Far more impactful is the situation in the home. Our deadlines and targets and assessments should rely on class work alone when it comes to young children.Īnother academic, John Buell, contests the idea that completing homework helps develop discipline. Knowing this, teachers must keep the work and expectations within their primary classrooms.
Some children live between two or more homes. This inequality is true the moment they leave a classroom. They are not passive receptacles into which knowledge, or skills, or dispositions can be poured.”Ĭhildren are individuals. He explains that: “People are active meaning makers. In The Homework Myth Alfie Kohn calls homework a “modern cod liver oil” for kids that makes them “bored and anxious”. But one thing I won’t concern myself with is their bloody homework. Hair brushing is below par when it comes to the youngest. Like many parents, I battle with screen time. It’s harder in the winter months and I’m not going to lie, my three are screen zombies right now, but come spring, they’ll spend their afternoons outside, being bored and making stuff up to play. Our shoddy planning and warped car culture means that most children get driven to school and back. Ireland is well on its way to becoming an obese country. But for the most part, for many Irish children, running around outside and climbing trees is what’s best. If, perhaps, they are struggling with reading, maths or spelling, and need a daily routine, that’s a private matter between the teacher and the parent to sort. If a child needs individual help with something. Teachers and parents must let children be children. And parents should let them play freely, without hovering around, banging on about phonics and fine motor skills. When they arrive home, dragging themselves through the door with their half-eaten apples and lopsided hair, parents should kick them outside to play. The research is clear that homework for younger children is unnecessary and potentially detrimental to their wellbeing. We are obsessed with homework in this country. I am most certainly going against the accepted norm here, but I’m not being as outrageous as some might think. Our ministers still offer “no homework days” to the country’s children on special occasions. Young children from this day forward, as I decree it here, in my slither of a weekly column, must only work in their primary classrooms and then, they must stop working.
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