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The following is purely psychological armchair theorizing. I think that homework is part of a larger problem where the modern education system slams into childr

The following is purely psychological armchair theorizing. I think that homework is part of a larger problem where the modern education system slams into children's brains that their time is worthless. Most elementary, middle, and high school homework is simply busywork. The very existence of the word busywork is telling. It's not just the wasted time that isn't valuable: it's the implicit message to a child that the best thing they can do is find something mind-numbing and pointless to do and just keep quiet. You see this in lots of "nice" activities that kids do, which are actually just time sinks that they are pressured or cajoled into. The most prominent example is playing instruments. Like half of kids learn to play an instrument at some point, but hardly any of them keep up with it when they are adults. Some people lament this as though it were some loss of innocence, but if playing an instrument was really a good use of time for most people, adults would do it, and kids would do it willingly. After 18 or more years of this sort of thing, I think it really sinks in that your time is basically worthless, and that it's not worth carefully considering how you spend it. Of course, the opposite is true. Your time is the most precious, and in fact the only, resource that you have. You should guard it jealously, and only spend it on worthwhile things.

stanmancan 11y ago
I disagree regarding the instruments. I think learning to play and instrument is about more than just playing it. Learning to play an instrument teaches you a lot of things that are useful in life; a big one being 'practice makes perfect'. My parents had me in piano lessons for about 6 years while I was growing up. I wasn't the best, but with enough practice I was able to learn whatever song it was that I was working on. That same work ethic has done very well for me professionally. As a self-taught developer I have always felt comfortable knowing with enough hard work I'll figure out whatever it is I'm working on. My daughter has started taking music lessons and in the last 6 months I've noticed a very similar thing happening. Ever since she started taking guitar lessons, she has started displaying more patience and confidence in herself than in other tasks like reading and school work than before. It's like it's starting to click with her that reading and math are like her music lessons; it takes practice, and she'll get it soon.
- beeboop 11y ago
  I am not a music lover, but I also agree that playing instruments is an extremely valuable life experience for children. It is such a unique experience and makes you use parts of your brain you probably wouldn't use for any other reason. There is really no other time in a person's life where they will receive such consistent daily encouragement at improving themselves in such a physically apparent way. Some people might argue that sports do this, but I think the "improvement" is much less apparent because the ability to run 100 meters three seconds faster is not anything like going from playing "Hot Cross Buns" to some complicated classical piece. The ability the play the instrument is not nearly as valuable as the experience in learning, improving, and using your brain in ways that doesn't involve math and reading.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    Learning just about any complex human activity results in obvious sustained improvements, for someone who cares and puts sustained effort into deliberate practice. If we leave out math and reading, we still have: woodcarving, dance, painting, rock climbing, gymnastics, sketching, football/soccer, cooking, chess, pottery, poker, speaking any foreign language, computer programming, graphic design, designing and building electronic gadgets, basket weaving, karate, public speaking, embroidery, juggling, mechanical engineering, and on and on for as long a list as you want... I’ll agree, however, that music is an essential part of human cultural heritage, and every person should be given the chance to learn to play an instrument. Just as every person should at least a little bit learn how to cook, and to sing, and to dance, and to juggle, and to sew, and to program computers, and to write mathematical proofs, and to build wooden furniture, etc... I think the great-grandparent poster was talking about something different though. Not teaching a child to play an instrument for a year or two to delight in music’s intrinsic value and then optionally continuing it if the child expresses interest, but ramming rigorous lessons down a child’s throat, forcing the child to spend years in training that he or she thinks is boring or a waste of time.
  - Xcelerate 11y ago
    > but I think the "improvement" is much less apparent because the ability to run 100 meters three seconds faster is not anything like going from playing "Hot Cross Buns" to some complicated classical piece As someone who ran D1 track & field yet can also play Liszt's Transcendental Étude No. 10, I would have to disagree with you. I think that running has had a much deeper impact on my physical and mental development than the process of slowly refining a niche skill.
jpittis 11y ago
I studied multiple instruments as a kid. Though it wasn't always fun, sometimes it was, it also taught me disiplin and I think it made me smarter. Thanks to my parents and teachers encouraging me to study music, today playing and listening to music brings me great joy.
nextos 11y ago
I cannot agree more. My school was quite forward thinking. E.g. they taugh us recursion using Logo in year 3 of primary school. This was early 90s. But still, our homework was completely useless and incredibly time consuming. I vividly remember it was calibrated to make us spend 2.5 hours on it per day, and this was after a 9-5 sequence of lectures. Completely insane and alienating.
hueving 11y ago
Meh, there are many things though that are important that a child won't realize so they have to be forced to do it. One such thing being school itself (regardless of the homework). Most children are not self motivated to learn anything without immediate gratification so without forcing them they will end up pretty misinformed. Unfortunately all of that neuroplasticity is wasted on the young. :)
- jacobolus 11y ago
  > Most children are not self motivated to learn anything without immediate gratification That’s definitely not true. I’ve spent enough time hanging out with small children of various backgrounds to observe that they are in general far more curious and self motivated to learn and explore than adults are. (Of course, some adults maintain this same imagination and curiosity.) What they often aren’t motivated to do is memorize lists of irrelevant-seeming facts or work through endless identical arithmetic problems.
