A well-designed homeschool curriculum minimizes homework.
If a student puts in an hour per course per day, that should be sufficient for a properly designed course.
The goal of formal education should be understanding, not memorization. With the World Wide Web, there is no need to memorize details. There is a great need to understand connections.
The Good Curriculum assigns one hour a day per course: half reading, half listening to a lecture. That is all a student needs. On day five, there is a writing assignment or a test (math and science), which should only take 30 minutes. There is also a half-hour review of the week’s lessons. There is no reading assignment on day five.
We assume that a student reads at 250 words per minute. The reading assignments are selected accordingly. If a student practices for 10 minutes a day with the free online Spreeder speed reading program, then the reading portion of the curriculum can be cut sharply.
If you limit formal homeschooling to one hour per course per day, the student will have time for extra-curricular activities, such as a part-time apprenticeship or starting a home business.