Homework As Child Abuse Essay, Research Paper

Homework as Child Abuse Reeva Miller Homework is superfluous, unnecessary and demoralizing to children, the author,Reeva Miller believes. This article, written in this week s issue of New York Teacher (City Edition), talksabout the many disadvantages homework has on children. She states that she neverenjoyed doing homework and her children (a doctor and a novelist) never got anythingproductive out of this daunting task. Reeva Miller is an English teacher at William Cullen Bryant High School inQueens, NY. he politically incorrect views on homework at pitted her against hercolleagues and ostracized by those in her profession. Ms. Miller feels that homework is themost frequently talked about topic in conferences, not the child s reading interest or hisreading ability. Homework focuses children away from important activities at home. After all, saysMiller, adults do not enjoy bringing home work after a full day. School authorities seem

convinced that schoolchildren will simply not become proficient and learned unlessteachers assign some sort of conformist labor. Parents and teachers have all kinds of futile strategies to attempt to force theiroffspring to complete the assignments, cajoling, threatening, bribing and withholdingprivileges, all of which traumatizes a child and forces him to fall under duress and in astate of total inadequacy. What kind of a place is this world coming to when children shomeworks are valued over their knowledge? When teachers a reprimanded for notassigning labor so that children may toil in their desks at home cutoff from the rest of theworld, only so that they may wtach TV again and their parents won t let them unless theyfinish it? And they wonder why adolescents rebel. Add the hormones and the homework,the aggravation plus the social life, and you have a gang of children collaborating todestroy the fraudulent ideas upon which the fascistic and conservative scholasticinstitution is based.