Ron A. Esponilla
Marcus Clayton
English 103
9 October 2016

Further Progress

Education comes from the root word educare, meaning to “lead out” or “draw out” the powers of the mind. According to Gert Biesta, a Professor of Education, one of the major purposes of education is to “qualify” children (6). Meaning, to provide them with the knowledge, skills and the understanding to perform tasks and make decisions. These tasks and decisions can range from specific things such as a profession or skill or career path or something general such as learning life skills or to impart culture. Furthermore, the aim of education is to prepare the next generation so that they may make progress in the fields of science, literature, engineering, the arts and, …show more content…
John Fensterwald, a writer who focuses primarily on public education, looked at the results from a standardized test, between 65 nations, from 2012. It was observed that the United States fall behind specifically in the fields of math and science and surprisingly, even reading. Interestingly, Asian nations such as Shanghai, Singapore, Japan and, Korea were among the top scorers. While some people critique these standardized tests as unreliable due to the vast diversity in our country, others argue that this is the first indication that something has to change in our education system and that we can actually learn from this, and therefore improve on our …show more content…
Most argue that it is beneficial while some say that it actually hinders learning. Homework is defined as “tasks assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during school hours”. Harris Cooper, a Social Psychologist and Professor at Duke University argues that homework is beneficial but also has its limitations. He states that while studies have shown that “homework does have a positive effect on student achievement”, too much homework will only lead to it being counter-productive. He argues that even high school students should only have up to about two hours of homework at most. After that, homework was no longer linked to higher achievement and simply as a chore. Past that point, the student will no longer absorb anything and will finish his homework just for the sake of finishing it. On top of that, it is also possible that the student may not have time or capability to finish his homework and may be tempted to simply copy off a classmate. At this point, homework is definitely no longer beneficial to the student as he will not be learning from it. This leads us to our second issue, the amount of time spent on school and the lack of time for anything