Where is your pencil! Get your books out now! Stop mucking around! Get on the table this instant! Do you recognise this? This is just an average day of my life with my parents when I have to finish my homework. Is homework really necessary? I do not think so. Homework is just hours and hours of late nights that ruin your social life and sporting activity.
Weather kids go to public, private or religious schools everyone has the same frustrations. How much homework are we doing? Parents are spending too much time dropping their own after work activities just because they have to help or monitor with their children’s homework. This is tiring and stressful for both parent and child.
Creative play and imagination are vital for a child’s development. Why should this be jeopardised in the name of ‘achievement’? Children need time to relax in the same way adults do when they come home from a hard day’s work. Isn’t it important for children to have a good time, express their own free will and be independent. Children quickly become distressed when they feel they can’t do their homework and feel that they have failed when they cannot complete it in the given time. This leads to low self-esteem.
Teachers and children are under extraordinary pressure to achieve, hence the excessive homework. But good grades have nothing to do with the individual creative development of the child. Kids are having to stop their extracurricular activities to study in their room and memorising fact after fact. Most children come home from school mentally exhausted, tired and hungry. They need to relax and use up their contained physical energy in the very short space of time left in the day after out-of-school activities, homework, eating, bathing, and story telling.
Children are at school for