Who's hate homework

Several years ago I gave a speech about technology to the Texas Library Association's big annual meeting. After the speech I was talking with a pair of elementary school librarians. Channing was back then just going off to pre-school so homework was the last thing on my mind but they brought it up. "The best thing you can do for your kids," they said, "is to not allow them to do homework until the third grade."

...most of the homework is busywork. It teaches nothing. Worst of all, our child-centric culture has parents digging-in with their kids to do that homework, wasting all of our time and ultimately pitting adult against adult as surrogates for their exhausted kids.
What's wrong with this picture? Everything.
When I was Channing's age, 50 years ago, my parents' attitude was one of benign neglect. They were busy doing whatever parents did back then (drinking and smoking cigarettes, mainly), but it sure didn't include helping me with my homework. Somehow my siblings and I survived just fine.

...public officials don't like good news, seeing it as un-motivating. If we had a dry year it was bad, they'd explain, because there wouldn't be enough snowmelt, the reservoirs would be down but, most importantly, the forests and grasslands would be tinder-dry, increasing the danger of forest and wild fires. But if we had the occasional rainy year their line changed. Now the reservoirs were full (though that could change in a moment so don't take any extra showers) but the extra snowmelt meant extra forest and grassland growth creating more combustible material making forest and wild fires even more likely. No matter what happened it was bad according to these guys because they didn't want to ever give up the chance to preach down to us. They were determined to remove whatever joy there was in life.
Same thing in education. We aren't as good as we used to be and that's going to have a major impact on, well, everything. So the answer is always more resources, more testing, more consultants. {...}

... How do we optimize our educational system to encourage normal kids to achieve greatness?
Not through all this God-damned homework.
German students have plenty of homework, too, and they go to school an average of 220 days per year to our 183. German kids go to school on Saturday. That should prove the point, right? Because nobody is saying the Germans are falling behind. Heck, they are the economic powerhouse of Europe.
But wait a minute. School in Germany starts at 8AM and ends each day at noon. Even the high schools follow that schedule. German schools don't serve lunch because the kids have all gone home, I suppose to do their homework. But if you get home at 12:30 there is plenty of time for homework, eh?

(in toto)