My nine-year-old niece wakes up at five every morning to beat Manila’s doomsday traffic. She drags a school bag heavier than the one I carried in college. Her school has a playground, but the slides and monkey bars are rusted, unsafe — and they are not allowed anywhere near them. My niece and her classmates haven’t played in that playground since Grade 1.
Her day? Long lessons, then piles of homework — coding drills, dense history texts in Filipino, worksheets that go past her bedtime.
At an age when curiosity should be blooming, she goes to bed exhausted. And she’s not alone. Children everywhere are carrying workloads that would make graduate students groan.
But why so much homework? Does it really help them learn, make them smarter — or are we slowly eroding their health, imagination, and their joy of discovery?
What the research says
The evidence is clear. Dr. Harris Cooper, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, studied homework for 25 years. He found the same pattern: in the elementary years, homework has little to no effect on achievement.
The US National Education Association and Parent-Teacher Association, citing Cooper, set a simple rule: 10 minutes per grade level per night. For a Grade 4 child, that’s 40 minutes. My niece triples, sometimes quadruples, that.
EDCOM II, Congress’ 2022 rescue mission for education, saw the same thing. Filipino kids are “overworked by design.” Grade 3 pupils spend nine extra hours of class per week compared to international standards. By junior high, it’s 36 hours. By senior high, 55 hours a week — more than a first-year college load.
And the results? Brutal.
In the 2022 PISA tests, Filipino students were near the bottom: 77th out of 81 countries in reading, math, and science. The Philippine News Agency, the government’s loudspeaker not exactly known for bad news about itself, reported we were in the bottom 10 in reading, math, and science — and second to the last in creative thinking. When even PNA says we’re at the bottom, you know it’s bad.
So what do we get? Kids studying longer but learning less — with tired eyes, shallow lessons, and skills that don’t stick.
Nakakahiya ba? Oo. Pero mas masakit isipin na it’s the kids who pay for our failure.
Why the overload?
Because of what EDCOM II calls “curriculum congestion.” This means there are too many competencies crammed into every grade. Teachers can’t finish in class so the spillover gets dumped on children as homework. Sino ba naman ang matutuwa sa ganyang sistema?
A study on the “No Homework Policy” in Apayao in the Cordillera Administrative Region, said it plainly: Teachers assign work not to reinforce lessons but to cover what they couldn’t finish in class. A Central Mindanao University study said the same.
The real costs are brutal
Sleep disappears. Children need nine to 12 hours a night at that age. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Department of Health both say so. Homework eats into those hours, weakening memory, growth, even emotional balance.
Stress spikes. Studies in Metro Manila senior high schools show alarming levels of anxiety and depression tied to heavy loads. If teenagers are buckling, why are we normalizing 10-hour days plus homework for grade schoolers? Parents see it every night — the cranky tears, the drooping eyes. Wala pa silang trabaho, burned out na.
Play vanishes. This is the cost we rarely talk about. Play is not indulgence — it’s medicine. Movement cuts stress, builds resilience, teaches kids how to solve problems together. Yet in many schools, recess is short and playgrounds are off-limits.
This isn’t accident. It’s a philosophy — the belief that children learn best when they’re still, silent, and overworked. This may produce short-term grades, but it starves long-term health, resilience, and curiosity. Tahimik, pagod, walang sigla, sunod-sunuran — is that really the child we want to raise?
What homework should be
Homework isn’t evil in itself. Designed well, it can be a short project, a science observation at home, a journal entry that sparks imagination.
The problem is the volume — and the kind of work kids are asked to do. Grade 4 students made to code or memorize historical texts in stiff Filipino? That’s not learning. That’s compliance.
Critical thinking doesn’t grow out of drills. It grows when children ask questions, try things, connect the dots themselves, and even challenge facts. That takes time — but this is time they don’t have, because homework consumes the evenings.
What should change
Give kids homework that fits their age and sparks their brain — not workloads designed to crush them. Forty minutes a night for a Grade 4 child should be the ceiling. Tasks should engage, not exhaust.
We keep mistaking fatigue for rigor, as if exhaustion were proof of learning. As if it were a virtue. But that’s not education — that’s cruelty in uniform.
One more time: rigor is not exhaustion. The best schools aren’t the ones that bury kids in work. They’re the ones that spark curiosity, boldness, imagination, and dare them to think.
The government — this is key — must accept the truth of its own study and do something about it: Filipino students are “overworked by design.”
Give children back their time
My niece — and millions like her — deserve better than joyless mornings and homework-filled nights. They deserve classrooms that balance study with play, schools that value imagination as much as memorization.
If we want a generation of problem-solvers and leaders, the answer isn’t more homework. It’s something simpler — and, in our case, almost radical: give children back their time.
Give kids space to wonder, mess about, play, rest, and learn the way kids are wired — through curiosity, trial and error, exploration, and a lot of fun. – Rappler.com
Marilen J. Danguilan, a medical doctor, works as a policymaker and works on health, peace building, and governance.
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