I'll defer to those more familiar with European, Asian, and African education history but can speak to the practice in North America. Generally speaking, for the first few generations on American soil, there was no real demarcation between home and school. There were some places built for the primary purpose of educating children (such as Boston Latin, built in 1635) but they weren't common. Instead, the adults around a child would provide knowledge they felt they needed to be a successful adult - if adults felt book knowledge was essential, they'd focus on a classical education. That meant a solid understanding of Greek and/or Latin, some mathematics, some science, and often, what they deemed necessary for their eternal soul. Girls would receive an education in service to their future as a wife as mother.
Education wasn't as outcome focused as we think of it now. That is, parents wouldn't ensure their son learned to read Latin because they wanted him to be a lawyer and know legal terms, which were/are often in Latin, they would educate him because well-educated, successful men knew Latin (to be sure, if Dad wanted him to be a lawyer, he'd likely be a lawyer.) Education was about discipline and learning how to think.
A variety of factors contributed to the rise of the "common" grammar school in the mid-1800's. These included a dramatic uptick in population, a perceived relationship between literacy and citizenship, and a growing sense that education should be for "us" and not just the lucky few. (But, to be clear, "us" were white boys, sometimes white girls. Rarely, if ever, Black or Indigenous children.) As the concept of formal school became the norm for all white children, regardless of class, the walls between a place called home and one known as school solidified.
At the same time, the sentiment that education was about discipling the mind was firmly entrenched. If reading was good for the brain, then reading books at school and home was double good. If parents saw a formal, content-focused education as something that would help their child, they might encourage their child to read at night (if they had books at home) Recitation was the primary form of assessment for most of the 18th and 19th century and teachers would send children home with a reminder to practice for an upcoming recitation or loan out a primer for a student to practice. Schools would hold performances where children would recitate information they'd learned for the community and preparing for those recitations wouldn't always happen at school as schools were cancelled for a myriad of reasons before attendance minimums became the norm.
Based on teacher's journals, superintendent reports, and students' own journals, 2-3 hours of "home study" was common for students who attended high school in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Around the same time, education, as well as a great deal of the country, became obsessed with the idea of efficiency. Schoolmen, AKA men who ran schools, focused on making schools as efficient as possible. Doing work at home was seen as a way to make a student more efficient, and therefore, schools more efficient. A 1915 Student Efficiency Test gave students 2 points if they said they could finish their lessons in two hours "home study." Home study served a number of purposes, not unlike homework today. Reasons included reading ahead, re-reading, preparing for a speech, practicing spelling words, or solving math problems. Like most things in education history, for every action there was an opposite reaction.
The most well-known pushback to the idea that children should do school work at home came from the Ladies Home Journal in 1901. Asking children to do work at home was described as an attack on children's playful nature and capable of doing lasting harm. Homework was described as a "Sin Against Childhood" and the anti-homework campaign was so effective, the state of California passed a law banning teachers from sending work home for children under 15. Parents in other states and cities tried with limited success - for most schoolmen, if children didn't want to study and do the work of school, they were under no obligation to go to high school.
Slowly, education began to consider the radical prospect that school should be a place children wanted to be. The "progressive" education movement cast a broad shadow and homework didn't sit well with the philosophy that childhood should be protected. Progressive writers often used hyperbolic writing to catch the reader's attention and in 1930, the American Child Health Association linked homework to child labor and claimed homework was, "the chief cause of high death and morbidity rates from turbolicious and heart disease among adolescents." And thus, began the generational dance between parents and educators around what children do in the hours they're at home.
Brian Gill and Steven Schlossman, “A Sin Against Childhood: Progressive Education and the Crusade to Abolish Homework, 1897-1941,” American Journal of Education, vol. 105, no. 1 (Nov., 1996), 27-66.
Brian P. Gill and Steven L. Schlossman, “Villain or Savior? The American Discourse on Homework, 1850-2003,” Theory into Practice, 43, 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 174-181.