Why Schools Are Racing to Ban Student Phones
Why Schools Are Racing to Ban Student Phones
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/technology/school-phone-bans-indiana-louisiana.html
https://archive.ph/KSXxg
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Not the smartphones themselves are addictive, but all these annoying social apps, advertisements and notifications are.
There are ways around this. Kids should learn how to use their phones for managing their lives. And actually, they do at some point - to a degree.
Smartphones are incredibly addicting by design
lmao. My phone is literally not addictive.
Which smartphone do you have?
Before phones, students were distracted by fidget toys, tamagochi, bubble gum, various collectibles, comic books, ordinary books, paper notes, drawing, pen twitching, etc.etc.
Students always find ways to get distracted. Take away everything and they'll still be rocking on the chair.
So if the purpose of banning distractions is to make students more attentive, well.. it's just not going to do that.
Then there is online bullying. Has bullying actually increased or are we just seeing it more, because it's now documented? Banning phones in school won't stop it from happening outside school hours anyway.
I'm not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it's pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.
The smartphone is a different beast. Hardware and software companies spent millions of dollars of R&D to create the most psychologically addicting and attention demanding device as possible.
May I gently ask if you have children in the phone age range?
I have never seen anything with such a hold over teenagers.
It's absolutely crack. My nephew and niece is 7 and 4, they don't watch a lot of tv and aren't allowed on the phone a lot, but when they are it's fucking crazy. They don't even have to do anything on it. When he was 5 and his friend was also 5, we had a Christmas family party. My phone was on the table and it blinked. No joke, they were like zombies, starring my phone down. He reached for it and i told him not to touch it. Their fingers kept moving on their own, and all they could to is stt the time, yet that was the most interesting thing in the universe to them. They were unable to not touch it.
When they are allowed on the phone for like 15 minutes all they do is to watch the biggest most meaningless garbage i can imagine. They would pick looking at a phone over pretty much anything. Before my sister had kids i would always think the whole ipad kids thing is blown out of proportion and i would teach them things with it, because after all, it is a useful tool. Not anymore, fuck that. I feel bad for ipad kids, i can only imagine the brain rot.
I have children, including a teen, and they have phones.
One thing I do notice is that they're quite a lot better at putting the phone away when they're with friends doing stuff or at family dinners than their grandparents who keeps checking notifications and answering calls regardless of when and where.
They grew up with phones and they have a much better understanding of when it's socially acceptable to use it.
They know not use the phone during class, so there's really no good reason to ban it entirely.
I'm not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it's pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.
While I don't disagree, social media is the problem and what are schools going to do about that, except for banning phones? You also can't compare getting distracted by a pen or piece of paper, to a phone with bright colours and notifications, specifically designed to be as addicting as possible
Social media is a problem for sure.
Also, thank you for asking what schools are supposed to do.
The problem is schools not managing to encouraging pupils towards learning.
I know I've said this before, but the teachers curse is that nothing is taught until the pupil understands it themselves, and is willing to absorb the material put in front of them. Encouraging pupils to want to learn ought to be top priority for any school. Banning phones is a lost cause, because they're already lost at that point. They're bored, so they rock on the chair or fiddle with a phone. I seriously don't think that social media addiction is the core issue here. It's an issue for sure, but it's not what is keeping kids from learning. Boredom is.
Regardless of technology, paying attention is entirely up to their own willingness to learn. Teachers should be feeding the desire to learn, not in a "fellow kids" kind of way, but by showing them why the curriculum is important to them.
I totally acknowledge that there's no reason to have a phone in class and that social media is bad, but it's relevant not issue in teaching.
Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in "zero-tolerance" policies that do things like punish the victim because they were "involved" in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.
To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is "phones may not interrupt class." Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what's happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they've already completed their work, and that's acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they're supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn't get in trouble. The parent will hear, "Brayden was using his phone and he didn't get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me."
If you've talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They'll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher's discretion versus an outright ban.
tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.
I'm sorry, but there's a wildly huge difference between bubble gum/collectibles/comic books and internet connected cell phones.
I was terrible at paying attention in class, but I always made it through by hearing just enough to get by... until I was in my final year of college when some of the classes got internet connected desktops at every desk. In normal classes I'd be fine, but in the classes with a computer where I could IM with friends I failed miserably (literally went from straight A's to C's and a couple F's in college classes because of internet connected computers being in front of me all the time). And that was a desktop with only a couple friends I knew who also had IM on at the time. I can't imagine how poorly I would have done at school if every one of my friends had messaging on every minute of every day, not to mention mobile gaming and social media.
