This debate seems to conflate two or three different issues.
1. Use of phones in classrooms
2. Having phones present in schools, but unused
3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren
(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)
(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues.
The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.
Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".
The fact that many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time is a part of the problem.
The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully phone-free quickly internalized the need for connectivity.
Raising children from a young age to expect and demand access to phone connectivity at all times is making this problem much worse.
No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen. The negative effects of perpetual connectivity are far, far worse.
Almost all humans (including those alive today) managed just fine to live life without a perpetual phone link. Teach children to do the same. The phone is a nice-to-have, not a necessity to merely venture out of the house on a routine trip to school and back.
Indeed it is. "Phone addiction" is the "smoking" of our time.
In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarettes!
Even at that time, there was strong initial evidence of smoking's harmful effects. It was largely ignored in favor of short term feelgood outcomes.
Perhaps in 2080 or so, we will look back upon today's era of always-on connectivity the way people now look at chainsmokers in 1955: "Wow, how could they ever do that? Didn't they know this was so obviously bad for you?"
There are many "smoking"s of our time. Food addiction is probably an even bigger one (cause of obesity and type 2 diabetes).
I'm actually starting to question whether smoking really was some huge public health success story. Or did it just go out of fashion? It's odd that we'd be able to tackle one thing like that then just completely drop the ball on it (see vapes) and not even begin to address other things like food/sugar and phones.
That's pretty close to "almost never happens" That works out the 33 a year, but there's something like 129,000 schools in the US. And when people talk about school shootings, they're typically talking about mass shootings, and there are even fewer of those (apparently 0.5 per year according to https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/4/e20230...).
And then there's the question of how a cell phone is actually supposed to help in such an emergency. If anything, I think it would be a liability.
As a parent that experienced such an event, my son having his phone let him message me that he and his class were literally running away into the woods and escaping the situation.
Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.
Your link shows ~600 people injured or killed in school shootings, across every possible education level (from kindergarten to college) in the course of 24 years. (Both injured and killed, the number actually killed is more like a quarter to a third of that).
That's an average of 25 people killed or injured per year.
ANY school shooting, whether people are shot or injured or killed, or whether the shooter simply misses and nobody is struck, is extremely rare in the United States.
That is to say, it almost never happens.
The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.
For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)
It is very useful device, but sure- it doesn't block bullets. In a shooting it's mostly useful for contacting family and 911.
>"having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents
How could you possibly conclude that? Look at any timeline of a school shooting and there's often a lot of information going from 911 calls to inform the police on the number of shooters, the shooter's location, and where students are still alive/hiding. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin...
As a parent that experienced this two years ago, I can confirm. Hearing about a threat at school, followed by shota.fired, and receiving a call from my fleeing child are those "life in slow motion" moments burned into my memory. It didn't alter the outcome, but it was very beneficial to everyone's mental state.
I don't understand (2); I (and probably you, too) never had a phone going to school, or playing outside, or doing most other things, and this was fine. If you really need to get in touch for the rare emergency that will probably never happen you can just ring the school. I sometimes see parents talk about not being in contact 24/7 is like [1].
On a practical level, "no phones at all" is just so much easier to enforce.
Yes, you were fine. But you were also fine meeting up with friends, giving up when people are late, making plans, etc. Society has moved on -- plans are dynamic and people keep each other updated. If you're running late you let them know and they go to the museum without you and you know you can catch up. If you're in the area, you send a quick message to see if they're around.
With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now. When kids make plans with each other they don't have to make a ton of arrangements, they can just fly by the seat of their pants; they can meet up with friends, or ditch them because they're feeling tired without it being a big deal or requiring a game-of-telephone approach to communication.
The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it."
Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.
There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a phone culture.
More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.
I appreciate that there is a body of research discussing possible implications of large-scale phone connectivity, but this does not meet the bar of "objectively harmful externalities".
I'm not even talking about methodologies or replication or evidence or p-hacking (all of which are huge challenges to this sort of research).
On a much more fundamental level, the statement "unauthorized smartphone use in a classroom setting is objectively harmful" is a defensible statement. I don't need a study to tell me that, nor should anyone. The extraordinary claim in this case would be the opposite, for which I would have to see tremendous evidence, and which even then I would likely not believe.
> With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now.
Because it's fucking up your kid's education. That's why. That's what this thread is about.
I'm so tired of this "it's just the way the world is" technofetishist apologetics. It's a complete non-argument that says nothing, and this type "it's just the way it is" resignation can be applied to every injustice or shortcoming in society every.
Phones in the classroom are clearly a distraction and should be disallowed. Phones in school seem mostly harmless and provide clear benefits.
I'm not saying "do nothing", I'm just not seeing a case anywhere of why phones in schools but not during class are "fucking up" anything.
