How the Cold War Space Race Led to U.S. Students Doing Tons of Homework
August 13, 2019 in History
By Dave Roos
After a period of shunning homework at the turn of the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 spurred an urgent U.S. focus on schoolchildren’s workloads.
Middle-schoolers who trudge home each day with a 50-pound backpack and hours of homework would have had an easier time in 1901. That’s when the anti-homework movement was at its peak and the state of California actually banned all homework for grades below high school.
From the late 19th century through the warned in Cold-War terms of the potential fallout from a failed education system.
“…[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” wrote the report’s authors.
Schlossman says that this second academic excellence push did little to move the needle significantly on homework, flattening out at around 12 percent of high-schoolers clocking two or more hours a day by the mid-1980s.
“The homework movement of the 1980s was cast as a character reform movement, almost like a moral enterprise,” says Schlossman. “It didn’t have the intellectual expectations of the 1950s and 1960s.”
In more recent times, a 2016 analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics found that U.S. high school students spent an average of 7.5 hours on homework each week—averaging about 1.5 hours per day. While that was up from an average of 6.6 hours in 2012, it remained an easier lift that what students took on during the heady days of the Cold War.
Source: HISTORY
Recent Comments