So says Benjamin Berrafato, a fifth grader at??New Lane Memorial Elementary School in Selden, New York. This young man composed an open letter to his classmates recently (reprinted by the New York Daily News, no less) urging them to resist "illegal" homework. Why, you may ask, is homework illegal? Benjamin explains:
Homework is assigned to students like me, without our permission. Teachers expect us to do homework, even though we'd rather not. It can be hard sometimes. We get punished if we don't do it. If we do it, we get no reward; we just don't get punished.
Simply put, if we don't, we get punished, and if we do, our reward is ... nothing.
Thus, homework is slavery. Slavery was abolished with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on Dec. 6, 1865.
So, every school in??America??has been illegally run for the past 143 YEARS. That's something to think about.
Probably a good thing we don't let fifth graders make education policy. He does, however, cite outside sources, abide by the rules of logical argumentation, and write with relatively good grammar. I bet you he learned how to do all that while doing his homework.