You can make a serious case for banning phones in school as the easiest way to enforce banning phones in classrooms, and accepting the tradeoffs that this implies. But you can't just dismiss the fact that many people (myself included) see there being serious benefits of having access to phones outside the classroom setting without first addressing those arguments.
Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as if it were a response to itself:
Replying to "society has this problem X" by saying, "Well, X is just the way society is now."
is not responsive to the proposition. It is merely repeating it in different wording.
I get where you're coming from, but times have drastically changed. I feel we'd see better results in teaching kids from a young age how to responsibly use smartphones, use them for research, fact-checking, how to protect themselves, and building a healthier relationship with them.
If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.
> If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.
Then you don't know kids, because this is not how (most) kids work, certainly not at a young (pre-teen) age. And even in teenage years/puberty this kind of reductionist simplistic reasoning doesn't really apply (and is also one of those non-arguments that can be applied to everything).
And no one is argueing against all smartphone usage by kids. Or at least, I wasn't. Just saying people don't need to in touch on the way to and from school.
I'm the oldest of 5 siblings and have helped multiple family members, friends, and neighbors with their kids. I feel comfortable enough to say that I do know kids. In total, I'd say I've helped raise 15-20 kids in my life.
I wasn't allowed a phone or internet access by my parents until I was 18 and off to college, by then the iPhone 5 was out. Even when I did go to college, they refused to get me a phone at all, stating that the front desk of my dorm will walk up 5 flights of stairs to my dorm to tell me I had a call. My aunt had to buy me a flip phone.
You know what I (and my siblings) did when we lived with them? We would buy a schoolmates old iPod touch, PSP, or Blackberry Storm and hide it in our pillow cases. We'd ask for a specific e-ink Kindle because it had a button hidden in the settings to access an "experimental" internet browser.
Kids are creative, and if they want something, they will get it.
I agree that it would be fine to not have phones - we'd all cope.
But when my daughter hasn't got home on time if I can check her GPS and see that she's in the park then I can relax a little.
If she needs to say she's staying out late, using a group chat to let the whole family know is easier than trying to phone mum, then dad, then grandma.
Or she can include a photo showing how much fun she's having.
My life is richer because of communication on things like family group chats.
It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose that
Why would three family members need to know that she's staying out late? I genuinely can't understand your comment because it seems like it has the obvious hallmarks of helicopter parenting. I don't actually know you and you're probably a much more reasonable parent than this comment portrays, and I don't know how old your daughter is, but it seems like you're not comfortable at all with not knowing much she's up to.
When I was a kid, my parent would know that I was staying out late... from the fact that I was not home yet. Sometimes he wasn't home yet, either, so no problem at all. If it was really late, as in it turned into a sleepover, the friend's parent would call my parent to let them know to expect me back in the morning. We somehow survived without 24/7 surveillance and GPS tracking.
"Surveillance parenting" -- which is "helicopter parenting" magnified through technological tools the Stasi could only dream of -- seems likely to foster long-term dependence and anxiety that far outweigh the positive effects.
Yes, it's OK to not know exactly where a responsible older child is down to centimeter-resolution lat/lon coordinates at all times. Most humans, including most alive today, lived like that for all of history.
Some of that is rather different than "I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school" from your previous comment mentioned though. I'm just saying it's fine to send your kid to school without a phone. I didn't say anything about group chats in general or (3) from your post or anything else.
>> 1. Use of phones in classrooms ... is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
I disagree. For a few years I taught a university class and very much appreciated the kids having their phones in class. In discussions I would often task someone with looking up or confirming some pertinent fact or law. They would usually use their laptops but I didn't much care whether the used their phones. Students having ready access to information can be useful in a classroom.
This isn't really about university classes but elementary school and high school, and no one denied that phones can't be useful on occasion – just that the downsides outweigh the upsides.
And many highschoolers are just one summer vacation away from a university classroom. Imho a great many highschool seniors are better behaved and take classroom time much more seriously than the average first-year uni student. We should not ball all kids together, as would happen under any total ban on a particular tech.
Well said! This is the same problem I have [1] with the messaging around this sort of thing and I don't know why people can't back up and figure out a more consistent approach to these separate issues.
One thing I hear a lot from parents of middle school and high school children (mine are just entering this domain) is that there's a deeper problem of teachers losing control of students -- even when they have these policies, the teachers and administrators are unable or unwilling to enforce them. I don't know what the solution to this is, though.
> But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".
Always seems to boil down this way. There is no place for nuanced discussion in US school policy. "Zero tolerance" was just a crystallization of existing all-or-nothing trends.
The problem with the phones and social media is bad discussion is that ... school's can't fix that. It's just too far outside their ability to control.