  - hueving 11y ago
    They are only curious about things that provide immediate gratification. i.e. they won't spend the effort to learn trigonometry to quantify the length of a shadow they see from a flagpole. Once they learn the general intuition behind the angle of the sun and the shadow, they will lose interest and move on. >What they often aren’t motivated to do is memorize lists of irrelevant-seeming facts This is basically the issue. They don't understand that many things are important to learn to build the necessary base to move beyond a superficial understanding of the physical world.
    - jacobolus 11y ago
      If you are complaining that teachers and textbooks do a crap job explaining why someone should bother learning lots of the school curriculum, I agree 200%. Trigonometry per se, as it is currently taught, is a boring and not very important subject, not worth spending more than about 2–3 weeks on sometime in maybe 10th grade (for a typical student), maybe 10 hours of total class time. Its form is a historical anachronism, dating from a time when there were no pocket calculators or general-purpose computers, and the only way to do science or engineering involved doing lots of hand arithmetic and consultation of big lookup tables printed in books, so it was important to be able to convert many types of problem into a form compatible with the available tables, and thus it was essential to memorize a large number of abstract formulas as shortcuts to tricky reasoning. Nowadays, you can easily solve a broad range of such problems using a computer algebra system or other type of computation, and learning to understand the reasoning is more practically important than memorizing the formulas, but the standard trigonometry course hasn’t caught up. Moreover, the trigonometry taught in high schools now is based on the understanding from of several centuries ago, and hasn’t changed to incorporate any more recent advances in related fields. The current trigonometry course could be skipped altogether and replaced with a basic course in geometric algebra, from which the current content of a typical high school trigonometry course is a completely trivial set of corollaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra (Obviously a high school course would not be at the same level of abstraction as this Wikipedia article.) This would have the advantage of radically simplifying and clarifying nearly every college mathematics, science, and engineering course. If you really like trigonometry and you wanted to make an interesting course on the subject, or on triangle geometry more generally, one could certainly be devised. Such a deeper and more interesting course would then deserve more work and more respect. Students would probably even find solving the problems to be fun. There are many surprising and beautiful theorems related to triangle geometry which students should be exposed to as part of their cultural heritage but currently are not.
hdctambien 11y ago
> Of course, the opposite is true. Your time is the most precious, and in fact the only, resource that you have. You should guard it jealously, and only spend it on worthwhile things. What are school-aged people spending their precious time on? Clash of Clans? Snapchat? Call of Duty? Binging Netflix? 4chan...ning? Smoking pot? Maybe it's okay if we ask them to set aside a few hours to read a book or practice solving an equation or trying to do something that isn't immediately easy.
- copperx 11y ago
  I think no homework has the same pro/cons than universal basic income. When I was a kid (at a Montessori school — no homework) I used my free time to learn programming, tinker with chemistry kits, and read while my public school friends toiled away at homework. I guess that other kids could squander their free time in pointless gaming or Internet browsing, but there will be a few (or ALL of them, if you buy Maria Montessori's thoughts on the matter) that will use their free unstructured time to learn something interesting to them.
  - themartorana 11y ago
    This is where involved parents make a world of difference. They engage you in things that interest you, not beat you about the head with busy work. They talk with you about what you learned, read with you, teach you that hard work has its rewards, but work for work's sake is a waste. I was extremely lucky. My parents were both educators and very engaged. I hope to be the same to mine. But parents like this are all to often not part of a child's life.
  - kqr 11y ago
    Interesting! I was also at a Montessori school but we had plenty of homework. Granted, it wasn't a big deal if you didn't do it every now and then, but you were expected to complete the majority of it. Either way, I think your social position shows through in your reasoning. Being able to learn programming or tinker with chemistry kits at least to a point requires parents that encourage and/or support that kind of pastime. A lot of kids don't have that, and will simply not be exposed to the existence of programming and chemistry kits. (Books are generally more accessible, but there's also something to be said for parents encouraging and supporting reading – the people I know who like to read also have parents who like to read, and the people I know who don't like to read have parents who also never read, for what it's worth.)
stephendedalus 11y ago
And then we've also accelerated the idea that the one thing worth spending your time on is performing for the sake of society at large. We increased testing of children in America. Many schools spend a lot of time teaching to the test. The lesson there is that your time is most valuable when it's helping the state prove your productivity. Why learn a musical instrument when society will most value you when you're sitting at a desk? I would argue, regarding the value of learning a musical instrument, that it's worth children sampling many things to even figure out what they will like spending their time on. How will they know they will care about music without exposure to it?
e40 11y ago
