Arising out of a paragraph in this column two sixth
form boys, one in the London region, one in Yorkshire, have been good enough to send me details of their school day. There is no space to reproduce them in full here, but there are various points of interest. What surprises me is the defence of homework which marks them both. One writes that "the homework given each week rarely takes longer than ten hours, [i.e. two hours a night], but most ambitious boys do at least twenty hours study in their spare time." The writer fully agrees with the headmaster who demands three hours a night: "University entrance is highly competitive, and boys who do less than three hours per night stand little or no chance." My other correspondent writes : "School ends at 4.15 p.m., and after tea I usually put in a good four and a half to five hours homework. . . . This may seem a stiff regime, but we survive." If the victims of the system take so cheerful a view of it I can hardly feel it part of my duty to plead for an alleviation of their burdens. None the less, I still think there is another side. One of my sixth form friends, indeed, admits that homework cuts him out of a lot of school societies—literary, debating and so on. That is a great pity.
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