But in general I believe this is true. I don't think it's as vague as you think it is. I'm not sure I would agree with "dangerous", but definitely "unhealthy".
The last thing Apple is going to do is put a bad taste in the mouths of it's most obedient golden geese. Apple stock would probably halve if kids stopped socially shaming each other into buying iPhones.
There is a potential clash here between control and privacy.
A few years ago Apple blocked[1] some parental control apps because "they put users’ privacy and security at risk"
This actually came up with our school. They tried to use an app to control student phones but it was fundamentally limited by these Apple restrictions.
First thing I would do is to wonder how I could enforce that ... for fun and games on others.
And really if we're talking about having to enroll a device into some sort of managed device system, schools don't have the time or manpower to manage tracking every kid's phone that is in the school.
And if we're talking about something you don't actively choose to enroll, we're back to my fun and games.
Moreover, when a kid is perpetually glued to a screen absorbed in a group chat, they are much less likely to interact with others who are physically around them and ever develop any actual mates.
My kids’ high school required kids to have a phone. They strongly encouraged the kids use the calendar to track assignments, they used the camera for capturing homework instructions from a white board, they sometimes made movies for class assignments, and they had some kind of Twitter-like app for the teachers to broadcast to the kids and the kids to contact teachers (this didn’t seem to be used often). They also used the browser a lot for looking stuff up.
When I went to the fall parent-teacher orientation night and they explained all this, it didn’t sound like phone use was a huge problem, but maybe they just didn’t want to talk about the problems. I did like that they had structure around phone use that included appropriate and inappropriate uses of the phone.
I totally get banning phones with young kids, but high schoolers should be treated more like adults as they progress through the grades. Some of the kids were entering the workforce or joining the military after their senior year. They should be ready for that.
> I totally get banning phones with young kids, but high schoolers should be treated more like adults as they progress through the grades. Some of the kids were entering the workforce or joining the military after their senior year. They should be ready for that.
High school is from the age of 13 to 18; big difference between those two.
I remember, in ancient history, that my very average public school system had a zero-electronics policy (with the exception of the mandatory TI-xx calculator, medical devices, and watches). Any other electronics, like computers, or musical equipment, were provided for the students by the school for specific classes or lessons.
School security guards would wander the halls and catch kids listening to walkmen, or playing with some other gizmo, and seize them -- recoverable only at the end of the year by the student's parents.
Cell phones technically existed at the time, but were too expensive and bulky for students to be carrying around. If people had them at all they were usually mounted permanently in a car.
While it was pretty draconian, I get why the rule was in place, though I can also see why it would also be relaxed somewhat given the massive increase in the prevalence of personal electronics since the stone age I grew up in.
But I don't understand why it's turned into such complete wild west. Even during my time, if you kept it in your bookbag, you were fine. That students are wandering the halls, or sitting in class, on their phones, is mindboggling.
"But what about emergencies!", that was trivially handled by all parents having an emergency number, where they could call the school and summon the student in just a couple of minutes over the public address system.
I hope some students or parents either sued or physically forced their property back into their possession. School teachers are the most authoritarian group of people that society gives a free pass to and I don’t get why the HN crowd loves to lick their boots.
> School teachers are the most authoritarian group of people that society gives a free pass to and I don’t get why the HN crowd loves to lick their boots.
Teens and kids are the most troublesome, whiny set of people adults deal with.
It takes a lot of patience and restraint to be a teacher but they aren’t even appreciated for it.
Because you need to be authoritarian to handle large groups of kids. That's the obvious reason. Otherwise you would have anarchy within the school grounds.
You can bring them but you have to lock them in your locker at the start of the day until the end of day.
If a teacher sees them they take them, kid gets it back at the end of the day on the first offense, on the second offense parents have to come to the school to get the phone, and from then on it works that way. (I like that this puts pressure on the parents)
I agree with this measure on general principles. At the very least phones should not be used in class unless on explicit instruction of the teacher.
But I do have that this is phrased as moral panic around "social media". In general, I hate the entire term "social media" because it smooshes together consumption of user-generated content, production of content, consumption of social network and contribution to social networking.
These are all very different phenomena. Kids watching Tiktok, Reels, Shorts, or whatever, doesn't really bother me at all. Producing the content bothers me a little more, but mostly as a parent -- I don't like the idea of people leaving a permanent record of all the stupid shit that they thought when they were a kid.
The other side of it, social networks, are very much a mixed bag; I'm not certain that the rise of "cyberbullying" or spreading rumors via social media is any worse than it ever has been -- we just have more visibility into it, because instead of a he said/she said about a who started a rumor, you have the screenshot of the rumor being started or spread. Maybe this makes it worse because of the indelibility, or maybe it's ameliorated by the fact that these sorts of rumormongering is so widespread and easy to see.