Do you have kids in school? Because I do, in a highly valued school district (all 3 elementary schools in the top 20 in CA). In this district it's two things: 1. Parents freak out when their kids don't have a lot of homework. How do I know? One teacher told me they got complaints if they assigned too little homework, and complaints = being fired. 2. Fear of not being good enough to complete in the rat race. This is on the part of parents and it drives #1. I had long discussions with the principal of my son's middle school and I could tell he was completely powerless to make any changes. His job was to listen to me and make me feel heard. Problem was, I wanted action. I made my son update a spreadsheet, daily, of his homework per class. Estimated time to finish and actual time. It was a lot of data and when I delivered it to the principal he was a little speechless. He said he'd get back to me. Btw, the spreadsheet proved one thing: the official amount of homework per day was complete bullshit. Officially it was 1.5 hours. In reality it was 3-4. Weeks later I saw him at a school concert. He looked annoyed. He thanked me and said it was a "big help" and I could tell he thought he had more power than he did. He probably showed it to the superintendent of the district and they laid down the law. I never heard another word. The problem is institutional, massively reinforced by the parents. So we could ask, why are parents like this? One I touched on. The other is fear of what their kids will get into if they have free time away from home. I shit you not, I never see kids out and about in my city. On weekends, a little. During the week, never. Kids don't have free time (here) anymore. They have school. Some have sports and activities. The rest is eating and sleeping. It is complete craziness and I hate it and I feel terrible for my kid, but I can't afford private school and we're locked into this until he's out of this particular system.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  As far as I can tell, the best thing is to try to change the hearts and minds of the people around you. I don't have kids yet, and I'm not particularly optimistic that any of my friends, family, or community who will have kids at a similar time as me will agree with me about these sorts of things, but I plan to advocate for my perspective nonetheless!
  - e40 11y ago
developer2 11y ago
>> The most prominent example is playing instruments. Like half of kids learn to play an instrument at some point, but hardly any of them keep up with it when they are adults. Why do you think so many fail to keep up with an instrument as an adult? Oh that's right, upon entering adulthood we figure out that we have to dump 40+ hours into earning pennies while the company we work for earns millions. Earning even a basic income is the real time sink. What most people do all day long, at least 5 days a week, is the real busywork. Society would be much improved if every adult spent a good chunk of their time in the arts. Yet we continue to pretend that if every adult doesn't spend 40 hours doing corporate busywork that the economy would fall apart.
- chii 11y ago
  Who's going to clean the toilets, wash the dishes and plant the food, of everybody is just doing the arts?
  - jackvalentine 11y ago
    Who said its a binary choice? Quite a lot of jobs have loads of empty hours useless to you and the company that would be better spent elsewhere.
  - lmm 11y ago
    There's not 40 hours/week/person worth of that kind of thing that needs doing. I'm not saying no-one should be working, but a France-style cap of 35 or 28 hours a week would be a good move.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Farming used to be a farmer for every four or five people. Now its more like 1:1000. That's been automated to an extreme. Service industry is hard to automate - though we've done a good start with the dishwasher. Only 1 fulltime guy needed for every 100 people or so? That's pretty good progress. So yeah, we'll always need folks for services. And we'll have to pay them well in future! That's seems a pretty good future to me.
  - riskable 11y ago
robotpony 11y ago
In later elementary school at least (in Canada, in French immersion, in a moderately-above-average public school), homework was very effective in increasing knowledge. Our kids enjoyed it, and expanded their vocabulary and fluency in a second language. They had ample time to play, to participate in sports, and to sleep. I can't imagine them doing less homework, and I suspect they could have done much more. The whole experience of learning is about practice. Early on this can be in well crafted exercises and simple homework. I'm sure that homework can be counterproductive and poorly managed, but I've seen it succeed in moderation (2-3 hours daily).
manyxcxi 11y ago
I do disagree slightly with the cajoling into playing instruments. Now, my experience is just that- mine, so I'm not saying you're even probably wrong or right. My brother, sister, and I were all cajoled into at least trying music when we were young. Our elementary school did mandatory xylophones in 2rd grade and recorders in 3rd for all the kids. From 4th grade on you could opt in to playing any instrument, though if you needed to play a school instrument is was the usual suspects of violin, flute, clarinet, sax, and trumpet. If you already had access or were playing one you could bring your own. I was gonna bag it and not opt in. My parents (strongly) suggested I pick one for the year and give it a whirl. I tried the violin and sucked so very badly. Mid year I switched to clarinet because that's what was available and I was going to quit entirely if I had to continue with violin. Side note- my sister played as well and has gone into software development after excelling at school and university, specifically science. My brother did terribly in school, didn't graduate, and gave up on music on about day two (he's wound up being very successful any way though). By my 8th grade year I was an extremely accomplished clarinet and sax player (first chair, solos, competition band, marching band, performed on some recorded albums, etc.) and I swear I started feeling dumber after I gave it up. I played in my very limited free time in highschool as I was way more dedicated to sports and our HS band was good enough that you could do sports or band, you could absolutely not do both. I looked into it and there are a few studies that suggest people that participate in playing instruments often do better in school and are more mathematically inclined. I'm lacking sources as I'm on my phone. I agree that most busywork homework is bullshit. I'm okay with the monthly/bi-quarterly assignments that require free form thinking and finding your own way on a subject like research papers, craft based projects, book reports and such. Anything that lets my child delve into their thoughts I'm okay with, as long as they get a sufficient amount of time that they are able to go deep, and not just churning out crap. I will absolutely cajole my kids to try a plethora of instruments. If we get through strings, woodwinds, percussion, and brass and they haven't found a winner- then we can bag it. I expect it'll be two or three years of trying. If they seem like they really hate it or we've exhausted our options, we'll let it be. Given the amount of music we surround them with now, and how they interact with it (drumming, Casio keyboard, dancing), I think we'll find a way to keep them involved in music.
