No more homework?

Tuesday afternoon, 3.15 p.m. Fernando, 12 years old, comes home and immediately sits down at the desk in his room. He has homework. Maths, one of his favourite subjects. Fernando has to name fractions in squares. It's easy for him. He finishes after 20 minutes. «Homework rarely stresses me out,» says Fernando. «I always do it straight after school.» His mum would love to take a look at his work, but Fernando doesn't want to. «I'm learning for myself, not for my mum,» he says.

Hach. So there are those children for whom homework is a finger exercise, nothing more than a pastime. For everyone else, homework is everything else: an annoying evil, a source of incomprehension, a pedagogical tyranny, an irritant.

Pupils who have no one to turn to at home are at a disadvantage.

Bernard Geruch, President of the Swiss Association of School Principals

The debate about the sense and nonsense of homework has been reignited. Lisa Lehner, Vice President of the Swiss Headteachers' Association, argued in favour of a school without homework in this magazine. Her colleague, association president Bernard Gertsch, also spoke out in favour of changes. He called for homework to become schoolwork in the interests of equal opportunities. Pupils who have no one to turn to at home are disadvantaged by traditional homework.

The value of homework is also the subject of heated debate in other countries. In Spain, they are on strike and in Israel they want to abolish them altogether. A letter from a teacher in Texas, USA, explaining why she rejects homework became an internet hit. And in Germany, the issue has taken on political dimensions: The Greens, together with the state student council, want to abolish homework across the board.

Does it really make sense to do without homework? What do children gain from homework and what not? What would be an alternative? And what do teachers think, what do children and their parents want? This dossier explores these questions.

School without homework is not just a pipe dream. It has existed before - namely in the canton of Schwyz. In 1993, the Department of Education decided to abolish all homework. From then on, the learning content was to be integrated into lesson time and the number of lessons per week was increased by one hour. This made the children happy, but not their parents. After just four years, the experiment was cancelled - due to pressure from parents. The government cancelled the scheme in 1997.

Homework as a means of parental control

Parents are actually less critical of homework than expected. Many of the parents interviewed for this dossier stated that they were in favour of homework as a control tool. «It lets me know roughly where my son stands,» says one mother. Homework creates a link between school and home. Or as a leaflet from the canton of Lucerne puts it: «Homework is a window into the school and gives parents an insight into what is going on there.»

Many parents are worried that their child will not be able to compete in the education market.

Some mums and dads don't leave it at that. A study by German educationalist Thomas Hardt shows that parents regularly help their children with their homework. They want it to be done well and do so out of concern that their child might not succeed in the educational competition. For example, 56 per cent of parents rate the fact that a child has to do less than one hour of homework per day as an indication that this child is not being sufficiently challenged by the school.

Parents grew up with Ufzgi

However, educational journalist and author Armin Himmelrath believes that it would be wrong to attribute this solely to parental educational zeal. «After all, parents have been told for decades that cramming at home in the afternoons, evenings and weekends somehow helps children to mature and be educated.» (See interview)

In fact, homework has long been an educational tool. These work duties are mentioned and regulated as early as the 15th century in school regulations. Even back then, homework was used to teach children to work independently and to revise and consolidate the material covered at school.

Little has changed in this respect. Almost the same wording can be found almost two centuries later in a leaflet from the canton of Zurich on primary school: «Children learn to learn independently through homework, to organise their working time and to take responsibility for their learning.»

What is the potential for conflict with homework?

But society has changed radically. The extended family hardly exists any more, single parents or patchwork families have established themselves, and mothers and fathers both pursue their careers. However, such formulations about homework assume an ideal situation that often has little to do with today's reality.

Jürg Brühlmann from the Pedagogical Centre of the Swiss Teachers' Association LCH criticises in the NZZ: «Many children can hardly do their homework at home because they don't have their own room, the TV is on or their siblings are disturbing them.» Traditional homework harbours a lot of potential for conflict: on the one hand, because it is time-consuming and not all children understand exactly what they have to do; on the other hand, because there is no one there to help them or the learning atmosphere is not right for them.

And where there is someone at home, conflicts may arise because parents inevitably slip into the role of assistant teacher. They check or try to understand the homework, remind, threaten and sanction with TV or mobile phone withdrawal out of concern that the child might not do the homework or forget it, which in many places results in a reprimand or at least an entry in the chore book.

Attempts by parents to interfere undermine the independence of pupils.

This parental interference is fundamentally bad. This is the conclusion of a study in which 1700 parents and pupils were surveyed over an extended period of time. The results - published in the «Journal of Educational Research» - show that both reading performance and German grades are worse in children whose parents frequently helped with homework. In addition, these attempts at interference undermine the independence of the pupils.

Homework is an intrusion into everyday family life

Another criticism levelled by opponents of homework is that parents are being given too much educational responsibility. Armin Himmelrath says that with homework, teachers are «burdening parents with responsibility for the success of a child's school career to an extent that has been practised for centuries from an educational point of view, but can hardly be seriously justified from an educational science perspective».

To quote the famous bon mot of the news magazine «Der Spiegel», this is simply «trespassing». The fact that parents monitor and help with homework and feel responsible for their children's homework at school has not just been commonplace since 2017.

