Your Essay Title Here
Do you agree with anything Hitler did? If you agree with anything Hitler did, raise your hand. Since nobody raised their hand, why does everybody still carry on Hitler’s legacy every day in your own home? Hitler’s legacy impacts your life every day when you do homework. We need to know how homework started and how it can actually hurt you because Hitler came up with the idea of homework, the Space Race increased the amount of homework, and homework is actually counterproductive.
According to the book Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote in 1925 to express how he thought the world should work, Hitler is the person who originally came up with the idea of homework in the form of The Hitler Youth Movement and implemented it into modern education. I realize this sounds hard to believe, but let me tell you how this happened and why we must do something about it.
Before World War 2, Hitler wanted more German children to know about how bad the Jews were for his pure nation. He decided that the best way to do this was to send kids to buildings every day. All day they would learn about what Hitler thought they needed to know and brainwash them into Nazism. The “students” would sit still and quiet and not be allowed to do anything without express permission from a teacher. Well, it worked and soon the entire country was being consumed by Nazism. This is all detailed in John Gatto’s book Weapons of Mass Instruction. Gatto wrote, “When you take the free will out of education, it becomes schooling.” Gatto described how Hitler took the free will out of what children were learning and turned it into brainwashing. Education and knowledge takes a lifetime of discovery and wonder and learning by experience. School is a corrupt checkbox that is inhumane and unnecessary.
Then the Nazis had a problem. They did not know what the students were doing when they were not at the “schools” so they decided to give them an inhumane amount of work that they would do at home. If it was not completed, the students would be punished the next day. The Hitler Youth Movement was how the Nazis indoctrinated youth. This is also where modern classroom schooling comes from. The Hitler Youth Movement included all of the Nazi youth and taught them how they were better than all other races. Put best by the National Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other “Aryan” races, while labeling Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as parasitic “bastard races” incapable of creating culture or civilization.” This shows how school was effectively used to brainwash people, and not as a tool of learning. If you are brainwashed, you are not any smarter, you are just brainwashed.
Many years later in the United States of America, the Space Race increased the amount of homework for American students. The American government needed a way to make the American kids smarter so that they could perform better and win the Space Race. The article “How the Cold War Space Race Led to US Students Doing Tons of Homework” describes how this happened. Before the Space Race, 8% of high school students had two or more hours of homework. This drastically increased and now 95% of high school students have two or more hours of homework a night, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
You might be thinking that homework helps American students perform better, but it actually does not. More than two hours of homework can actually be counterproductive. Research at Stanford shows that more than two hours of homework may actually be harmful to students. It can harm health by sleep deprivation, exhaustion, weight loss, and stomach problems. “Both the survey data and the student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills.” This is why homework hurts more than it helps. There are no benefits to homework for students. The benefits for teachers is that they have to do less during the school day. There is no good alternative to homework. Teachers should be able to teach everything in the time that they’re given with students. Students are already in school for seven hours a day. That’s more than enough time to cover everything.
We, as students, need to understand what homework truly is: Hitler’s original idea that was increased by the Space Race, and it is counterproductive to student success. Homework is Hitler’s legacy hiding in disguise in your own home. What you can do right now is educate yourself more about this and bring awareness to teachers. Don’t be controlled by Hitler.