the Postal Service, has neither the time or the monetary resources to have her brightest child groomed in such a manner.
I disagree with Professor Turley. For one thing, I think I speak for a number of parents in saying that adult life is busy and stressful enough without having to plow through fifty algebra equations and ten pages of chemistry worksheets every evening–mainly because doing so requires that I re-learn algebra, something I wasn’t exactly wild about the first time around.
For another, I think the few precious afterschool hours our kids *do* have are better spent reading for pleasure, going out into the fresh air and and kicking a ball around, helping to cook dinner (and thus learning an enjoyable and valuable skill in the process), watching a little (emphasis on LITTLE) teevee–especially if it’s something funny or historically relevant, or a beautifully-crafted work-of-art movie–and generally blowing off steam.
There will be time enough for bringing work home from the office when they’re adults, and far too many kids today are showing the negative results of too much to do in too little time, i.e. stress behaviors, insomnia, eating disorders, and depression.
The French President got this one wrong. Homework can be essential to success in school and provides a template for what one needs to do to succeed not just in high school and college, but grad school and on the job.
It’s good to see France is getting back to the France we know and love! How long before we need to pull their pompous asses out of the fire again?
More misguided nonsense from Hollande. The French deserve what they get if they continue to follow this fool.
DeborahNewellsays: too many kids today are showing the negative results of too much to do in too little time, i.e. stress behaviors, insomnia, eating disorders, and depression.
Since school is work for kids, to prepare them for the real world, including learning things that they will never use but helps to instill learning patterns and habits, maybe the too much to do is the gymnastics, tennis, karate, overscheduliing that has too many kids being shuttled to one activity to another without time out.
The thing kids are not learning it seems is how to have down time, how to be alone with themselves, how to sit still and read a book or work out the math problems. Homework helps a child to learn on his own, at his own pace whether he has good parents or not (My father screamed at me to do my homework and would not let me keep the radio on which helped drown out all the other noise so I could concentrate. 2 parents in an upper middle class home does not automatically mean the kid has a better chance.
(I, like Mike, was a lousy student. hated school, bored as a gourd as they say. Even with all A’s and B’s senior year I graduated in the lower 3/5th of my HS class. Thanks for SATS I got into all but one school to which I applied. Different theme but ending the Sat’s would be a detriment to many.)
Seerms like we are bending over, throughout the world not just here – the post about teaching to the ethnicity, to work to the lowest common denominator. That is not who I want becoming my doctor, my kids teacher (if I had kids), my dentist, lawyer, etc,.
Montessori schools do not assign homework and do not need to assign homework. THAT is what France should do to achieve equality: go Montessori.
The studies that show which nations have the most savvy students ought to determine which educational systems are best.
J’Accuse…!
Helping France along to be at a comparative disadvantage with other countries. All with the goal of achieving social greatness. This French leader has some rather counterproductive ideas of the real world.
Homework should have to be done at home. Each child’s schedule should include time for any extra work.
I was usually able to get my homework done during the short homeroom period or between classes or before band practice or…..A study hall could have been available if I dropped a class but dropping the class/es I didn’t like (English and Social Studies) wouldn’t have been wise. I never took it home for my younger brothers and sisters to mess up my books or papers. Besides, I had my hands full babysitting and fixing dinner. Essays were always late b/c I couldn’t deal with the blank sheet of paper that usually ended up with sketches of whatever I could see. It wasn’t until the advent of the word processor that I found writing to be anything but a horrible experience.
Current situation with another family is a dad who goes to work before the kids get home from school and a mom who gets home about the time the kids should be in bed b/c she needs the overtime. The two older kids don’t have homework b/c they have extra time during the school day to get it done. The youngest needs the adult supervision that he’s not getting. Video games are more fun.
I like the idea of no homework as an equalizer but there should be time during the school day for the students to do the extra work on their own. Those who don’t need the time are probably the students who would benefit from extra, optional assignments in areas of their interest that would further their education beyond what they are already getting.
This extra time could include aides to help those who need it. Maybe hire some of those parents who need the work and who also have the skills. Oh, I forgot, that money is needed for more bombs for the drones. Damn.
Why I have a hard time with essays – lots of editing needed….