If homework is part of the educational programme, it can be a daily annoyance in many families. The child doesn't feel like copying out words after seven lessons. He doesn't quite realise how much really needs to be done and is on the phone to his friends. They get into a crisis when they forget to do their homework at school. Or they simply don't manage to complete them in a reasonable amount of time.

One mother complains that homework is a constant source of friction at home. If she doesn't constantly ask whether her son has to do his homework, «very little happens». Homework is something you always have to keep an eye on, even at the weekend. This forces her into the role of admonisher and makes her feel uncomfortable. Another mum complains that her 13-year-old child has a «very, very» heavy workload with daily homework and cramming for tests as well as sports training and music lessons in Year 6.

How much homework is allowed?

The cantons decide how much homework is allowed. According to the Federal Constitution, they are responsible for school laws. However, they exercise their competences differently and have often not regulated the school system down to the last detail. There is no federal law that stipulates a time limit for homework.

In the absence of guidelines on the maximum workload for pupils in cantonal school law, the Labour Act applies. It stipulates a maximum daily working time of 9 hours for young people aged 15 and over, which should be within a period of 12 hours. For 14-year-olds, the maximum working time is 40 hours.

For younger children, this value must be correspondingly lower. The following practice has become established in everyday school life: 10 minutes per class level and per day. A first-grader should therefore spend no more than 10 minutes a day on homework, a sixth-grader no more than 60 minutes a day (including exam preparation).

This corresponds to the figures from the OECD study from 2012, which analysed how much time is spent on homework per week in 38 countries around the world. The result: 4 hours per week in Switzerland, 3 hours in Finland, 9 hours in Russia and just under 5 hours in Germany and France.

What are the benefits of homework?

Whether homework is useful is controversial. New studies show: Some people even find it harmful. The New Zealand educationalist John Hattie is considered a reference in this field. In his book «Making Learning Visible», he compiled findings from over 50,000 studies involving more than 80 million pupils. He wanted to find out which prerequisites and conditions help children to learn.

Factors that promote learning success include a good student-teacher relationship or certain learning techniques such as repetitive reading. Homework, on the other hand, does very little to promote learning success. And even this small benefit should be viewed with caution.

This is because it depends on the amount of time students have to invest in their homework. The more effort, the lower the profit, Hattie concludes. On average, older and higher-achieving students in particular would benefit.

Armin Himmelrath also analysed countless studies for his book «Homework, no thanks». «From a scientific point of view, there is not a single study that proves that performance or knowledge can be increased by systematically completing homework,» he summarises. «On the contrary: experiences of self-efficacy, increased motivation and self-structuring generally fall by the wayside.»

Abolish homework?

Educators at universities have long argued in favour of abolishing homework. A lecturer at a university of applied sciences describes it as a «sacred cow» that should not be tampered with, a «pill with almost exclusively negative side effects».

He wants to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. There is no need for homework, he says, you can safely leave it out. After all, the pupils don't get any smarter or dumber.

Teachers can use this to equalise the different working speeds of the pupils.

Teachers on why homework is needed

Teachers, educators on the front line, are also questioning traditional homework. In the research for this dossier, we spoke to countless teachers who are trying to integrate homework in new forms. Here are a few examples:

• A middle school teacher subverts the system by rarely giving her pupils homework. Instead, she says: Go out and play!
• A high school teacher teaches in work units in which tasks are integrated. His team colleagues record all the tasks on a large board. This prevents children from having to do three sets of homework on some days and none at all on others.
• One teacher believes that the topic cannot be killed off because teachers can use homework to equalise the different working speeds of pupils. If children catch up on the material at home, the teacher can apply the same speed and level of work to the entire learning group the next day. Abolishing homework would therefore mean fundamentally changing teaching. Many are not prepared to do this.

Personalised homework

The quality of homework is also crucial. According to Ulrich Trautwein from the University of Tübingen, it is a decisive factor for a child's learning and school career. In maths, for example, learning success is higher when teachers are also interested in the solution, even if it contains errors.

The same effect is achieved when students have to think about something new when doing homework. And pupils stated that they were convinced of the benefits of homework if they felt it was well prepared and integrated into lessons. In today's student world, this means one thing above all: individualisation. "Homework should be personalised.

Teachers should meet pupils where they are," says Christoph Schmid, professor at the Zurich University of Teacher Education. This is because pupils are sometimes overestimated when it comes to independence and discipline. «The point of homework is to give children confidence in their abilities and a sense of achievement."

This is already part of everyday life in some schools. The German comprehensive school Barmen in Wuppertal received the German School Award in 2015 because it makes it possible "for everyone to reach their goal», as the laudatory speech put it. The school lesson there lasts 60 minutes instead of 45. Homework is work time, not attached to lessons, but at 10.30 a.m., two to three times a week. The tasks that the pupils have to complete are customised.

Once they have completed them, a cross is made in the pupil's logbook. Parents sign this booklet every week and find out what progress their child is making. In one school in Aargau, teachers have integrated mixed-class lessons and fixed learning studio lessons into the timetable, in which pupils work on their assignments. At home, there should only be time for exam preparation.