executesorder66 11y ago
I agree with everything except your example of playing instruments. How is that a waste of time? It takes years to master an instrument, so if you ever want to be good at it, it's a very good use of time. Secondly, it's not easy. So sticking though with it teaches you self discipline. I know a lot of adults and kids who do it willingly. Myself included. The reason we do it willingly is because at some point we were forced to learn how to play music and we stuck with it for a few years; after all that time we got good at playing instruments, and started enjoying it. It also became much easier to learn new instruments and songs, boosting the enjoyment. But we would never have reached this point if we weren't forced to drudge through the years of hard work.
hvidgaard 11y ago
I'm really torn on this topic. On one hand, the human brain ingrains knowledge by repetition. So this "mindless busywork" is exactly that. They already know how to do it, they just have to work to make it stick. I had an old math professor, he used to say: "repetition, repetition, repetition". On the other hand, I believe that the time can be far more wisely spend on actual interesting things, incorporating this "mindless busywork"/repetition - it's just not simple or easy to figure out what the activities and problems should be, and in many cases the children need some guidance as well, and/or should be in groups doing this. Given that many parents are unable to help their children because they lack the knowledge to do so, the teachers do the next best thing they know.
diskcat 11y ago
>The most prominent example is playing instruments. I think the important lesson for learning an instrument is that you improve by putting in effort. There are gonna be songs that you couldn't play a month ago but now you can and that gives you a sense of achievement and an appreciation of hardwork. The actual technical skill of playing is just a vessel for this character learning.
rorykoehler 11y ago
Learning an instrument teaches you discipline, concentration and patience... something that is in short supply in contemporary life.
defraptor 11y ago
I'll never thank my parents enough for making me learn music, even if it was really hard and boring at the beginning, it changed my life and is now the thing I prefer spending my free time doing. On a less personal aspect, it really is a good way to learn you can do anything if you practice enough
deleted 11y ago
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alanwatts 11y ago
>"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -Buckminster Fuller
VLM 11y ago
The TLDR is you're getting the best 1900 education money can buy, and middle class people spend most of their time competing in a self created parody of what they think is upper class sensibilities, because they are The special snowflake who will experience upward mobility (LOL). The German educational system that "the west" generally uses hasn't had a "git push" in at least 150 years. Until widespread recorded music technology and broadcast technology existed, being a musician was a very realistic vocational choice. Relative pay was much higher than now. Sure the pay wouldn't be as good as a carpenter or plumber, but its a nice mostly indoor and clean job, true the employer might want you to cross train as a waiter or bartender, but patrons like hearing music and before radio and records, music came directly from middle-class-ish hands. Some day public schools will advance beyond 1900 in general. Some day. Another aspect of mass aspirational education is its a window into what the middle class thinks the upper class does all day. The fact that it has nothing to do with what the upper class actually does is completely irrelevant, as long as they can easily and visibly compete among themselves for superiority in their imaginary game. So the middle class has built a whole elaborate mythology about the path into the promised land being reading the finest literature to each other and poetry and gazing into fine art paintings and, yes, playing and listening to classical music. That way you can fool the college admissions and interview counselors into thinking you're actually a Vanderbilt, or come from old European royalty, etc. I assure you they are not that stupid, but its an unstoppable belief, its an article of faith for middle class people. Amusingly due to my grandparents, I spent time as a little kid with the kids of extremely wealthy people, and I can assure you that in reality the 7 year old of a billionaire digs in the mud and plays catch and makes sand castles just like any other kid, and very rarely indeed recite Greek poetry, listen to Mahler, or gaze into old dutch master paintings. They do have very interesting "money is no object" life experiences but most of their time is spent not spending money at "no object" rates of speed. Very early I learned upper class people get very pissed off when you compliment them on their stuff, on the implication that they don't have enough money for the best. With the side effect that they feel no need to show off (showing off is a middle to upper middle class thing) so you'll never see a real Picasso in an upper class kids bedroom, but you will see a Picasso reproduction or poster in an upper middle to middle class kids bedroom.
zekevermillion 11y ago
Music education works for a few. My wife picked up an instrument in public middle school, went on to study at conservatory, and played professionally. I muddled about with a couple instruments which I enjoyed, but hated practicing set lessons. I would believe most students fall into the category you describe of having their time with music mostly wasted. The obvious problem is that our schools pursue a set outcome rather than providing opportunities. We want all our kids to "learn to play" an instrument, and we do that with a set curriculum (boring, lifeless). It's a shame b/c there is tremendous value and beauty in playing music with our friends. Focusing on ensuring the meaningless technical accomplishment of "learning to play" for everyone crowds out the more meaningful opportunity of making music, and ruins the experience for many kids. Same could probably be said of other curricula as well, for example CS.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
It's also busy work for a teacher to grade. Doesn't that help balance things?

