Schoolchildren in Polish primary schools will not receive any homework from April. Barbara Nowacka, the education minister there, said children should rest during recess. According to him, the ban on homework will later apply to secondary schools as well.
However, according to Minister of Education Mikuláš Bek (STAN), the situation in the Czech Republic is slightly different from Poland. “Unlike Polish children, Czech students on average spend very little time on homework, almost the least in developed countries,” he told Novincom. studied From 2019 onwards.
At the same time, he emphasized that in the Czech Republic, setting homework is the responsibility of school principals. “They can better take into account the specific needs of students as they relate to the school's specific academic program,” Beck explained.
Homework to be banned in primary schools in Poland
A blanket ban on homework is also largely rejected by members of the Committee on Science, Education, Culture, Youth and Physical Education in the House of Representatives. According to them, homework is important for students.
“They can help create a routine and environment in the family that supports lifelong learning. They help children develop skills such as time management or responsibility, which is a specific preparation for high-quality education, where self-study is important,” ODS MP Renáta Zajíčkova, for example, told Novinka.
“There are situations where it is clearly beneficial to practice what you learned at school at home,” added Petr Gazdík, STAN MP and former Minister of Education.
KDU-ČSL's David Šimek rejects the ban on homework. “As a father of four and a former cantor, I am ready to do homework. In first grade, practice multiplication tables, equations, list words and so on. In second grade, to make statements or listen to English texts,” he enumerated.
“If we don't have a plan to dumb people down on purpose, banning homework is an educational atrocity. Important subjects such as Czech and languages in general or mathematics cannot be done without homework,” SPD's Zdeněk Kettner commented more sharply.
“Intelligent”
Conversely, Matěj Ondřej Havel from TOP 09 will not oppose Polish nomads. “For example, I understand the lack of homework in the first grade of elementary school,” he admitted to Novincom.
“However, the older a person is, the more he has to develop the habit of preparing for school or work,” he admitted at the same time.
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However, according to him, home preparation is an essential part of education in high school. “However, it must be entered in a meaningful way. At any level of school, it is unsafe to assign homework that is not covered in school. They must remain in school, otherwise it is usually a failure of the teacher in the area of preparation for teaching. No one should be offended,” warned Hewell.
Other MPs agree that it should be preserved in the Czech Republic method, published by the Ministry of Education last May. Accordingly, school principals should decide the homework themselves, who should communicate it with their teaching team.
Something has to change
However, delegates welcome some changes. “It is desirable to discuss the nature of homework, so that it is not just a task for the sake of a task, but a long-term assignment of a task that supports group work,” pleaded ANO MP Jana Berkovkova.
Pirates' Olga Richterova has similar reservations. “It is appropriate to open up the discussion about forms of non-academic training and focus more on, for example, project work, individual/group work,” he agreed.
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“I think it is also desirable that homework should be made voluntary and meaningful. They certainly should not shift the responsibility of education to the family and create an unequal burden on children and their parents. That too with regard to children's different family backgrounds,” he stressed.
According to Richter, homework shouldn't even be assigned. “Personally, I prefer to take them as an exercise and take them into account as part of the assessment of the students' long-term work,” he explained. This is supported by Shimek, a local man. According to him, there should be no punishment if students do not complete their homework.
Gazdík emphasized that in his opinion, the content of education is more important than homework. “He has to change radically,” he insisted.
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