I'm really not sure if abandoning homework is a good idea. I went to school in the Soviet Union/Russia, we had ca. 5 hours school a day and around 2-3 hours of

I'm really not sure if abandoning homework is a good idea. I went to school in the Soviet Union/Russia, we had ca. 5 hours school a day and around 2-3 hours of homework, 6 days a week. I surely can't provide solid scientific evidence linking homework to results in learning, but I don't think it was unreasanable. I have to admit, I mostly remember math homework, I loved math and loved math homework, it was always great fun to hack those problems and then problems with * and and * (stars for the higher difficulty). We learned concepts in the class, but we also needed to train mechanics with pure repetition. Some commenters wrote about scaling - I think repetition is exactly something which scales well in the homework, you don't really need to do this in the class with a teacher. The same for foreign language, for instance. You don't really need a teacher a classroom to memorize new words, that's perfect for the homework. So I don't think homework is unreasonable, I think it's a valid approach to "outsource" mechanical/repetitive tasks which don't require classroom or supervision. Having said that, 7 hours of school PLUS 2-3 hours of homework is definitely too much.