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If "wasting kids' time so they can't do worse things" is meant to be the point of the education system, it's a stupid idea, as it just means when they're adults

If "wasting kids' time so they can't do worse things" is meant to be the point of the education system, it's a stupid idea, as it just means when they're adults with more free time they'll catch up on what they missed, and as a bonus they'll carry a lifelong hatred of learning from being trained to associate it with mind-numbing, pointless busywork at school.

optymizer 4y ago
If homework is "wasting kids time" and "busywork", you and I have very different definitions of homework.
- teeray 4y ago
  I took Spanish for 7 years and passed all the classes. Countless hours of homework involved every week. As of my 30s, I can now mostly read warning labels and some of the Spanish manual if I happen to grab the wrong one out of the box. Conversations with a native speaker? No way. If that wasn’t a complete waste of my time, I don’t know what is.
  - optymizer 4y ago
    It seems like you wrote this in support of the argument that homework is a waste of time, but it doesn't seem like you're describing a problem with the concept of homework or how it applies to learning a subject. You're describing a situation when the subject itself was not useful to you in retrospect. Presumably, from your point of view, all of the time invested into it was a waste of time, not just the homework part. That said, it doesn't follow from this that any homework is a waste of time. It doesn't even follow that Spanish homework is generally a waste of time. One cannot generalize from your example at all because you might be an outlier. You'd have to show that learning Spanish provided no value to the majority of kids who studied it, or that class time is sufficient to learn Spanish so homework isn't really needed, which would be a very hard thing to argue for a human language. For what it's worth, I took Bulgarian folk music - I'm not Bulgarian, nor do I live in Bulgaria, nor can I play any musical instruments. Was it a waste of time? Acquiring knowledge is never a waste of time for me. Typing comments on HN might be though.

optymizer 4y ago

If homework is "wasting kids time" and "busywork", you and I have very different definitions of homework.

teeray 4y ago
I took Spanish for 7 years and passed all the classes. Countless hours of homework involved every week. As of my 30s, I can now mostly read warning labels and some of the Spanish manual if I happen to grab the wrong one out of the box. Conversations with a native speaker? No way. If that wasn’t a complete waste of my time, I don’t know what is.
- optymizer 4y ago
  It seems like you wrote this in support of the argument that homework is a waste of time, but it doesn't seem like you're describing a problem with the concept of homework or how it applies to learning a subject. You're describing a situation when the subject itself was not useful to you in retrospect. Presumably, from your point of view, all of the time invested into it was a waste of time, not just the homework part. That said, it doesn't follow from this that any homework is a waste of time. It doesn't even follow that Spanish homework is generally a waste of time. One cannot generalize from your example at all because you might be an outlier. You'd have to show that learning Spanish provided no value to the majority of kids who studied it, or that class time is sufficient to learn Spanish so homework isn't really needed, which would be a very hard thing to argue for a human language. For what it's worth, I took Bulgarian folk music - I'm not Bulgarian, nor do I live in Bulgaria, nor can I play any musical instruments. Was it a waste of time? Acquiring knowledge is never a waste of time for me. Typing comments on HN might be though.