Comment by travisp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by travisp | Hacker News Reader

The biggest piece of data that speaks to me against hours of homework being generally necessary for learning and academic success is homeschooling (at least secular homeschooling). Many homeschooled children, especially pre-middle school, have academic periods that last for a maximum of a couple of hours. Yet, these children are able to integrate academically back into traditional schools and excel.

I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload.

Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.

Very small class sizes make a huge difference. Homeschooling (usually) involves a very small effective class size. Lessons can be very carefully tailored, the teacher can change the course of a lesson entirely on a dime if the kid or small set of kids need them to, the pace is better tuned for each student, and so on.

AFAIK most prestigious private schools have much smaller class sizes than public schools, and that's not for no reason. 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less. Practically every single thing is harder for the teacher (except getting kids to participate in discussion, but that's likely a socialization/norms thing—I doubt kids used to small classes clam up the way kids used to 20+ kid classrooms do when they happen to be in a small class for some reason) and worse for the kids.

Homeschooling is a small effective class size, but my parents were by no means wonderful teachers (even though they are wonderful people). For homeschooling during 6th and 7th grades, I mostly used the purchased curriculum books myself without significant involvement from them. On a typical day, I probably received less instruction from my parents than a student in a regular classroom (sometimes no instruction).

It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone.

Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).

If you're self-pacing then you don't have to waste time covering material you've already mastered or banging your head against material you're not ready for yet because you're missing fundamentals. If you're much ahead of or behind average then that can be a ton of time—most of your day, even—lost to waste there. Not productively repeating material to attain mastery, I mean, but stuff like taking four weeks to cover a math concept or technique that you could easily have completely understood and internalized in the first week, then moved on to using it in more complex work, if it'd all been presented to you that quickly.

Probably 10% of the school day's moving around or preparing to move around or settling down from having moved around, or recess or otherwise not-learning (not to shit on recess—I wish they'd give kids more time for it in lower grades). Another 10-15% is stuff you might not consider part of your "school day" if you're homeschooling (PE, music, library visits, "specials") or nonsense you don't have to worry about (assemblies). So there's maybe a quarter of the day accounted for with no allowances for faster and/or better-tuned pacing or more personalized instruction—poof, 90ish minutes of your day back, 180ish days a year, for 13 years, like magic. Self-pacing you fit it all that remains in 2 or 2.5 hrs, don't need more than minimal breaks so there's minimal padding to that time, and the rest of the day's yours.

Public school's alarmingly wasteful of children's time, but saves parents a ton of time, collectively, in exchange.

You can setup a big class as a pyramid scheme though, the smart first graspers, get to work as tutors for pre selected groups of students, effectively reducing class size as a lesson goes on. Of course this has to have a reward.

I spent a couple of hours last night helping my son with homework that involved getting him to understand the sieve of Erastothenes and I can totally see this - the number of detours we had to take to find a way of explaining it (I made it harder by insisting he understand how to prove that you only need to test up to the square root of the upper limit you choose) that made sense for him was maddening. I can't imagine trying to teach it to a whole class of kids even a year or two older than he is now.. And at the start, I thought it'd be simple - it's just a handful of simple logical steps...

> 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less.

Anecdata: in my quite successful french public middle and high schools, I've never been in a class with fewer than 27 pupils. I would say success had more to do with geographic selection and other external criteria than from the internal educational benefits.

Yeah, selection bias probably does overwhelm most other factors in education, which makes it kinda hard to see what actually works.

I don't even think you have to add the qualifier "at least secular homeschooling". In the US, homeschoolers absolutely dominate their public school counterparts in educational outcomes. Of course, homeschooling parents are generally wealthier, but the statement holds true even when you control for income level and racial demographics. When tested, the average homeschooler ends up in the ~80% percentile compared to the general population [1].

Honestly, the statistics here are so stark that it shows something is deeply wrong with the US public school system. Personally, it always felt like a busy-work day-care when I went.

[1] https://www.nheri.org/HERR.pdf

If you above avg intelligence, you don't need to train it to keep. Therefore it makes it easy for you to transition from homeschooling to school.

This is probably tautological. Intelligence isn't a thing that objectively exists apart from performance.

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