Throughout the decades of educational reform cycles, the value of homework has proven either meaningful or meaningless depending on the reforming framework. Questions about homework as simply busy work or knowledge work, mere content distraction or content extension, ambivalence toward importance, or discipline of character all cloud any…

Contemporary American culture has taken on protecting children from the consequences of their own actions so much that parents are raising children for whom being responsible for one's own actions and one's own work is anathema to "good parenting." Unlike the culture of the past, many parents spend hours on end with their children under…