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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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.
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.
I think they want kids to pay attention in class
The post you responded to was responding to someone that got in trouble for using a pay phone to call home when school was canceled.
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.
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for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it’s pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.
May I gently ask if you have children in the phone age range?
I have never seen anything with such a hold over teenagers.
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.
That’s your kids which are in the minority.
Their friends are pretty good too. Whenever they hang out they do other stuff. They plan to meet for some purpose and that’s what they do. Keeping up to date on social media is something they do on their own time when they’re bored.
It’s like they grow out of it, once they’ve seen enough crap.
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Your anecdotes and your kid’s anecdotes might not represent reality either. But somehow y’all are (violently) banning phones for everybody.
Exactly.
I’m surprised to see users on Lemmy being this dead set on banning stuff for kids just because "we tried nothing and it doesn’t work*
Social media is bad, phones are bad, I get it, but banning is not the solution.
Kids will grow up in a world with both social media and phones. IMO school should prepare them and be a practice ground for it, so they don’t make the same mistakes as we - the parents - did.
Like posted elsewhere, my kids are better at it than I am. Banning phones is projection all the way.
I’m perfectly fine with disallowing phones during class, but an outright ban is an extreme reaction completely missing the problematic issues and potentially making it worse.
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.
Maybe y’all are just boring AF to these poor kids? I would greatly prefer a phone over somebody condescending to me.
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.
Fair points, although I’m not sure that’s easy to solve. Some teachers are more interesting than others, but schools, especially middle and high schools are too generic for a whole class to be able to listen. Not everybody is going to enjoy chemistry class, while others are just not going to be happy in PE or foreign languages (me). I think a major rework of the school system is required for this to be kind of solved, but it’ll never go away completely.
I think putting all the responsibility on schools is not the right approach, they’re probably already doing their best, but that just doesn’t work on every kid
Why did they allow them in?
I remember we weren’t allowed to and our phones weren’t even as capable when they were “dumb”.
Fucking pagers were going to end teen life, shortly after Beavis and Butthead were going to ruin America’s youth. Then actual horrific data from teen phone use shows up and nothing happens because the Christian right is too busy focusing on people’s junk and banning books to raise hell about phones
I’m just guessing that stories of kids trapped in classrooms during school shootings had something to do with it.
But that is purely a guess.
Overly concerned parents want their kid to always carry a phone/tracking device.
I’m sure Life360 parents played a not-so-small part in that decision.
Also school shootings might play a factor.
The biggest contributing factor was 9/11. My school had 3 pay phones for 1600 students. When 9/11 happened it was chaos. Tons of teachers were letting students use their cell phones (of they had one) so kids could call their parents, and no me had a problem with anyone that had a phone pulling it out of their bag to use it. It felt like almost overnight half the school had a new cell phone that no teacher cared about.
School shootings have just been a continuation of the fact that parents want to know their kids are okay at any given moment.
Boomer thread
They have been banned for over a year where I live. I guess the people pushing back against this policy are just completely ignorant of the issue. Smartphones are incredibly addicting by design and, aside from the academic problem, exposing developing brains to such devices 24/7 is just a really bad idea. Having a space where children and their peers can be smartphone-free for several hours a day, several days a a week, should be seen as a positive thing.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Stupidest thing i’ve heard this week
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.
We ban gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, media for children, because of harms we understand that they inflict on children. Should these be parental discretions too?
There are good and bad ways to use a phone. It’s not comparable to things like cigarettes.
True, but there is good and bad ways to use media (educational content done well vs cheap Chinese children’s TV) and we do have age ratings there.
You’re right that cigarettes are universally bad (smokers would argue not, of course, and probably highlight social moments, pauses to reflect etc) but much of my list has good and bad sides. I’m perfectly open to removing cigarettes from the list, but it doesn’t change the validity of the other areas where we regulate minors’ usage.
I’d argue that gambling doesn’t really have good sides and alcohol is ambivalent at best. We could compare it to other media like TV, that’s perdectly ok. But when it comes to restrictions concerning other media, they are not as strict and act mostly like guidelines for parents.
Society used to think crack was bad, and then invented smartphones.