> Kids watching Tiktok, Reels, Shorts, or whatever, doesn't really bother me at all.
My main concern with this is that it shows a very very unrealistic view of life.
It's basically the old "unrealistic role models" debate all over again (and this applies to both boys and girls). Except worse because TV shows and such were at least presented as fiction, whereas this is presented as "real life", even though it's not. And "education" is not going to solve this, because intellectually knowing something and feeling something like this are two very different things.
There are some other concerns as well; here is what I got on YouTube some time ago when searching for "Alan Lomax" (famous for recoding obscure "regular people" playing music throughout the US): https://imgur.com/a/jTQ6xvM
This is just rage-bait designed to make your angry. It has nothing to do with what I searched for. I don't have an account, don't store cookies, and even if YouTube was somehow tracking me: I more or less only use it for music stuff, sometimes comedy or programming videos. Certainly not politics.
None of the above is strictly new per se. George Galloway was around with fairly inflammatory rhetoric before social media really took off, but level and amount of exposure do matter a great deal.
And while almost all journalistic mainstream journalistic outlets do care about some level of balance of viewpoints (even though this is not perfect), this is just non-existent for a lot of online stuff.
You make very good points. I would depart from you on kids watching reels and shorts.
I believe infinite feeds to be a very dark feature for adults and kids alike. We should not get our kids used to mindlessly scrolling until their brain fries.
On the other hand, I am 100% with you on not mashing everything up into a single "social media" bucket.
We need to educate our kids to manage these tools and more importantly, themselves with these tools in hand. A blanket restriction/removal won't be very efficient in the end.
If you are arguing that phone use inside the classroom is a distraction then we're already on the same page.
If you're arguing for a total ban even outside the classroom, then I need a little more clarity on how it is a distraction. The cheating ship has scaled; even if you ban the outside the classroom, students still have a "home" where they do "homework" that they can apply whatever cheating mechanisms they want.
You are using "Social Media" in the vague and scary sense that I am specifically arguing against here. One reason that I haven't dug deeper into Haidt's work other than listening to him argue for it on podcasts is that he does not appear to address the specific nuance that I'm referring to here.
I feel most of the effort in the last 2 decades to "bring technology to classrooms" has either been ineffective or even negative.
No, Chromebooks and iPads are not needed for most things, and while we all like to pretend that we are using them for "studying", most of the time spent on them is wasted time that stifles creativity. Whenever you bring it up, someone points out the example of Timmy from Grade 4 who made a beautiful digital sketch on his iPad or something, conveniently ignoring the other 99 students who basically wasted hours on the computers with no intellectual stimulation.
We probably need fewer electronics in the classroom, and even for stuff like taking notes, kids should be practising the motor skills of writing with their hands.
It's hard to correct the many serious, fundamental problems in K-12 education, but it's easy to write a check and "buy a bunch of technology" so you can look hip and modern at the school board meeting.
Why do kids even need a phone in school? There is no reason they'd need one since they should be learning a subject. At best they'd need a calculator but there are cheap stand alone ones.
Here in Canada a few schools have said no phones during school even lunch hour. The kids themselves have said they find they feel better and their studies are better.
A phone now would be like allowing comic books to be read in class say in the 1980s.
When I was in school (graduated HS in 2007) phones were already not allowed. Teachers would confiscate them all the time. What happened? I guess when gen-z came around this policy fell apart and now we are going back to where we were 20 years ago.
I wonder if there's a technological solution such as student's phones joining the school network or use of geofencing to prevent certain phone apps from being able to be used while school is in session. If a parent needs to talk to anyone while in session it should be school administration to not disrupt class or the student unless necessary.
Default geofencing of ALL Apple and Google phones, to go into DND when entering churches, hospitals, schools, theaters, etc. with geofencing and maybe a Bluetooth signal this should be pretty feasible to have good boundaries.
Likewise, transition phone into school focus mode (calculator and Google classroom only, canvas etc) would be great.
Obv could be overwritten if you are an on call doctor or something, but at least a tool that could help.
This is an excellent policy in my opinion. I think the FTC should probably make a policy exception for signal jamming cell phones at schools as well for all the more criminally minded kids Faculty and others can get on wifi calling instead.
Because it’s worth giving it a shot. It would -probably- be better to do it on a smaller scale like say do it in all LA schools for a year and see how it goes. Then expand the program if it seems successful.
Honestly so many parents are pro cell phone, we should develop parallel tracks of classes (think smoking/non smoking). Kids can sign up for the class track that requires they deposit their cell phone in locker; you get 3 strikes and then you are moved for the remainder of the year and the NEXT year to the unfettered cell phone track.
