Villain or savior? The American discourse on homework, 1850-2003

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2004 by Brian P. Gill, Steven L. Schlossman

This article examines homework's place in American K-12 schooling over the last century and draws three main conclusions. First, homework has always aroused strong passions pro and con. Second, despite prominent press reports to the contrary in the early 20th century and again today, the best evidence suggests that most parents have consistently supported homework during the last 100 years. Third, homework practice is slow to change but is not unmovable, as evidenced by increases in high school homework in the decade after Sputnik and recent increases in homework for children in grades K-2. Nevertheless, the academic excellence movement of the last 20 years has succeeded in raising homework expectations only for the youngest children.

TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE; too easy or too hard; a spur to student achievement or student alienation; a marker of enlightened or lazy teaching; a builder of character or a degrader of self-esteem; too demanding or too dismissive of parents; a stimulus of national economic vigor or of behavioral conformity. The range of complaints about homework is enormous, and the complaints tend--as much today as in the past--toward extreme, angry, often contradictory views.

This article provides a brief historical overview of the rhetoric and reality of homework's place in American K-12 schooling since the establishment of widely available, publicly funded education systems in the mid-19th century. We have divided our discussion into four time periods. We begin with a brief discussion of homework in the 19th century, followed by discussions of the era of progressive education, the mid-20th century, and the period covering the academic excellence movement of the last 25 years. Throughout the discussion, we address three key issues:

1. Was homework a hot-button issue, and how was it viewed in educational discourse?

2. What did parents think about homework?

3. How much homework were children actually doing?

Homework in the 19th Century

Homework was rarely viewed as a problem in the 19th century. Students in high school were the only ones burdened with much homework; the common expectation was 2-3 hours per night, weekends included (Reese, 1995). Because compulsory attendance laws extended only to age 14 and adolescents' labor was key to the family economy, just a tiny portion of the population chose to attend (and could qualify for) high school. Parental complaints about homework appear to have been few. In rare instances, such as briefly in Boston and San Francisco, parents protested against arduous assignments and school boards sought to limit or abolish homework or make it optional (Gill & Schlossman, 1996). But these regulations did not last long. Educators reasoned that those who wished to attend high school must be willing to study; those unwilling to study were free to drop out.

Organized homework in the elementary grades (then viewed as including grades 1-4) was a rarity, indeed, often an impossibility, given short and irregular attendance patterns and typically overcrowded and multiage classrooms. While homework in the grammar school grades (5-8) was often burdensome, the basic method of teaching subject matter--drill, memorization, and recitation--required sustained preparation at home for classroom success (Gill & Schlossman, 1996). At a time when students were required to say their lessons in class in order to demonstrate their academic prowess, they had little alternative but to say those lessons over and over at home the night before. Before a child could continue his or her schooling through grammar school, a family had to decide that chores and other family obligations would not interfere unduly with the predictable nightly homework hours that would go into preparing the next day's lessons.

Toward the end of the 19th century, with the stirrings of the progressive education movement and the initial application of scientific method to educational evaluation, the first systematic critique of homework arose as a result of a research project conducted by Dr. Joseph Mayer Rice, a physician who was broadly interested in children's health and learning (Gill & Schlossman, 1996). Rice zeroed in on children's spelling--the epitome of the drill/ memorization/recitation pedagogy--and concluded that children's often arduous devotion to practicing spelling at home was unrelated to their later spelling ability (Rice, 1897). Spelling homework, in other words, was futile; it not only wore children down and alienated them from school, but it did not even translate into higher academic achievement. The emergence of homework as a widely debated, hot-button issue in educational discourse was about to begin.

1890s-1940s: The Progressives' Crusade Against Homework

The rise and rapid dissemination of the child study, child health, parent education, and progressive education movements fundamentally altered the context for educational discourse on homework in the first part of the 20th century (Gill & Schlossman, 1996). Although the homework burdens faced by high school students received more criticism than in the 19th century, the major focus of concern was on children in grades 4 to 8 (homework before grade 4 was still uncommon and thus a non-issue). The drill/memorization/recitation routine was now excoriated as a threat to pre-teens' physical and mental health. Local and state women's organizations (notably the PTA) pressed school boards to regulate and minimize how much homework teachers could assign. Both popular and professional educational periodicals joined in the diatribes; homework forced on children too young to bear its burdens was portrayed as among the worst of school abominations.