That nailed it. I've never been the type of person to study or get to caught up in busywork (typically, if it's pointless, I just don't do it). I'm in AP classes and things, but I never, ever feel like I'm getting too much homework. Sure, I have some nights where I have a project to finish, but, like tonight, I didn't have any. Of course, I have friends in my classes who constantly moan about their homework load, but get similar grades to me. That's not to say I'm a bad student, it's just that I don't really care for, or feel that I need, to do superflous homework.
This thread began with a newspaper article about a study that said most parents don't believe their kids get much homework. From there, it morphed into a discussion about the desirability of lots of homework. To get back to the origional point, my kid has easily five times the amount of homework I had as a 17 year old. I am acutely aware that I am the proverbial blind guy holding onto one tusk of the elephant trying to describe the whole beast, and comparing what happened in the 60s in a frankly anti-intellectual smallish town with today's honors program in the most academically demanding suburban school system of a medium-sized city. Nevertheless, and based on the experiences of the children of the people I know, the implication that teenagers who actually do 2 or 4 hours of homework on a typical night are as scarce as 40 year old virgins is simply wrong. IMHO the popular view that very few kids actually have a lot of homework is part of a politically-motivated large-scale effort to discredit the public schools as a whole. They just are not all alike. It may well be that inner-city schools are mostly awful. Painting the rest with that brush is unjust.
Yep; I think generalizations are not valuably applied relative to unique challenges. I guess it depends on the student, classes, teachers, school... too many variables to paint such a broad stroke.
I think the problem is that many teachers rely on homework as a way to teach. I'm in college, so it's a different arugment. But it's a pain in the ass having to take a course that isn't directly related with your major, and is the toughest in your schedule because the prof doesn't teach anything and yells at students who don't do their homework (because they don't get it). This happened all the time to me in high school math courses. I this teacher twice...he'd write a couple things on the board and tell us to do a bunch of problems, which resulted in no one learning and him having an easy ass day.
Amount of homework has nothing to do with the quality of the education, really. Quality over quantity and all that. Personally, I had a couple of hours of homework a week, plus a fair bit of project work later on, coasted through everything but the projects, but really learnt a lot due to good teachers and good feedback on both the work in class and the homework. One of my friends struggled in history due to a teacher who just wrote up stacks of notes, didn't really explain them, and then asked for piles of essays on them, while I was learning loads of stuff in my computing lesson at the same time and doing maybe 15 minutes of brief questions, which then were marked with notes on them and had reasoning behind the answers covered at the start of the next lesson.