Homework and rights
It was with welcome relief that I read holiday homework has been canceled in Taipei; you might have noticed an oxymoron between the two words (“Taipei plans to abolish vacation assignment rule,” Dec. 19, page 1).
I have written to the Taipei Times many times about the problem I have with the amount of homework my son has to deal with.
My wife and I have met with the school principal and the teachers to ask for the right to choose when our child goes to bed: As parents we would like to have control over activities in our own time. Sadly, no amount of pleading gives us rights in our own home.
I even asked one of the professors who works at the Ministry of Education to write to the school and ask that parents be given equal rights in their own time. He suggested using a homework timetable, something all parties could agree on, but he was ignored.
Human beings behave according to universal principles, one of these is fairness. That might seem a strange thing to say, but it is this balance between atomic forces that produce stability within atomic nuclei, and it is the balance between these forces and gravity that produce the star which is producing the atomic elements.
You see how it all feeds back to produce harmony. Balance produces harmony. Equality and mutual respect produce harmony among people.
That is what I do not have in my home. Another human being thinks it is OK to dictate to me what happens in my home. No matter how much it hurts others, we all fall into this trap to get what we want. Women have to fight for the right to say NO, I want to choose. People have to fight for the right to be free from colonial oppressors.
I would love to be given time to communicate with my child in the evenings, but another human being has decided to take that right away from me. She has agreed that if homework is not finished by 10:30 he can go to bed. This is supposed to make me happy.
I rise before 5am and sleep at 9:30pm, so during a week the teacher takes all evenings from me without asking: “Is that OK?” We must learn to copy good results rather than tradition. Finland outperforms the rest of the world in education every year without giving any homework.
The need for equality does not evolve out of us, so we had better start paying attention to the qualities of life rather than just the quantities. I respect schools’ rights to use their own rules in their own time. I would like the same respect. The most basic of all human rights is an equal right to make our own choices about the things that we care about most. The news is full of examples of this every day. How can we be so blind to the same continuous mistake? It is so simple and yet so difficult at the same time.
Peter Cook
Taichung
Being a foreigner, I was not aware that children had homework during their vacations. At the beginning of the first Lunar New Year vacation, when I saw my child’s homework booklet, I tore it apart and told my five-year-old son: “When you are on vacation, you play, all day. When you are at school, you study.”
During all his studies, his teachers were always amazed at his homework grades; better than all his classmates.
Pierre Loisel
New Taipei City
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