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I'm a teacher in Canada. I'm not sure lack of homework is either a good thing or the result of advances in pedagogy.
I teach high school, and can say with full confidence that it has been decades since kids have been educated as poorly as they are now (and this in in Canada, where I say with much less confidence that average performance is better than the US). Less and less is expected of kids every year, everything operates in what Zvi Mowshowitz calls easy mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-easy-mode/), when most of it should happen in what he calls hard mode (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/play-in-hard-mode/) and grade inflation is rampant. All of this is caused by institutional cowardice, since angry parents call all the time to complain about their kids' grades. Because homework was often a mark-depressor (as you note in your own case, and as it was in mine), it has become unfashionable largely because, if people send their kids to school for any nobler reason than "day care" it's to have the kid's intelligence certified ("He's an A student"), rather than to have the kid actually learn things. So cutting homework raises grades and reduces teacher workload- it certainly isn't cut because people are reading well-designed studies and changing their practice based on the findings. But cutting homework also removes a ton of practice from the kid's life, which means the kid is absolutely worse at the subject than he would have been. Maybe it's a good trade-off, maybe it's not that important to be good at school when you're a kid, maybe school should be nothing more than day care, but the kids definitely know less and have weaker skills than they used to. And your taxes are increasing to pay for it.
Note also that places like Kumon exist to SELL homework to families. Since this homework is not connected to the school, they get all the benefits of the practice without any of the risk of mark depression.
On the other hand, my father never got homework until grade eight, so maybe we are returning to how things used to be.
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It seems like you can square this circle with the assumption that school-homework is mostly designed based on ass-pulled postulates and hence doesn't work to do anything but take up time, while kumon homework actually teaches because it's designed better.
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I think it’s a problem of weakness of the underlying dogmas under scrutiny. If you have a dogma that absolutely falls apart on contact with reality, it isn’t good to create a population that is able to think carefully about reality. In fact, you’d want a population almost exactly like our own, in which people are taught trades and given university degrees, but aren’t actually taught to observe or think and who are basically scientifically illiterate and unable to read and understand complex texts.
It’s not hard to get right, as high levels of scholarship were achieved quite often before the modern era. Teach kids how to learn, give them tools to observe and interpret their own data, to think carefully about ideas. It’s borderline criminal that we aren’t doing that: teaching logic and statistics and philosophy would create a generation of thinkers with the tools to question narratives.
We aren’t doing that, and judging by how things are, it’s being torn down on purpose as anything that actually produces a good outcome seems to end quickly because of accusations of racism.
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This just begs the questions "better in what ways" and "more competent in what?" If the ideologues really do think that, e.g., racism, prejudice, and just plain old meanness are the cause of all society's ills, why wouldn't it make sense for them to honestly invest in educational systems that try to be more competent at not being mean to kids, and similarly try to be more competent in teaching kids to not be mean themselves?
I agree with you that technical skill and competence is quite important, and that modern education is not geared towards fostering it. In fact, I think that modern education is quite prepared to suppress competence when it tends to produce outcomes which do not appeal to modern progressive aesthetic or moral sensibilities, and that this tendency is extremely bad. However, I don't think that your criticism shows hypocrisy - to the contrary, it shows the dangerousness of the earnest belief in bad ideas.
Depending upon what you need people to accept for the first part, I’m not sure that you can do both. If I want kids to accept an ideology that says the earth is flat, then competent understanding of physics would work against that.
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Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.
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