Wikipedia has an informative history of Homework: “Historically, homework was frowned upon in American culture. With few students interested in higher education, and due to the necessity to complete daily chores, homework was discouraged not only by parents, but also by school districts. In 1901, the California legislature passed an act that effectively abolished homework for those who attended kindergarten through the eighth grade. But, in the 1950s, with increasing pressure on the United States to stay ahead in the Cold War, homework made a resurgence, and children were encouraged to keep up with their Russian counterparts. By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the consensus in American education was overwhelmingly in favor of issuing homework to students of all grade levels.”
Informative? Pardon me while my head explodes.
In my reality, where informative apparently comes out of different dictionary, that’s a good example of why Wikipedia shouldn’t be used for history. Oh, look, a footnote. What does the original article it’s quoting from say? Not much of any substance or context. It appears to be a sidebar to a longer article.
Informative. If you want informative, go to the source. Which is ‘‘A Sin Against Childhood’’ Progressive Education and the Crusade to Abolish Homework, 1897-1941 by Brian Gill and Steven L. Schlossman. It’s a scanned pdf from the American Journal of Education. And it’s the source of the information in that article footnoted in that Wiki paragraph. Unlike that Wikipedia paragraph, it’s worth reading, even if only to skim over the first section, which is the relevant one.
It says that we know very little about homework in most schools in 19th century America. Larger city schools did have required homework, but much of it consisted of memorization of spelling and math, although some arithmetic would seem to be included. Most kids dropped out of school by the fifth grade in any case.
Using the “kids are innocent snowflakes” theory - yes, that goes back a century - the anti-homework advocates wanted childhood to be a time of play and merriment. Which means that their theories were applied to middle class households. You can’t believe that parents in the Lower East Side of New York or on working farms thought this way.
So, pretty much what I said. Homework as in formal written-out assignments start in big cities (the California law was pushed by the Los Angeles schools and Bok was a New Yorker) in the late 19th century. The article is interesting, mostly because the nonsense sounds so exactly equivalent to what we hear today, with only the technical terms changed. Curvature of the spine from carrying too many schoolbooks? Neurasthenic teens? Death from overstudy? Tiger moms of the world, unite.
Informative. I could weep.
Aww, no need to restrain yourself, tell us how you *really *feel! 
Yup. Juvenile fiction set in about the last quarter of the 19th century (and I’m thinking of books by Horatio Alger and Laura Ingalls Wilder in particular; specific cites provided on request) showed schools as places where students “recited” to the teacher: i.e., informal oral presentation rather than handing in written assignments to be graded. Students would solve math problems at the board, parse and translate passages in classical language sources, or recite memorized portions of textbooks in, e.g., history and geography.
Of course, the students might well have to work at home with their books to prepare for the next day’s recitation (although there was also preparation time available during the school day itself). But writing up something to hand in, in the modern sense of “homework”, was not the focus of students’ academic efforts outside of school hours.
Note, however, that special assignments such as essays or compositions, especially for end-of-term marks and/or school prize competitions, would typically be worked on over a period of several days, not just in the classroom. So that’s more like “homework” in the modern sense.
Maybe cut down on caffeine, too.
Sorry, man, but I do this all day long. That is, I research what people really said and thought and did in the past, trying to come up with primary documents, or at least good books and articles that have found the primary documents. History is hard work, a long and seemingly endless slog. I liken writing a history tome to scooping up a beach full of sand and hoping that what doesn’t slip through my fingers is shaped like a castle. Nothing (well, no more than a dozen, or a hundred, things) pushes my buttons like lazy history.
And while I use Wikipedia daily, just as I find the Internet an absolutely indispensable tool for finding posted articles, both are next to worthless for looking up history beyond the most basic of facts. Context and understanding are impossible to get from a paragraph. People cannot be made to realize this and it’s intensely frustrating.
That particular paragraph was utter garbage, though.
Perhaps you need to get out more often. Smell a flower or two. I was just throwing that out for whatever it was worth, but I must have inadvertently questioned the marital status of your parents, judging from the reaction.
Yeah, I guess questioning the value of a quote from Wikipedia in GQ is way over the line.
Just imagine your reaction at an equivalent quote about Thailand, though.
It was not the questioning per se., but rather the disprportionate force of the delivery. But whatever. I’m out of this discussion now.
No, but the snarkish insinuation that Siam Sam didn’t even understand what “informative” means was perhaps straining the bounds of courtesy a little bit:
There are politer ways to say “Actually, Siam Sam, that article isn’t really very informative at all, and is a good example of why Wikipedia shouldn’t be used for history.”
Exapno, (can I call you Exapno?) I think you should maybe look up at the title of the topic, and look at how serious and severe your response is, and consider that it might seem… out of place in a thread that has thus far been a mostly lighthearted discussion of the origins of canine cuisine.
Maybe a dog ate Exapno Mapcase’s sense of proportion?
Anyway, when I was thirteen, a rat ate my homework.
I left my notebook next to my pet rat Lucy’s cage, and during the night she leaned out, grabbed it by the corner, pulled part of it into her cage, and shredded half of it to make a nest. Luckily there was enough prose left in the half-shredded book for a) the teacher to believe me and have a good laugh, and b) me to recreate the essay a few days later.
As far as I know this started in the UK where most families had dogs and if they had children of school age it was likely that the dogs would be puppies. It was therefore a credible reason why the homework was not available given that dogs, especially puppies, are liable to chew things. Of course, whether or not such a dog or puppy existed was not normally practical to question.
I learnt that story as one about St Kieran
And here’s a cite
Don’t forget that Ancient Greek kids from rich families were set subjects to study and prepare for debates, speeches or arguments
Demosthenes the Orator made his pupils practice speaking, in their own time, with mouths full of pebbles in order to cure stammers and stutters and to teach them how to speak clearly without shouting
I didn’t have a dog growing up, but a few weeks ago, my dog chewed up my RSA token (& the padded envelope it was in). In other words, he ate my ‘work from home’ access device. :smack:
The worst part was I had to refresh e-mail every five mins so I didn’t time out & get logged off because I wouldn’t be able to get on again - I only ever found ½ of the LCD screen among the pieces.
Teaching seventh grade I had a high achiever who turned in any and every assignment or suggestion of an assignment. One morning she arrived with a baggy containing a slimy mess of dog chewed paper. With it was a note from her mother, signed by two witnesses, that while waiting in line to board the school bus in her subdivision, her dog had grabbed the assignment from her hand and chewed it up as she screamed. Since she had, as usual, worked many hours on the assignment, she had been terrified to go to school without documentation.
So yes My dog ate my homework does get used as a legitimate excuse, with documentation and evidence.
Was it a zombie dog? 
I remeber using this excuse once in the fourth grade back in 1938. The teacher, who was a real gentleman, let it slide.
John Steinbeck’s first draft of Of Mice and Men was lost before he could submit it to the publisher because his dog ate it.