> Next you'll want to teach morals.

We always have in many ways, but I catch your drift. I take issue with schools that teach kids what to think instead of how to think.

I don’t know if it is pandemic but I’ve seen some people complain about some very controversial curriculum creeping into schools. A person I saw on Twitter recently posted some curriculum their 1st grader was being taught which tells a story through the lens of critical race theory. In essence telling the children that the white kids are racist and need to work to be anti-racist.

It was shocking to me because it is applying controversial “Theory” that is very much opposed to liberal science ideals of falsifiability and injecting identity politics into minds that can’t even begin to understand the postmodern philosophy these ideas grew from.

The uncomfortably truth here is that kids will always be taught values. The question is who gets to decide what the "right" values are?

Agreed. Self-study is the most important part in going to school and doing things yourself leads to it. Lots of intelligence self starters here on HN claiming homework is not essential because they were able to absorb the material some other way.

That's like saying you're a great natural basketball player and practice should be abolished.

>> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential.

It's not even about teachers being good or bad. It's about something called "illusion of competence". Basically, everything seems easy while teacher is explaining it on whiteboard, but when facing similar task on your own, outside of the classroom you are completely lost, don't know where to start. Homework helps dispell that illusion.

Tests get the same result. It is better to regularly tell the kids to solve problems without help than to make them to do it at home, since many kids wont do it at home.

but homework gets checked by teachers, right? I mean, from what I remember from my own high school teacher would spend first few minutes of each class asking about homework, somethimes simply providing the correct answers, sometimes randomly asking a kid in class to provide an answer. It wasn't graded, so much less stress than taking a test, but still you could verify that your solution to the assignment was correct.

> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential

An excellent cowpath right? "The teachers are bad, so rather than fixing the teachers we make the students teach themselves afterhours."

If most teachers are bad then using homework to fix this is a shit solution: why are children being forced to endure 1st the bad teacher AND the homework.

And more often than not, the teacher is the one creating the homework, so it ends up being just more of the same.

IIRC, there’s actually evidence that homework is negatively affecting learning for most age groups.

Can you post it? Because i only found this[0], and it says that good homework can be really helpful, but it should be more personalized and creative. [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098655.1996.10...