Please see below the excerpts from a letter of my friend. He and his wife visit almost every year their grand children living with their parents in the Bay Area, San Francisco.

.
What is the educational purpose of giving home works from school to students? It should be some kind of a repetition of the class work of the day for the purpose of "drilling"(to use the educational term). If there can be some thing to go beyond what was taught, it must be to t.est the originality and resourcefulness of the student---------Well and good!   It can never be something that turns the home into a school of 1 to 3hours duration, requiring the parents to get transformed into teachers of sorts, taxing on their nerves after a strenuous days work for  earning bread.. The very idea of home work is abhorred for children in the beginning classes of the primary education. The success of the school and teachers lies in making the child feel at  HOME even when the child is at school. Instead this heavy home work assignments  to children even of Pre-First standard, make these tiny tots feel that the school never ends.
And the irony is that this sort of utterly anti-child-psychology/learning process is prevalent in the US which, you remember, we undergoing Teachers' training, considered as the haven of child-oriented education. Of course, I am talking from my limited experience of a few cases in the Bay-Area, San Francisco.
Now friends in the US, especially those living in the Bay Area, San Francisco!! Would you mind expressing your opinion and experience in this matter?
Raghunathan, Kadangode.  .