Should Homework Be Banned?

With adults, we often limit working hours to 40 hours a week. There are many laws and protections to prevent worker abuse. Unpaid labor and forcing workers to work excessively is considered unjust and bad for worker health. When overtime is absolutely required, we consider it such an extra burden on the worker that the law necessitates 50% more pay. Why is it then, that we pressure our students even harder than adults?

Students already have what is almost equivalent to a full-time job for in-school hours alone, 7 hours a day being 35 hours a week. On top of this, many students participate in extracurricular activities, adding as much as an extra 2 to 4 hours a day. In reality, students are having 45 to 55-hour long weeks, more than the standard work week for an adult.

Yet, students are expected to do homework on top of this. Oftentimes, this only leads to stress and sleep deprivation in teenagers, at a critical time in their life when they need sleep for brain and body development. Furthermore, it normalizes a culture of overwork, leading them to be readily exploited by corporations and employers down the road. The mentality that free time is not allowed and that sleep must be sacrificed for success is something that needs to go.

The Case for In-School Learning

With 7 hours in a school day, there is more than enough time to learn and complete necessary work within the school system itself, and not outside of it. Adults do not have homework in their full-time jobs. Once they clock out, the rest of their time is theirs. If an employer expects off-the-clock work, they have to pay appropriately for it. Yet, we expect our students to do so much for free.

This culture cannot be fixed by hoping individual schools alone will give less homework simply out of students and parents asking them to do so. Just like working conditions, these things have to be mandated by law. Workers once suffered through 10–12 hour work days, or even 14–16 hour work days in extreme cases, until laws following the Haymarket Riot of 1886 led to the standardization of the 40-hour work week. Like work culture, the school system will not change unless it is mandated to do so by law, and we need regulations that restrict the assignment of school work outside of school hours.

Consequences Beyond the Classroom

The normalization of overwork has consequences that go beyond high school and into college and the career field. We do not let people operate heavy machinery or motor vehicles while sleep-deprived. Yet, we normalize sleep deprivation for students going into roles like healthcare, where they will operate on actual human bodies. We won’t let someone drive for multiple shifts straight, but we expect people to do surgery in that state, where mistakes can cause injury or death.

Our culture of overwork cannot get us ahead individually or as a nation; it can only drag us down. School works best when it is a true environment for learning focused on teaching students within school, and not assigning them stressful busywork. Our society functions best when we have free time and are socially satisfied.

At this time of high productivity, with humans in 2026 being 4–5 times more productive on average today than in the 1900s, we should be going lower and lower in school and work hours. 32-hour weeks? No, that’s not good enough, 20-hour weeks should have long ago been possible. Yet in some cases, we only add more work and go in the opposite direction.

Living in the system we are in, it is easy for things to feel normalized, but we have to remember what could be, and what should be. We should push for a serious homework ban across the nation, so that teachers and students can get back to doing what they do best: teaching, growing, and learning.