I think there is a difference.
Yeah, the tamagotchi are games, but they are a game in the singular sense.
All the things you mention as distractions except the food items are contained in one phone multiple times over. Heck, you could probably even find a bubblegum chewing app.
That’s the distraction potential contained in one phone.
hide the issues instead of solving them.
And thats really all they care about.
Here in Europe many schools are doing this too. As a father of an (almost) teenger, I'm they are.
Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!
We got our oldest a smart phone a few years ago. Based on that experience, our younger two can buy their own smartphones when they're adults because we've decided we're not going to repeat that mistake.
I strongly disagree, this should be a decision for parents to make, no need to get the law involved. However, schools can and should have a policy that phones need to be off (or at least silenced, no vibrate) during class, and they can check it if excused to go to the restroom or something. But I would never agree to a law banning access to phones for minors, that's a violation of parental discretion.
No, you're right.
Stupidest thing i've heard this week
I have mixed feelings. "Because I said so" can get compliance in high school, but that's mostly it. It's not going to be that effective. At the same time, a lot of this overly permissive parenting seems like a reaction by people who are upset about being told no as kids and that will lead to problems, especially once they get into places that don't care about constantly trying to have a debate back and fourth.
I don’t wanna click. Too easy to cheat?
The article is about how smartphones have made people lazy. So incredibly lazy that some people aren't even reading short articles from reputable sources, but are instead using smartphones to write comments on the internet begging strangers to summarize things for them.
That was brutal.
Nah, people are just better at prioritizing.
Ha! Funny.
I made this 5 second comment just before bed, so it wasn’t so much being lazy, but not having time to click on anything else before calling it a night.
And it worked out because someone else was kind enough to give me a TL;DR and I got to bed on time.
Seems to be a combination of students too distracted playing on their phones and difficulty policing behavior on social media bleeding into school time. They give an example of students filming a student being bullied on school grounds and the video being uploaded and shared on social media. I'm not sure banning smart phones during school hours is the right solution, but it's certainly a tricky problem to deal with.
Schools are literally prisons. No phones allowed. No filming of the bullying and harassment. No incriminating evidence against the guards.
agreed
Build a Faraday cage into the walls so that only wired connections will work. Boom, no bans required. Actual necessary calls go through the office landlines, like they did in the 1990s. (Probably impractical, especially given the refit required for existing buildings.)
I can think of an America specific reason to not block all communication with the outside world in a school. Even if every room has a wired landline that worked and was accessible to students and teachers
That's because you lack the political will to fix the actual problem, which isn't an issue anywhere else in the world and has absolutely nothing to do with communications.
There are still windows, assume they are in classroom. There are RF blocking windows but those are quite expensive, and lose function as soon as you open it for airflow.
They do make RF blocking paint, but it's very expensive and I have no idea if it would be enough to fully block microwave signals.
The paywall free link is instead captcha walled.
I do the audio captcha. The image captcha never works for me, especially over VPN.
Yeah, not being able to communicate during a school shooting is a deal breaker for me.
Boomer thread
I don't quite understand why this is still a thing? Back when I was in school in the late 2000s, phones were banned. Couldn't even bring it out even if you were going to use it as a calculator. Immediate 3 hour detection if you were seen with one. I got one for calling my mother to pick me up because I needed to go to the doctor.
I don't understand how between now and then, the rules seemed to lax.
You haven't really spent any time near a school system have you? I don't even refer to them as parental units anymore, they are just banshees. These awful horrible screaming demons that want you to raise their kid but also never discipline them.
Nope I have not. I don't have kids. I have heard your comment said by many other teachers around too. I don't understand how it got to be like this. If people really don't want the responsibility, time, money, emotional and physical investments of raising kids, they shouldn't be having them.
I got in trouble for trying to use a payphone to call my mother to pick me up on a day when they cancelled school after it started due to worsening ice conditions. I didn't have permission to use the phone and my teacher got on my ass.
They want kids to be completely dependent and controllable.
Power of unions. Can't suspend everyone.
Because smart phones are a more normalized piece of technology that (most) people have and use extremely often.