Justice Rauch: Parents take work home. Some of them work all the time. That’s the nature of a competitive society. Shouldn’t we prepare our children for it?


Sadie Warren: Parents are paid to do the work they bring home, Justice Rauch. Kids are just pressured to do it. If they don’t, they get punished or publicly shamed by teachers who post homework charts in class.


Justice Fitzgerald: Are you saying that there’s no benefit at all to homework?


Sadie Warren: None proven, Justice Fitzgerald. And that does raise the question, if kids aren’t being paid to do the work, and there’s no proof that the work benefits them, then whom does it benefit? The real estate industry, which enjoys higher home values in neighborhoods with homework-heavy schools? The pharmaceutical industry, which has seen prescriptions for ADHD and anxiety drugs rise at the exact same rate as homework has risen? With so many hours of unpaid work for the benefit of others, then, we believe that homework is itself a violation of child labour laws.


(I check the clock: eleven minutes left.)


Sadie Warren: Also, if you look to common law principles to support our claim, you’ll find that in 2009 the Supreme Court of Canada granted one family the right to refuse homework for their son.


(Justice Fitzgerald makes a note on a pad.)


Justice Cohen: The examples you cite in your brief, of endless worksheets and online exercises, do seem like a poor use of children’s time. But surely not all homework is as mind numbing as that.


Sadie Warren: It’s true that some teachers are more creative and challenge their students to think. But they don’t have time. They’re too busy rushing to complete the standards. And they’re under the same pressure kids are to boost test scores.


(Eight minutes.)


Sadie Warren: I also hope you’ll consider the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. In 1954, this Court found that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal. But there’s another inequality that hasn’t been addressed, and that’s the socioeconomic inequality. During the school day, students sit together, they play together, they learn together. But then they go home – some to an empty home because both parents work, others to a home full of advantages like college- educated moms and dads, technology and tutors. By giving homework, then, the schools are forcing students back into a condition of separate, unequal, and therefore unconstitutional education.


109


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