“Homework should have” should be “Homework should NOT have”
“This extra time could include aides to help those who need it. Maybe hire some of those parents who need the work and who also have the skills.”
Or those students who have finished their homework could tutor younger students who need the help.
What Mike S. said in general, but I will have to credit Hollande for balancing the tactic with hiring more teachers. However, it is addressing the symptoms and not the social ill proper.
Also, we may have save the French’s bacon in WWII, but they saved ours in the American Revolution. Without French aid, the Revolution would have been materially choked out by British blockades and several important battles could have gone the other way.
A lot of people tend to gloss over that bit of Franco-American history.
Gene:
I remember when the French gov’t decided not to be a full participant in the Iraq war and some members of our congress were incensed to the point of making a mockery of themselves by censoring many things French; the most famous being the Freedom Fries action.
My solution would have been to ask congress to send the Statue of Liberty back to France, might as well–why stop with french fries?
You are right that we are much more kindred with France than many people realize. The animosity does not help. We don’t hear the French citizens criticizing us for what could be seen in their minds as abandoning them when the Suez Crisis ensued. It is true that the French gov’t has gotten itself into some losing positions, and it might be fun among friends to joke about this. Yet, as far as national policies are concerned at the very least it is better to have more friends than enemies. Even if the leadership of either country can be chumps at times.
“…there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.”
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rethinkinghomework.htm
It does teach you to work on your own (although I guess study hall might do the same thing.)
France will be importing grads from China to do their jobs.
Kids needs to be kids, teachers needs to be teachers and parents needs to be parents.
The school should and must assign a part of the class time for doing the assigned “homework ” just it should be called classwork. Nobody is closer to the subjects but the teacher who assigned it nobody can watch and give a helping hand but the teachers who taught the subject. Don’t burden the parents or invest in tutors. When kids comes home they should unwind and play Lego, read books or do outdoor activities, or whatever relaxes them. When they are done with middle school and going to high school they should be ” weened ” and do the class work in designated areas ( Libraries ) Home should be the place where you gather for meals and conversations and free time. Also moms and dads should not bring home their work either.
I do not believe that it is up to the Government to decide who will, or not do homework. This is a fundamental right of parents regardless of whatever social stratum they are on!
If school work which reinforces, cements and allows “internalization” of concepts aids children (and smart parents know this), then soon, the under-class would catch on, thus approving and allowing this along with other activities such as karate, piano lessons, volunteering etc.
BOTTOM LINE, GOVERNMENT HAS NO BUSINESS IN THE EDUCATIONAL, MORAL AND SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL UPBRINGING OF OUR CHILDREN…THATS OUR JOB!
Leveling the playing field by dumbing down the masses works exactly . . . where?
I suspect in most cases it achieves precisely the opposite of the intended consequence, which may well mean that not hurting anybody’s feelings is priority one.
Here’s an attempt at deodorizing stinky-think on our side of the pond:
http://drscoundrels.com/2011/03/13/doj-forces-dayton-to-dumb-down-passing-scores-and-requirements-for-african-americans/
I’d say lunacy in our public safety policies are at least as important as French kid’s homework, or the lack thereof.
Elizabeth Juanita Campbell said:
“I do not believe that it is up to the Government to decide who will, or not do homework.”
And,
“GOVERNMENT HAS NO BUSINESS IN THE EDUCATIONAL, MORAL AND SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL UPBRINGING OF OUR CHILDREN…THATS OUR JOB!”
Amen, Ms. Campbell, and let those of like minds shout it from the belfry.
Because, when those of political bent are allowed to sit at the adult table on family decisions for the rest of us, what is the inevitable return? We get proclamations as shaky as a Southern California fault line, i.e.:
> Whereas, the top X percent of any species has advantages that others don’t have, and,
> Whereas, the offspring of said X percent are – by sheer luck of birth – blessed with enviable gifts that benefit the species, and
> Whereas, Mankind was fashioned in the image & likeness of the Creator, we proclaim,
>Therefore, that homo sapien exceptionalism means inherent laws of natural hierarchies do not apply to humans.
I submit that we will evolve far more successfully, if & when we recognize that mankind will never change the shape of the pyramid. .