Why is homework not regarded as intrusion into students' leisure time?

Question

With the AI debate, everybody seems to be wringing their hands on how to keep up the system of homework instead of getting rid of it for the sake of students' mental health / work-life balance.Imagine regular adult workers were given "homework" they had to do every day after work at home: This would be considered as a severe worker's rights violation and fought tooth and nail.Why do students not have "worker's" rights? Are they less of human beings?IMHO once you walk out of school your "work" duties should be over, just like they are for adults.So what's stopping schools from introducing clear separation between the work and private life of their students?If the homework tasks are so important, why not have the students do those at school with supervision?Then there wouldn't be any "students are using ChatGPT" problem to begin with, the supervision could just take away their smartphones, done.

broken_logic · Accepted Answer

You are comparing things that you implicitly assume to be the same, when clearly they are not. Students aren't payed for their work; the education system doesn't benefit from students' work the way companies do from workers; schooling is compulsory (children must attend school by law, but law doesn't force people to have a job).

broken_logic · Answer

Please note that even if your comparison between workers and students sounds flawed (to me at least), this doesn't mean that there isn't a case to be made in favor of limiting or even suppressing homeworks. I just think that this comparison is not the best approach.

zoezoezoezoe · Answer

The difference is schools dont care about students, nor do students have voices. When employers invade workers rights, they go on strike, when students go on strike they get arrested.