In the cell phone track, kids are basically free to do whatever on their phone as long as it’s not actively disruptive to others. We basically had classes like that for kids who were not on an academic path and would spend class time doodling and passing notes.
My nephews on both side of the pond (one in London and one in North Carolina) have received smart watches for their 10th birthday. Mom can call you, you can call mom. Find My for easy tracking by parents.
So bizarre and embarrassing the peanut gallery here views this as anything other than a backslide. We've been having this non-argument since I was in middle school: moratorium was a ridiculous non-sequitur then and it's a ridiculous non-sequitur now. If civic institutions can't find a constructive path to integrating socially ubiquitous prosthetic tech, it ought to be disqualifying. That's quite nakedly the task of governance.
Imagine having to teach a whole class, keep track of each kids engagement, where they're at, if they need more help, and on top of that, having eyes on the back walls of the classroom to see if kids have their phones hidden in their pencil case or something, watching youtube or cheating, or msging each other, or are wearing buds under their hair and are just jamming and not listening in class... Imagine each kid has a gaming console in their hand and are already addicted to all their devices and on top of trying to teach them a full curriculum, you also have to be their addiction counselor and police.
At most, if kids phones were registered as "student" phones and registered to a school so that between certain hours, the phones allowed policies from the school to be applied to a phone while the phone is on the premises. Teachers could just disable them during class or allow for exceptions like if such and such kid was waiting for a critical call from a parent or something.. Classrooms could have beacons telling the phones they're in a classroom so if they go in the halls the phones could work... Or not.. Either way, there should be tech solutions to tech problems and teachers have enough to deal with, they shouldn't be further strained by having to police students always trying to find ways to sneak on to their devices.
Soon teachers might be a thing of the past and kids will just interact with an AI teacher anyway... The AI will be responsible for keeping them engaged and make sure they understand the material. At that point the AI can just shock them into submission if they whip out their phones... Muahahhaa... jk jk.
Yes, as a society we have comfortably made this distinction all of the time. Think gambling, or marijuana, nicotine, and alcohol. Or dangerous hobbies. Etc.
>> Guess the kids need a dumb phone. Nokia will rise again.
> Why do kids need a phone at all? They especially shouldn't need it at school.
Part of it is that almost all the infrastructure for "not having a cell phone" has disappeared. At every school I went to as a kid, there was a landline phone or two for kids to call their parents. There were payphones everywhere. I remember biking around as a kid, getting soaked in heavy rainstorms, then biking to whatever school was closest to call my parents to pick me up to take me the rest of the way. I think even the airport (traditionally the pay-phoniest places in the world) now only has one or two payphones left, if any. So a kid with no phone today is probably less able to contact their parents than in the pre-cell phone era.
So a kid needs a call phone of some kind in the modern world, but certainly not a fully-featured unlocked smartphone. I'm thinking ideally that would be a locked down phone that has no web access, no ability to install apps, and can only send and receive texts from numbers on a whitelist (though I actually think it might be fine for the phone make and receive voice calls from any number).
> At every school I went to as a kid, there was a landline phone or two for kids to call their parents.
We didn't even have a dedicated phone for that, although I'm sure I could have used a phone if I had need to. I think I may have did once or twice. I'm sure that's still the case in all schools, especially if they start banning kids brining phones to school.
Lack of payphones is more of a problem, although I would imagine that especially for a child or teenager it wouldn't be too hard to use a phone from a stranger or business or even a random house. But not all personalities would be comfterable with that.
Schools still have phones, plus there’s cable/fiber connections. It’s not a big deal. Kids don’t need phones at school.I would not want to be the staff enforcing this during the first year though lol. It’s going to be a real shit show fighting all those addicted to their phones.
I think it's more an Americanism... I don't think parents elsewhere need to be so vigilant over their kids when they're at school... Of course, kids elsewhere are nowhere near the level of danger generated by a country that sells assault rifles like they're candy.
I could see it in case of emergencies or unexpected surprises.
Maybe the parent texts "I won't be able to pick you up today because something came up, so take the bus home, and there should be leftovers for dinner in the fridge."
Or maybe the kid texts "There's been a fire at school today, and so they're sending us home early. Can you come pick me up? If not, let's talk over the phone over what to do."
Well, I wasn't saying those would justify a smart phone, just a relatively dumb phone that can text and call. A school-provided phone could also work, like you said.
Before school, kids walking to school? Or even bus riders: Bussing companies absolutely suck about keeping parents in the loop about incidents with the bus transportation. (I've been part of multiple incidents as both a K-12 child riding, AND as a parent)
After school events?
Kids with the autonomy + maturity to change + confirm plan changes after school with their parents or caregivers?
Kids with complicated home situations?
