country banning homework

Work & Careers
Life & Arts

Poland’s battle over homework

Poland’s battle over homework on x (opens in a new window)
Poland’s battle over homework on facebook (opens in a new window)
Poland’s battle over homework on linkedin (opens in a new window)
Poland’s battle over homework on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Raphael Minder

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Seven-year-old Nadia Nizinkiewicz is thrilled about the Polish government’s decision to remove homework from her schooling. In fact, “everybody in my class is very happy,” she tells me while colouring patterns in her notebook. “Some of our homework is very difficult.” She is excited about instead spending more time in the park “playing berek (the Polish version of tag) with my friends”.

Since taking office in December, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has launched a series of reforms, in part to dismantle the state apparatus built up by the previous government of the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party.

One Must-Read

This article was featured in the One Must-Read newsletter, where we recommend one remarkable story each weekday. Sign up for the newsletter here

Late last year, Tusk’s government announced a 30 per cent salary increase for teachers, who have long complained about their working conditions. His education ministry is also changing the syllabus, for instance, cutting the number of hours for religious studies classes. Some Polish history and literature that had been promoted under PiS’s ultranationalist and conservative agenda will be removed from classrooms, notably works by Polish Pope John Paul II.

Schools in Poland certainly need help. Following pandemic-era lockdowns, their next challenge was to welcome in 2022 the EU’s largest contingent of Ukrainian children fleeing Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. There is little agreement over whether scrapping homework will improve things, however. Former PiS education minister Przemysław Czarnek is predictably critical of the measure. Repetitio est mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of learning) remains, he says, “the recognised and natural principle of classical pedagogy”. The homework ban ignores this, he says.

Tomasz Gajderowicz from Poland’s Educational Research Institute, which is supervised by the education ministry, stresses that “the regulation is not a ban but merely a limitation and a change” to make homework “more effective”. Polish children have eight years of primary school, from the age of seven, and teachers will still be able to assign homework in the final four years of schooling — but the choice is theirs and it won’t be graded.

Gajderowicz argues the reform is vindicated by recent Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) education studies that show 15-year-olds in OECD countries spend an average of 1.5 hours a day on homework, compared with 1.7 hours in Poland.

The OECD also acknowledges its Pisa studies show lower grades for children who reported spending more time on homework. But “with the Pisa data, we cannot draw causal inferences, and the results do not necessarily suggest that spending more time completing homework leads to lower scores,” says Miyako Ikeda, senior analyst in the OECD education directorate.

Poland’s education minister Barbara Nowacka has defended the move, notably by suggesting that “cunning” schoolchildren are seeking help from ChatGPT for their homework. She also says that “the mental crisis of young people” can be attributed to “overload with studies and enormous stress”. Nowacka further links homework to inequality, since children in affluent families are often helped by their parents or private tutors.

But Justin Snider, an assistant dean at Columbia University who has taught across middle schools, high schools and universities, says “while there are legitimate concerns” around homework, this doesn’t mean there’s no value in it. “It means that teachers have to be more mindful of the types of homework they assign.”

Among my Warsaw acquaintances, Anna Pająk is now worrying about how to keep her 11-year-old son away from his mobile phone when he returns from school at 1pm. Contrary to Nowacka, she predicts rising inequality because it is now up to “parents to make even more effort to fill their children’s free time. Some kids will just be left in front of their screens for many more hours.”

Tom McGrath, director of the British Primary School on the outskirts of Warsaw, observes that Poland’s debate over homework shows how “education has become part of the culture wars”. Only one party is wholly delighted by the policy change: those who want to spend their afternoons playing berek.

[email protected]