stanmancan 11y ago

I disagree regarding the instruments. I think learning to play and instrument is about more than just playing it. Learning to play an instrument teaches you a lot of things that are useful in life; a big one being 'practice makes perfect'. My parents had me in piano lessons for about 6 years while I was growing up. I wasn't the best, but with enough practice I was able to learn whatever song it was that I was working on. That same work ethic has done very well for me professionally. As a self-taught developer I have always felt comfortable knowing with enough hard work I'll figure out whatever it is I'm working on. My daughter has started taking music lessons and in the last 6 months I've noticed a very similar thing happening. Ever since she started taking guitar lessons, she has started displaying more patience and confidence in herself than in other tasks like reading and school work than before. It's like it's starting to click with her that reading and math are like her music lessons; it takes practice, and she'll get it soon.

beeboop 11y ago
I am not a music lover, but I also agree that playing instruments is an extremely valuable life experience for children. It is such a unique experience and makes you use parts of your brain you probably wouldn't use for any other reason. There is really no other time in a person's life where they will receive such consistent daily encouragement at improving themselves in such a physically apparent way. Some people might argue that sports do this, but I think the "improvement" is much less apparent because the ability to run 100 meters three seconds faster is not anything like going from playing "Hot Cross Buns" to some complicated classical piece. The ability the play the instrument is not nearly as valuable as the experience in learning, improving, and using your brain in ways that doesn't involve math and reading.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Learning just about any complex human activity results in obvious sustained improvements, for someone who cares and puts sustained effort into deliberate practice. If we leave out math and reading, we still have: woodcarving, dance, painting, rock climbing, gymnastics, sketching, football/soccer, cooking, chess, pottery, poker, speaking any foreign language, computer programming, graphic design, designing and building electronic gadgets, basket weaving, karate, public speaking, embroidery, juggling, mechanical engineering, and on and on for as long a list as you want... I’ll agree, however, that music is an essential part of human cultural heritage, and every person should be given the chance to learn to play an instrument. Just as every person should at least a little bit learn how to cook, and to sing, and to dance, and to juggle, and to sew, and to program computers, and to write mathematical proofs, and to build wooden furniture, etc... I think the great-grandparent poster was talking about something different though. Not teaching a child to play an instrument for a year or two to delight in music’s intrinsic value and then optionally continuing it if the child expresses interest, but ramming rigorous lessons down a child’s throat, forcing the child to spend years in training that he or she thinks is boring or a waste of time.
- Xcelerate 11y ago
  > but I think the "improvement" is much less apparent because the ability to run 100 meters three seconds faster is not anything like going from playing "Hot Cross Buns" to some complicated classical piece As someone who ran D1 track & field yet can also play Liszt's Transcendental Étude No. 10, I would have to disagree with you. I think that running has had a much deeper impact on my physical and mental development than the process of slowly refining a niche skill.

jpittis 11y ago

I studied multiple instruments as a kid. Though it wasn't always fun, sometimes it was, it also taught me disiplin and I think it made me smarter. Thanks to my parents and teachers encouraging me to study music, today playing and listening to music brings me great joy.

nextos 11y ago

I cannot agree more. My school was quite forward thinking. E.g. they taugh us recursion using Logo in year 3 of primary school. This was early 90s. But still, our homework was completely useless and incredibly time consuming. I vividly remember it was calibrated to make us spend 2.5 hours on it per day, and this was after a 9-5 sequence of lectures. Completely insane and alienating.

hueving 11y ago

Meh, there are many things though that are important that a child won't realize so they have to be forced to do it. One such thing being school itself (regardless of the homework). Most children are not self motivated to learn anything without immediate gratification so without forcing them they will end up pretty misinformed. Unfortunately all of that neuroplasticity is wasted on the young. :)

