Editing Homework (section)

=== United States ===
Historically, homework was frowned upon in [[Culture of the United States|American culture]]. With few students able to pursue [[higher education]], and with many children and teenagers needing to dedicate significant amounts of time to chores and [[Farmworker|farm work]], homework was disliked not only by parents, but also by some schools. The students' inability to keep up with the homework, which was largely memorizing an assigned text at home, contributed to students [[dropping out]] of school at a relatively early age. Attending school was not legally required, and if the student could not spend afternoons and evenings working on homework, then the student could quit school.<ref name=":2" />

Complaints from parents were common at all levels of society.<ref name=":2" /> In 1880, [[Francis Amasa Walker]] convinced the school board in Boston to prohibit teachers from assigning math homework under normal circumstances.<ref name=":2" /> In 1900, journalist [[Edward Bok]] railed against schools assigning homework to students until age 15.<ref name=":2" /> He encouraged parents to send notes to their children's teachers to demand the end of all homework assignments, and thousands of parents did so.<ref name=":2" /> Others looked at the new [[child labor laws in the United States]] and noted that school time plus homework exceeded the number of hours that a child would be permitted to work for pay.<ref name=":2" />  The campaign resulted in the US Congress receiving testimony to the effect that experts thought children should never have any homework, and that [[teenagers]] should be limited to a maximum of two hours of homework per day.<ref name=":2" /> In 1901, the [[California]] legislature passed an act that effectively abolished homework for anyone under the age of 15.<ref name=":2" />  While homework was generally out of favor in the first half of the 20th century, some people supported homework reform, such as by making the assignments more relevant to the students' non-school lives, rather than prohibiting it.<ref name=":2" />

In the 1950s, with increasing pressure on the United States to stay ahead in the [[Cold War]], homework made a resurgence, and children were encouraged to keep up with their [[Soviet Union|Russian]] counterparts.<ref name=":2" /> From that time on, social attitudes have oscillated approximately on a 15-year cycle: homework was encouraged in the 1950s to mid-1960s; it was rejected from the mid-1960s until 1980; it was encouraged again from 1980 and the publication of ''[[A Nation at Risk]]'' until the mid-1990s, when the Cold War ended.<ref name=":2" />  At that time, [[American schools]] were overwhelmingly in favor of issuing some homework to students of all grade levels.<ref>{{cite news
| url = http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/HISTORY-OF-HOMEWORK-3053660.php
| title = History of Homework
| access-date = 2007-03-24
| date = 1999-12-20
| work = The San Francisco Chronicle
| archive-date = 2013-03-23
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130323150604/http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/HISTORY-OF-HOMEWORK-3053660.php
| url-status = live
}}</ref> Homework was less favored after the end of the Cold War.<ref name=":2" />