Homework for three-year-olds? They’re too young to enter the rat race | Emma Brockes

I was an obedient child, and think kids should be stretched. But the amount of schoolwork my children get is unacceptable

Between the hours of 6.30 and 7.15pm nightly, we sit down in my house to do homework. This has been a surprising addition to the schedule, given that my children aren’t yet four years old. More surprising has been my enormous hostility towards it; while my daughters happily apply themselves to reading and writing practice, I pace in the background, indignant that the tiny amount of time we have in the evening has been annexed by the New York City Department of Education.

What’s particularly weird about this is that I never had any objection to doing homework myself. I’m a fairly obedient person. If as a child I’d gone to a progressive school, I doubt I would have liked it, and I sometimes thank God no one thought of forest schools in the late 1970s. As an adult, I belong to a personality type that has never grown out of needing sharp deadlines to function, and I believe, somewhere in my core, that missing one means I will actually die.

Slogging through work sheets at night when they have already spent six hours in the classroom seems absurd

Related: No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pXoIVb