A senator in the Philippines has suggested prohibiting schools from giving students homework on weekends on the grounds that pupils are overworked and also need to rest.

Proposed Legislation

Sam Verzosa, a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, recently said that his country was experiencing an "educational crisis" because Filipino students were putting in excessive study time without seeing improvements in their test results.

"The Filipino youth are overworked, and yet the Philippines is trailing behind other countries," Verzosa told the reporters, including local news Inquirer.net.

According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, as reported by Rappler, the Philippines ranked worst out of 79 nations in reading in 2018 and came second lowest in science and mathematics.

As per Verzosa's proposed legislation, the issue is that pupils spend too much time in school without getting much out of it. Even though professionals advise just one hour of homework on the weekend, kids still have a mountain of stuff waiting for them when they get home.

Under the recommendations, educators in elementary and secondary schools would be prohibited from assigning homework on the weekends, and students would be allotted no more than four hours per week to do homework.

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Justification for the Proposal

According to The Guardian, Verzosa said that students required time to "rest and recharge." He said assigning homework could worsen class differences by making it more difficult for low-income students to do their schoolwork from home if they also had part-time jobs.

Ruby Bernardo, secretary of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, stated that the average time a kid spends in school in the Philippines is six hours per day, but in the provinces, it is 10 hours.

To accommodate students and provide for a shortage of classroom space, several schools in the National Capital Region (NCR) begin their day at 6:00 AM local time.

Bernardo argues that too much homework is evidence that underinvestment and a lack of resources are causing problems in the educational system. "In my experience as a teacher, usually the teacher gives homework to the students because we don't have enough numbers of textbooks and materials in class," she stated.

Due to a lack of textbooks or computers, teachers may assign homework that requires students to do independent Internet research at home. Bernardo went on to say that at some point, teachers spend their own money on everything from computers and projectors to balls for physical education.

She said that the government's reaction had been inadequate. Schools were particularly overburdened after the pandemic had forced the suspension of face-to-face classes for two years, forcing children to lag behind.

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