jacobolus 11y ago
> Most children are not self motivated to learn anything without immediate gratification That’s definitely not true. I’ve spent enough time hanging out with small children of various backgrounds to observe that they are in general far more curious and self motivated to learn and explore than adults are. (Of course, some adults maintain this same imagination and curiosity.) What they often aren’t motivated to do is memorize lists of irrelevant-seeming facts or work through endless identical arithmetic problems.
- hueving 11y ago
  They are only curious about things that provide immediate gratification. i.e. they won't spend the effort to learn trigonometry to quantify the length of a shadow they see from a flagpole. Once they learn the general intuition behind the angle of the sun and the shadow, they will lose interest and move on. >What they often aren’t motivated to do is memorize lists of irrelevant-seeming facts This is basically the issue. They don't understand that many things are important to learn to build the necessary base to move beyond a superficial understanding of the physical world.
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    If you are complaining that teachers and textbooks do a crap job explaining why someone should bother learning lots of the school curriculum, I agree 200%. Trigonometry per se, as it is currently taught, is a boring and not very important subject, not worth spending more than about 2–3 weeks on sometime in maybe 10th grade (for a typical student), maybe 10 hours of total class time. Its form is a historical anachronism, dating from a time when there were no pocket calculators or general-purpose computers, and the only way to do science or engineering involved doing lots of hand arithmetic and consultation of big lookup tables printed in books, so it was important to be able to convert many types of problem into a form compatible with the available tables, and thus it was essential to memorize a large number of abstract formulas as shortcuts to tricky reasoning. Nowadays, you can easily solve a broad range of such problems using a computer algebra system or other type of computation, and learning to understand the reasoning is more practically important than memorizing the formulas, but the standard trigonometry course hasn’t caught up. Moreover, the trigonometry taught in high schools now is based on the understanding from of several centuries ago, and hasn’t changed to incorporate any more recent advances in related fields. The current trigonometry course could be skipped altogether and replaced with a basic course in geometric algebra, from which the current content of a typical high school trigonometry course is a completely trivial set of corollaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra (Obviously a high school course would not be at the same level of abstraction as this Wikipedia article.) This would have the advantage of radically simplifying and clarifying nearly every college mathematics, science, and engineering course. If you really like trigonometry and you wanted to make an interesting course on the subject, or on triangle geometry more generally, one could certainly be devised. Such a deeper and more interesting course would then deserve more work and more respect. Students would probably even find solving the problems to be fun. There are many surprising and beautiful theorems related to triangle geometry which students should be exposed to as part of their cultural heritage but currently are not.

hdctambien 11y ago

> Of course, the opposite is true. Your time is the most precious, and in fact the only, resource that you have. You should guard it jealously, and only spend it on worthwhile things. What are school-aged people spending their precious time on? Clash of Clans? Snapchat? Call of Duty? Binging Netflix? 4chan...ning? Smoking pot? Maybe it's okay if we ask them to set aside a few hours to read a book or practice solving an equation or trying to do something that isn't immediately easy.

copperx 11y ago
I think no homework has the same pro/cons than universal basic income. When I was a kid (at a Montessori school — no homework) I used my free time to learn programming, tinker with chemistry kits, and read while my public school friends toiled away at homework. I guess that other kids could squander their free time in pointless gaming or Internet browsing, but there will be a few (or ALL of them, if you buy Maria Montessori's thoughts on the matter) that will use their free unstructured time to learn something interesting to them.
- themartorana 11y ago
  This is where involved parents make a world of difference. They engage you in things that interest you, not beat you about the head with busy work. They talk with you about what you learned, read with you, teach you that hard work has its rewards, but work for work's sake is a waste. I was extremely lucky. My parents were both educators and very engaged. I hope to be the same to mine. But parents like this are all to often not part of a child's life.
- kqr 11y ago
  Interesting! I was also at a Montessori school but we had plenty of homework. Granted, it wasn't a big deal if you didn't do it every now and then, but you were expected to complete the majority of it. Either way, I think your social position shows through in your reasoning. Being able to learn programming or tinker with chemistry kits at least to a point requires parents that encourage and/or support that kind of pastime. A lot of kids don't have that, and will simply not be exposed to the existence of programming and chemistry kits. (Books are generally more accessible, but there's also something to be said for parents encouraging and supporting reading – the people I know who like to read also have parents who like to read, and the people I know who don't like to read have parents who also never read, for what it's worth.)

stephendedalus 11y ago

And then we've also accelerated the idea that the one thing worth spending your time on is performing for the sake of society at large. We increased testing of children in America. Many schools spend a lot of time teaching to the test. The lesson there is that your time is most valuable when it's helping the state prove your productivity. Why learn a musical instrument when society will most value you when you're sitting at a desk? I would argue, regarding the value of learning a musical instrument, that it's worth children sampling many things to even figure out what they will like spending their time on. How will they know they will care about music without exposure to it?