I 100% agree they are a distraction in the classroom and should not be allowed in them. But these laws and these rules should NOT grant the school administrators another black + white so called "zero tolerance" rule to lord over the kids and mindlessly enforce without compassionate understanding of the individual situation.
Was nice to not have to remember to bring a quarter or call my parents collect. "Would you like to accept a collect call from, It'smepickmeupatschool!!!?"
I’d say they might need one in Europe where they are allowed to walk home from school alone, in case something happens. But in the US where school buses take kids almost door to door,[1] there’s no clear need for phones.
Edit: [1] I am simplifying here and ignoring a lot of geographic variability.
Where we live (in Southern California), the school buses don't go door-to-door. My daughter's nearest stop is about 1 mile from our home. She could make that walk without a phone, but we appreciate knowing she can contact us if necessary.
FWIW the door-to-door schoolbus service is pretty rare and vastly over-represented in our media. Not trying to be argumentative, but I always think about how fun and convenient that would be when I see it in television or movies. It's mostly a relic of the past.
It's not kids neglecting to lock their lockers, it's that if it becomes known that hundred to thousand dollar phones are in lockers, they will get opened and stolen.
I think setting clear policy with personal expectations of no phones out in classrooms, with personal repercussions of not following that policy is fine. No need to use bans to make schools any more prison like than they already are.
> I think setting clear policy with personal expectations of no phones out in classrooms, with personal repercussions of not following that policy is fine.
When's the last time you've been in a high school, it's like giving an addict a pile of cocaine and telling them to wait until after work to use it.
Most recently, I have been involved on the board of a high school PTA with constant volunteering for events over the time my own kids went. Before that i also did pta for elementary and middle school. For high school, two kids, four years apart so back to back over eight years - my youngest is just starting college; I feel i have a good amount of experience.
The current generation of kids are very cognizant of healthy phone discipline - moreso than many adults imho.
When you set policy, clear expectations and crisp repercussions treating the kids as equals, you get better results than treating kids like addicts with medical problems or subhumans for that matter. You very much receive the respect you put out; and bans are imho disrespectful of personal responsibility and autonomy.
i feel like parenting keeps regressing. at my kids school many parents walk their kids in. i get that for kindergarten, but 3rd grade? you live 3 blocks away. your kid could walk. and biking is out of the question, too dangerous. only 2 kids bike to school. and they wouldn’t let their kid walk home (probably a quarter mile) without a gps device. air tag is not enough because it’s not realtime and has no communication.
this isn’t an exaggeration. so many of my parent friends think this way. “they can’t bike to school because what if they fall and need help? they need a phone”
why as humans do we create more barriers and goalposts?
Humans evolved to constantly identify threats and ward them off.
A side-effect of this is that as real threats dwindle and disappear, brains will naturally fill the gap with progressively more paranoid and unfounded fears.
I think this is almost 100% born out of fear of liability. From the school side it’s fear that parents will sue them for neglect or injury or any other failure. Parents fear that the state will charge them with neglect and take away their children. Compounded by a generation of news over-coverage and fear-generating reporting, you end up with anxious parents desperate to protect their children from anything and everything.
Fair enough, though I do think I appreciate the problem. I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.
I was sort of imagining a neighborhood and school near me that does actually have great sidewalks with a single conflict-producing crossing that is managed by a guard in the mornings. I admit this is totally our of the ordinary though, especially for a public school in the SE USA.
I apologize for the assumption, that was quite rude of me.
That said, you’ve just described my neighborhood. We’re about 2 blocks from my son’s school. One major road, with a crossing guard at school time. The 2nd-to-last day of walking him home from school I come up to the guard who’s calling in a driver who blew past her.
As an aside, I’ve begun to notice cars leaving huge gaps between them and the car in front of them. In every case I see the driver looking down, oblivious to the 20+ feet between them and the next car.
Yea. I live in a downtown area on one of the most popular streets in town and I was pushing my luck and essentially had to hop on the hood in both cases. A lot of situations where drivers are waiting to turn left against cross traffic and don’t then look to make sure the pedestrian crossing is clear. Appreciate the question.
The parents of Madeleine McCann were completely assraped in the media for not watching their 4-year old like a hawk 24/7. In various online discussions (including HN) I somewhat frequently see parents be blamed for all types of things, from a child committing a crime (or generally being "bad") to victim-blaming when something bad happens, like with McCann. I'm pretty sure you can see the horde of victim-blaming after something bad happens to a 11-year old "but he didn't have a phone".
Parents are the Tour de France cyclists: we expect them to do the impossible and are then surprised they're all doped up. Surprised Pikachu.
As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid.
In the cause of a school shooting (that’s statistically almost not bound to happen), phoning your child is a liability likely to get more people killed than an asset.
