Homework. Every student’s favorite after-school activity. Who doesn’t like getting home from school only to do more school? Schools all across the country rely on homework to teach their students, but students all across the country hate it and say it’s useless. So, who’s right? Does homework actually deliver any educational benefit whatsoever, or is it completely unnecessary?

The history of significant homework loads in the United States goes back to the A Nation at Risk report, published by The Elementary School Journal in 1983, during the height of the Cold War. It cites American education falling far behind its global counterparts (namely, the Soviet Union) as a main reason why the nation was at risk. In a section titled “Indicators of the Risk,” the report goes into detail about how poor education was hampering American progress, citing falling SAT scores and high rates of functional illiteracy as some examples of how the American public is less prepared for an era in which information and knowledge is a priceless commodity.

The report says,“[S]tudents have migrated from vocational and college preparatory programs to ‘general track’ courses in large numbers,” which makes everyone worse off by funneling everyone into one path, whether or not it is right for them. It later goes on to recommend that schools “strongly consider 7-hour school days, as well as a 200- to 220-day school year.” Finally, and most relevant to this article, the report suggests, “Students in high schools should be assigned far more homework than is now the case.”

A study conducted in Australia found that increased time spent on homework directly led to increased rates of stress and other mood disturbances. Increased stress leads to less willingness to engage with material, which leads to less work getting done, as well as a greater desire to do other things that distract from the stresses of school and homework. The participants in the Australian study had 37 hours of homework per week (about 5.3 hours a day) on average, which the study points out may be inflated but is still extremely high. Having a full-time job’s worth of homework in addition to regular school hours eats into free time significantly, sometimes all but eliminating it. What kids could be doing with their free time is often more valuable to their learning—especially in elementary school—than rote, fact-spit homework. Going outside and playing freely with friends has immense benefits, one of which being the exercise itself. Excessive homework can also eat into sleep time, especially if the student has no desire to complete it and puts it off until 10 p.m. Quality, restorative sleep is incredibly important to every living, breathing human to avoid feeling like they got hit by a bus from fatigue.

In addition, most people simply cannot sit still for four hours and focus. Breaks are crucial to helping students actually retain information, but if there is no time for a break, students probably will not take one. Whether because of a time crunch or due to personal choice, many students don’t take breaks often enough, if at all, which makes their focus deteriorate further as they go along, leading to less retention.

Teachers at HSMSE can have varying philosophies surrounding homework; some assign it all the time, while some assign it hardly ever. I spoke to Mr. Liu, who assigns homework after virtually every one of his math classes, and he said that the reason is that he uses homework as a review tool to help solidify the concepts taught in class or as a tool to prepare students for the next class. I also spoke to Ms. Engelhardt, who explained that she uses homework mostly as a preparatory tool for her US history class, but her government class is heavily reliant on classwork and thus has no real need for much homework. Both teachers said that whenever they give homework, there is a reason and a use for it that they have thought about, and it is never just work for work’s sake.

The American education system relies heavily on rote memorization rather than critical thinking, a focus which is maintained by large amounts of repetitive homework. This focus, along with other factors, led to the United States receiving a score of 79.2 out of 100 on a 2024 U.S. News and World Reports survey. Germany, by contrast, scored a 95.9. All comparisons of American and German education are based on my personal experience, having been in the German system for middle school and the American system for high school.

One major way the German education system, and society at large, differs from the American one is in its philosophy around schooling and children. In many cases, children in the United States are viewed as things to be kept in check and busy, whereas in Germany, children are viewed more as young humans who need guidance but also need to be allowed to grow organically.

German curricula are not designed to try to teach everything about a subject in one year, but rather a little bit about a subject interspersed with other related subjects across several years. For example, at HSMSE, we have a progression of math classes that starts at Foundations and geometry, then goes to algebra II and trigonometry, then on to precalculus, and then calculus. In the German system, all four years would simply be called Math, and various topics from algebra and geometry would be interwoven into one part of the year and would progress gradually, while retaining callbacks to earlier material during similar units. This setup makes learning, and thus homework, much less dependent on rote memorization and remembering formulas, and much more reliant on applying skills as soon as they are learned as well as long after. The frequent callbacks to past material also help with forgetfulness by reinforcing the topics learned before.

German language curricula revolve much more heavily around practical usage of the target language, and a major part of the instruction is having to function in the target language during the entire class period. Most American language education is taught through English, which makes it more arduous to actually learn the language and incredibly difficult to learn by reinforcement, which is built in by making the students use the target language for the whole class and hardly ever defaulting to the students’ native language. The total immersion in the target language also reduces reliance on memorization, since not everything is given to the students on a silver platter by the teacher. The students need to think critically and figure things out, a skill that both Mr. Liu and Ms. Engelhardt thought was more important than memorization. Both expressed a sentiment that memorization doesn’t really drive students to learn and push themselves to learn, while critical thinking drives students towards more creative, out-of-the-box thinking that will get them farther in life.

Lastly, the German system assigns far less homework than most American schools. On average, American high school students have about three and a half hours of homework every night. In Germany, that number is under an hour a night, at about 40 minutes, and many teachers rarely assign homework, if ever. There is a philosophy espoused best by my sixth-grade biology teacher, who said that his opinion of what school should be was “einmal hin, alles drin,” meaning that essentially all learning should be done during school hours. Germany’s educational system consistently scores better than that of the United States, with less homework and pedagogy generally more focused on catering to students rather than test scores. There is no such thing as being a good test taker in Germany, because German exams are designed to assess what the student knows rather than what the student doesn’t know, and the education the students get backs this up by leaving rote memorization by the side of the road in favor of a more holistic approach aimed at creating adults.

So is homework really all that useful? To put it bluntly, not really. There is a point after which its usefulness plateaus and even starts decreasing. When used well and with intention, homework can be a great tool to help students learn, but in excess or without a clear point, homework is often more of a burden than a boon.