e40 11y ago

Do you have kids in school? Because I do, in a highly valued school district (all 3 elementary schools in the top 20 in CA). In this district it's two things: 1. Parents freak out when their kids don't have a lot of homework. How do I know? One teacher told me they got complaints if they assigned too little homework, and complaints = being fired. 2. Fear of not being good enough to complete in the rat race. This is on the part of parents and it drives #1. I had long discussions with the principal of my son's middle school and I could tell he was completely powerless to make any changes. His job was to listen to me and make me feel heard. Problem was, I wanted action. I made my son update a spreadsheet, daily, of his homework per class. Estimated time to finish and actual time. It was a lot of data and when I delivered it to the principal he was a little speechless. He said he'd get back to me. Btw, the spreadsheet proved one thing: the official amount of homework per day was complete bullshit. Officially it was 1.5 hours. In reality it was 3-4. Weeks later I saw him at a school concert. He looked annoyed. He thanked me and said it was a "big help" and I could tell he thought he had more power than he did. He probably showed it to the superintendent of the district and they laid down the law. I never heard another word. The problem is institutional, massively reinforced by the parents. So we could ask, why are parents like this? One I touched on. The other is fear of what their kids will get into if they have free time away from home. I shit you not, I never see kids out and about in my city. On weekends, a little. During the week, never. Kids don't have free time (here) anymore. They have school. Some have sports and activities. The rest is eating and sleeping. It is complete craziness and I hate it and I feel terrible for my kid, but I can't afford private school and we're locked into this until he's out of this particular system.

sanderjd 11y ago
As far as I can tell, the best thing is to try to change the hearts and minds of the people around you. I don't have kids yet, and I'm not particularly optimistic that any of my friends, family, or community who will have kids at a similar time as me will agree with me about these sorts of things, but I plan to advocate for my perspective nonetheless!
- e40 11y ago

developer2 11y ago

>> The most prominent example is playing instruments. Like half of kids learn to play an instrument at some point, but hardly any of them keep up with it when they are adults. Why do you think so many fail to keep up with an instrument as an adult? Oh that's right, upon entering adulthood we figure out that we have to dump 40+ hours into earning pennies while the company we work for earns millions. Earning even a basic income is the real time sink. What most people do all day long, at least 5 days a week, is the real busywork. Society would be much improved if every adult spent a good chunk of their time in the arts. Yet we continue to pretend that if every adult doesn't spend 40 hours doing corporate busywork that the economy would fall apart.

chii 11y ago
Who's going to clean the toilets, wash the dishes and plant the food, of everybody is just doing the arts?
- jackvalentine 11y ago
  Who said its a binary choice? Quite a lot of jobs have loads of empty hours useless to you and the company that would be better spent elsewhere.
- lmm 11y ago
  There's not 40 hours/week/person worth of that kind of thing that needs doing. I'm not saying no-one should be working, but a France-style cap of 35 or 28 hours a week would be a good move.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Farming used to be a farmer for every four or five people. Now its more like 1:1000. That's been automated to an extreme. Service industry is hard to automate - though we've done a good start with the dishwasher. Only 1 fulltime guy needed for every 100 people or so? That's pretty good progress. So yeah, we'll always need folks for services. And we'll have to pay them well in future! That's seems a pretty good future to me.
- riskable 11y ago

robotpony 11y ago

In later elementary school at least (in Canada, in French immersion, in a moderately-above-average public school), homework was very effective in increasing knowledge. Our kids enjoyed it, and expanded their vocabulary and fluency in a second language. They had ample time to play, to participate in sports, and to sleep. I can't imagine them doing less homework, and I suspect they could have done much more. The whole experience of learning is about practice. Early on this can be in well crafted exercises and simple homework. I'm sure that homework can be counterproductive and poorly managed, but I've seen it succeed in moderation (2-3 hours daily).

manyxcxi 11y ago

I do disagree slightly with the cajoling into playing instruments. Now, my experience is just that- mine, so I'm not saying you're even probably wrong or right. My brother, sister, and I were all cajoled into at least trying music when we were young. Our elementary school did mandatory xylophones in 2rd grade and recorders in 3rd for all the kids. From 4th grade on you could opt in to playing any instrument, though if you needed to play a school instrument is was the usual suspects of violin, flute, clarinet, sax, and trumpet. If you already had access or were playing one you could bring your own. I was gonna bag it and not opt in. My parents (strongly) suggested I pick one for the year and give it a whirl. I tried the violin and sucked so very badly. Mid year I switched to clarinet because that's what was available and I was going to quit entirely if I had to continue with violin. Side note- my sister played as well and has gone into software development after excelling at school and university, specifically science. My brother did terribly in school, didn't graduate, and gave up on music on about day two (he's wound up being very successful any way though). By my 8th grade year I was an extremely accomplished clarinet and sax player (first chair, solos, competition band, marching band, performed on some recorded albums, etc.) and I swear I started feeling dumber after I gave it up. I played in my very limited free time in highschool as I was way more dedicated to sports and our HS band was good enough that you could do sports or band, you could absolutely not do both. I looked into it and there are a few studies that suggest people that participate in playing instruments often do better in school and are more mathematically inclined. I'm lacking sources as I'm on my phone. I agree that most busywork homework is bullshit. I'm okay with the monthly/bi-quarterly assignments that require free form thinking and finding your own way on a subject like research papers, craft based projects, book reports and such. Anything that lets my child delve into their thoughts I'm okay with, as long as they get a sufficient amount of time that they are able to go deep, and not just churning out crap. I will absolutely cajole my kids to try a plethora of instruments. If we get through strings, woodwinds, percussion, and brass and they haven't found a winner- then we can bag it. I expect it'll be two or three years of trying. If they seem like they really hate it or we've exhausted our options, we'll let it be. Given the amount of music we surround them with now, and how they interact with it (drumming, Casio keyboard, dancing), I think we'll find a way to keep them involved in music.

