HOMEWORK FOR THE HOLIDAYS: training or enrichment?

If the school world seems to be in favor of assigning homework during the summer holidays, some parents do not approve of this mode of teaching. The reasons that encourage teachers to suggest summer tasks, often through the execution of cards or books, are various: review the contents carried out during the school year, avoid that some concepts and procedures can be forgotten, promote a sense of duty in pupils. Parents, opposed to this practice, however, think that the performance of the tasks is only a “torture” for the children and for themselves, especially when children or young people refuse to perform the tasks.

Both perspectives, although they lead to completely opposite positions, seem to have the same basic idea: the tasks would be a way to train pupils to perform school-type tasks. Deliveries are often very tight and the solution is unique. The mode therefore provides for the training of a pupil able to solve certain school exercises, sometimes proposing the same methods for several exercises. In pupils with surplus equipment (gifted children) or in more creative subjects this mode causes a deep boredom, as well as a discomfort and a disappointment, to the point of resulting in refusal to carry out tasks and trigger quarrels in the family.

In educational and pedagogical terms, why should a pupil do summer homework?

The period of suspension of school activities during the summer is about three months, time that is usually used by children, families and teachers to rest and spend time with their loved ones. In spite of this, usually tasks are assigned that follow the “traditional” activities that are used in frontal teaching at school. The activities in most cases concern exercises to be completed, discriminating some words on the basis of two or three grammatical concepts given, solving calculations or problems where there is already written (in the title of the chapter) which operation will be used to find the solution. These examples show that tasks currently pursue an end of mechanical “training” of certain specific school skills. It is well known that learning takes place only if the pupil is actively involved, through engaging activities and through a genuine task. If we think of an active teaching, where the student is made to participate, where the goal is not the mere execution, but the ability to learn and solve problems and create new solutions, then we think that it is better to address some tasks that can “enrich”.
In the scientific literature we speak of “enrichment activities”, that is “enrichment activities”, through which we tend to motivate students to pursue the aforementioned objectives. If I think of pupils with extra equipment and/or high potential