It’s extremely unlikely a given kid will be present at all during any kind of shooting at school, the vast majority of which aren’t indiscriminate killings and which may not involve students or staff at all (a shooting that just happens to take place with at least one involved party standing on school property)—over all 13 years of k-12 school.
I ran the numbers and it was firmly in “not even worth a thought” territory. I cast the net of the definition of “school shooting” as wide as remotely reasonable, and made the criterion present at the building for, not hurt or killed, and it was still not worth worrying about.
The odds are even better in the kinds of schools HNers are likely to send their kids to, since a ton of those shootings are drug- and/or gang-related.
> We prepare for unlikely events all the time. Impact is another metric that we respond to. I simply multiply the two together.
But we don't design our lives around those unlikely events. Nuclear war is extremely serious, but extremely unlikely in the short term. By you logic, we should all be living in fallout shelters basically all the time, just in case.
I had an immediate family member in a similar scenario. I think those closest to a problem are the best able to make decision about it.
People far from a problem deciding how you should solve is like a boss telling you how to solve a coding issue. They aren't close enough to understand important details that affect the decision.
You're suggesting that the solution to school shootings is to ensure that all children have smartphones, not that less people should have access to guns?
I think they will get used to it quickly. This is how it used to be and parents had far less anxiety. I think at first it will be a very jarring change, but once they are through the worst part society will adopt quickly.
"As a parent, yep, in event of a school shooting. It's an insurance policy to hear your child's last words. Address the root cause, because everything else is just a band-aid."
Sure, rather than go after the actual source of the problem (large social media companies that knowingly enact policies that harm children), that would ruffle too many donor feathers, so we make a gesture at correcting the problem that will ultimately do very little to protect children. Wonderful. Sorry for my cynicism but this is so beyond the pale. If he'd given literally any other reason I would buy it, I do not believe smart phones have a place on campus during school hours for most use cases.
Social networks aren't the only reason that phones shouldn't be in schools. There are very few good reasons why a kid should be looking at their phone in school. Kids having phones is just a sweet spot where parental paranoia (legitimate) intersected with the opportunity to indulge your children (they're begging for it), with a luxury item that kids could discriminate against each other over (social disorder.)
I accept that it's understandable that we did the experiment, because it was a new device, but it offers no significant benefit to the parents and children (in fact playing into their neuroticism), and allowed companies a new way to go after those children to exploit their insecurities for money. It's moronic that we got rid of Saturday morning cartoons because they were just longform ads aimed at kids (but they were fun!), yet we allowed this contagion in school.
They shouldn't even be on Wikipedia in school. There's a teacher there, speaking, and a book. Look at Wikipedia at home. The teacher is expensive and only available at certain times, Wikipedia is cheap and always there.
I couldn't disagree more. Children don't need 24/7 unfettered access to intensely dopaminergic mental stimulation that is equivalent to junk food. They need focused minds, not the constantly searching monkey mind that is amplified by having a phone in your pocket from age 13.
Adults need to stop regurgitating 1970s era neuroscience tropes long proven false as if they were facts. You come off like someone pointing at their monitor declaring the internet is broken because the monitor is set to the wrong display input. Not even wrong. These extremely scientificially incorrect memes re: "dopamine" and "screens" are far more dangerous to society than looking at screens ever could be because they're used to justify use of physical force against human persons in contexts where there is no force or coercion or fraud.
There are quite a few of these studies from the modern era about the effect that these devices have on children. They posit the exact opposite of what you're saying here, and have data to back it up. I presume that these are what you're referring to as "non-scientific" here and have specific issues with their methodology, and not just disliking the concept that phone/social media could be bad in some fashion.
I'll put in as much effort in my rebutal as was shown in the initial false statement (very little). In the 60/70s there was this idea that dopaminergic populations of neurons (of which there are many with different roles, but here lets simply talk about the mesolimbic populations in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NAc). Early electrophysiological studies found that activiating these populations could lead to animal models doing whatever was necessary to get them stimulated again. This lead to the idea of dopamine as the "pleasure chemical". But since then it's been found that in the VTA and (shell of) the NAc the dopaminergic populations don't actually encode for pleasure or reward at all. The reward/pleasure is mediated almost entirely by glutamergic neurons in the NAc, and the dopaminergic projections there from the VTA encode for belief in possible future reward, not reward itself. Dopamine is wanting (prediction of liking), not liking.
Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking. It needs no special disproval; the burden of proof is on such a wild unphysical claim. Screens are not, and cannot be "addictive". That word has a medical meaning and it does not cover screens. You may object and say, "But what of gambling?" to which I respond, the DSM5+ and ICD10 both have it as "gambling disorder" because it's not an addiction and it's a grandfathered in disorder at that; all by itself. Additionally, the DSM spent the last decade addressing the potential issue of "screens" and each commitee returned with the same conclusion: not enough evidence for inclusion (latest was 2022).