executesorder66 11y ago

I agree with everything except your example of playing instruments. How is that a waste of time? It takes years to master an instrument, so if you ever want to be good at it, it's a very good use of time. Secondly, it's not easy. So sticking though with it teaches you self discipline. I know a lot of adults and kids who do it willingly. Myself included. The reason we do it willingly is because at some point we were forced to learn how to play music and we stuck with it for a few years; after all that time we got good at playing instruments, and started enjoying it. It also became much easier to learn new instruments and songs, boosting the enjoyment. But we would never have reached this point if we weren't forced to drudge through the years of hard work.

hvidgaard 11y ago

I'm really torn on this topic. On one hand, the human brain ingrains knowledge by repetition. So this "mindless busywork" is exactly that. They already know how to do it, they just have to work to make it stick. I had an old math professor, he used to say: "repetition, repetition, repetition". On the other hand, I believe that the time can be far more wisely spend on actual interesting things, incorporating this "mindless busywork"/repetition - it's just not simple or easy to figure out what the activities and problems should be, and in many cases the children need some guidance as well, and/or should be in groups doing this. Given that many parents are unable to help their children because they lack the knowledge to do so, the teachers do the next best thing they know.

diskcat 11y ago

>The most prominent example is playing instruments. I think the important lesson for learning an instrument is that you improve by putting in effort. There are gonna be songs that you couldn't play a month ago but now you can and that gives you a sense of achievement and an appreciation of hardwork. The actual technical skill of playing is just a vessel for this character learning.

rorykoehler 11y ago

Learning an instrument teaches you discipline, concentration and patience... something that is in short supply in contemporary life.

defraptor 11y ago

I'll never thank my parents enough for making me learn music, even if it was really hard and boring at the beginning, it changed my life and is now the thing I prefer spending my free time doing. On a less personal aspect, it really is a good way to learn you can do anything if you practice enough

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alanwatts 11y ago

>"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -Buckminster Fuller

VLM 11y ago

The TLDR is you're getting the best 1900 education money can buy, and middle class people spend most of their time competing in a self created parody of what they think is upper class sensibilities, because they are The special snowflake who will experience upward mobility (LOL). The German educational system that "the west" generally uses hasn't had a "git push" in at least 150 years. Until widespread recorded music technology and broadcast technology existed, being a musician was a very realistic vocational choice. Relative pay was much higher than now. Sure the pay wouldn't be as good as a carpenter or plumber, but its a nice mostly indoor and clean job, true the employer might want you to cross train as a waiter or bartender, but patrons like hearing music and before radio and records, music came directly from middle-class-ish hands. Some day public schools will advance beyond 1900 in general. Some day. Another aspect of mass aspirational education is its a window into what the middle class thinks the upper class does all day. The fact that it has nothing to do with what the upper class actually does is completely irrelevant, as long as they can easily and visibly compete among themselves for superiority in their imaginary game. So the middle class has built a whole elaborate mythology about the path into the promised land being reading the finest literature to each other and poetry and gazing into fine art paintings and, yes, playing and listening to classical music. That way you can fool the college admissions and interview counselors into thinking you're actually a Vanderbilt, or come from old European royalty, etc. I assure you they are not that stupid, but its an unstoppable belief, its an article of faith for middle class people. Amusingly due to my grandparents, I spent time as a little kid with the kids of extremely wealthy people, and I can assure you that in reality the 7 year old of a billionaire digs in the mud and plays catch and makes sand castles just like any other kid, and very rarely indeed recite Greek poetry, listen to Mahler, or gaze into old dutch master paintings. They do have very interesting "money is no object" life experiences but most of their time is spent not spending money at "no object" rates of speed. Very early I learned upper class people get very pissed off when you compliment them on their stuff, on the implication that they don't have enough money for the best. With the side effect that they feel no need to show off (showing off is a middle to upper middle class thing) so you'll never see a real Picasso in an upper class kids bedroom, but you will see a Picasso reproduction or poster in an upper middle to middle class kids bedroom.

zekevermillion 11y ago

Music education works for a few. My wife picked up an instrument in public middle school, went on to study at conservatory, and played professionally. I muddled about with a couple instruments which I enjoyed, but hated practicing set lessons. I would believe most students fall into the category you describe of having their time with music mostly wasted. The obvious problem is that our schools pursue a set outcome rather than providing opportunities. We want all our kids to "learn to play" an instrument, and we do that with a set curriculum (boring, lifeless). It's a shame b/c there is tremendous value and beauty in playing music with our friends. Focusing on ensuring the meaningless technical accomplishment of "learning to play" for everyone crowds out the more meaningful opportunity of making music, and ruins the experience for many kids. Same could probably be said of other curricula as well, for example CS.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

It's also busy work for a teacher to grade. Doesn't that help balance things?