If you really do want to learn the nitty gritty details and see the references I suggest starting with Kent Berridge's lab on affective neuroscience and his review papers, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/
> Furthermore, the idea that screens are a special type of stimuli that can directly bypass the senses and act like a dopaminergic drug to increase incentive salience (wanting) without there being intrinsic pleasure to the stimuli is absurd and unsupported magical thinking.
Or at least it's not the damning point you're making it out to be. I think there is an issue with smartphones, attention, and development, but I don't claim that screens are anything other than an audiovisual medium. Nor do I think they need to increase specifically "incentive salience without intrinsic pleasure" to be a problem.
Do you not see gambling addiction as an issue in real life? Do you not see massively decreased attention statistics as an issue in real life? It feels like you're arguing against a position that is both incorrect and irrelevant, when the rest of us are talking about things that are obviously an issue in real life, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with this approach.
Do you not struggle with anything like what is being discussed here, or see it in others?
No one is claiming it, true. They don't understand their claims stem entirely from this position and only make any sort of sense if they claim it. But they don't have the background knowledge to work out the foundations of their statement.
My personal experience and emotional response has no relevance to the neuroscience involved. As for your continued use of "gambling addiction": There is no such thing as gambling addiction medically as I explained. It's a social meme without basis that is overloading the word mostly for profit in non-medical "addiction" treatment centers. This is far more dangerous than the very gambling disorder it hopes to mitigate.
The issue is that the claims do not in any way stem from the concept that screens are the issue. Everyone else is talking about how the usage and content delivered through the screens are the issue. What you're describing seems to be semantics at best. It's akin to people talking about not going to strip clubs, and you saying "what's wrong with stages?".
But there is a lot of modern research towards these questions. But more importantly: most of us see and feel and experience the challenges of inattention and screen time in our real lives. Do you not have those same experiences?
I've never once looked at a study, nor could I possibly care less what some numbers on a paper say when I've got evidence in front of my own eyes. I'm speaking from experience, kids today are smooth-brained idiots that don't understand how to do some of the most basic things in life, nor do they have any desire to learn. I'm not some screeching, out of touch boomer, I'm someone who is in my mid-20s who has grown up floating in this shit-tank, and I'm so tied of watching people around me being preyed on by predatory algorithms.
This is not some "Oh, curse these wretched novels, polluting the minds of our children with fiction!" This is the recognition that we have released a technology with an addiction cycle that has been intentionally built and tweaked to engage users and keep them on their platform as long as possible, and the human brain is not evolutionarily equipped to deal with that, least of all the developing mind of a child. They have neither the self-control nor the awareness of what's going on to determine that they're feeding an addiction that their parents enabled. Getting Entertainment Boxes™ out of places of education is a great first step in that direction.
> I'm speaking from experience, kids today are smooth-brained idiots that don't understand how to do some of the most basic things in life, nor do they have any desire to learn. I'm not some screeching, out of touch boomer, I'm someone who is in my mid-20s who has grown up floating in this shit-tank, and I'm so tied of watching people around me being preyed on by predatory algorithms.
Well said, and I concur. I think we are precisely the right age to have seen a decent amount of the transition, too.
If you’re at school, you’re there for learning activities, not phone activities. I don’t think you’ll find too many people on HN that think all digital entertainment is bad, we’re just saying kids need guardrails and limits, and there is little practical use for cell phones at school vs the damage they do to the learning experience.
So what? Killing a scapegoat does not a problem solve. You shut down facebook and then what happens? Everyone shuts the phone and enjoy the sunset or would they all just move to the next addictive app? Marlboros are not harmful, tobacco is. If we managed to largely curb smoking, it was by restricting access to tobacco.
A scapegoat? Who is the problem then, if not them? No one is suggesting shutting them down either - the proposal is to hold them accountable for enacting policies they know harm children. Who in their right mind would be against that except a meta astroturfer? It would help your argument a lot more if you didn't resort to ridiculous hyperbole like this.
Why is that the only people responsible for their children in any way at all whatsoever are never held accountable?? It is always, 100%, in every and all cases, the parent's fault. Either they're too stupid to know better, or they simply don't care.
Social media is far from the only distraction on phones, though. I spend next to zero time on social media, but my phone is nevertheless a powerful distraction for all the other things it can do.
Is it? He used the surgeon general's recent moves as a starting point in his statement and continued "When children and teens are in school, they should be focused on their studies — not their screens.".
1. Use of phones in classrooms 2. Having phones present in schools, but unused 3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren
(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)
(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues. The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.
Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".