I can’t believe it wasn’t like that since the beginning.
How is it not one of the many distracting things they would ban immediately?Some definitely tried. I got suspended in middle school because I forgot to turn my phone on silent and it went off in class. They had a “zero tolerance” policy, so it didn’t matter that it was an accident
I think it has to do with the Columbine school shootings.
We’re talking about France here.
And they still have phones in school in a lot of other coutries.
Make school fun and not a prison and then kids don’t need phones like their office worker parents do.
You could be in the finest school in the world and the phone would still win.
Also, France started doing this a few years ago already and has seen improvement across every metric. Better grades, more socializing, 80% less bullying, less anxious kids. They only downside they found? Parents complaining they were unable to call the kids at any moment.
Doesn’t matter if the teacher is an absolute gem and knows how to captivate kids who want to learn. Most kids prefer the dopamine hit from social media and other phone usage compared to actually learning. It just ruins it for kids who actually want to learn.
What’s funny is all the rich tech elite send their kids to schools that don’t use tech to the same degree as public schools. Wonder why.
Because personal tutors are engaging directly with the student the whole session?
Probably because elite schools have smaller class sizes or teacher/student ratios thereby making it less necessary to have the ability to disseminate information via mass means with technology. Put it all up on a big screen where 30 kids can see it, send the assignments out to 120 kids via google classroom on school issued chromebooks (because there are plenty of kids from families that cannot afford computers), and do all the grading and review digitally. I’d be willing to bet those expensive private schools use plenty of tech, maybe kids carry Macbook Airs instead, but there’s no escape from tech in schools.
We’ve had a similar ban in the Netherlands for a year or two now. Mobile phones were already not allowed in classes. Kids seem to have survived.
Brazil did it a while ago. Nobody died [yet]
Brazil and nobody dying, what kind of propaganda is this?
Some kids have medical issues and need a phone to monitor their health or text family for advice and help since they may be young. It’s also nice to track the kids with their phone when they’re walking too and from school.
Right. Kids used to die like flies back in the day when there were no smartphones.
Jesus Christ exaggerating what I said like talking to a trump voter
Some minority of kids can be exempted. You’re the one exaggerating
We did not even have dumb phones … somehow we still survived …
Yea but now we do. And not every one did survive
That you know of
Does anybody but me remember when schools banned walkmen? What about portable CD players? Gameboy? This happens everytime a new technology becomes popular and schools don’t know how to regulate it they do this.
The downside is, a fair few student will have their phones confiscated by the school. But it won’t dissuade them from bringing them in. You make them better at hiding them instead of creating tools and protocols to enforce for when they can and can’t use them.
The crazy thing is, this should be about schools not wanting to be liable for or responsible for these pieces of tech. But Everytime I see legislation like this, it’s to do with “children’s mental health”, or these devices being a distraction.
Model it. Nobody should be allowed to have a phone in schools by this metric. No phones for students? No phones for teachers and administration.
If they have to hide their phones now, they won’t be using them as much, which is The end goal.
You might be living proof that not using tiktok does not necessarily make you smart, I’ll give you that point.
They already had to “hide the phones”. Literally France already passed a law stating that phones aren’t allowed in elementary and middle schools for students. Those phones previously had to be kept in a backpack or pocket and weren’t allowed to be used on the premises.
This new law does one singular thing, so far as I can tell (which isn’t made clear in either of the articles I read). It actually actively makes students surrender phones at the beginning of the school day and locks those phones away in a centralized location the students don’t have access to.
The problem with that is what I have been saying in subsequent comments. There are protocols in place for what happens when a student breaks the rules. But A. They mention nothing at all about how they will know a student is carrying around a phone in their pocket or using it in the bathroom. And B. they mention nothing about the repercussions for skirting such rules and regulations.
Additionally, if this is about student mental health (as they claimed), it does absolutely nothing to teach them about the dangers of cell phones, nor does it even remotely teach them to moderate cell phone use.
Does anybody but me remember when schools banned walkmen? What about portable CD players? Gameboy?
Except none of these things were feeding Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan garbage straight into their highly impressionable skulls.
I, for one, support the banning of phones in schools. The social media addiction has been shown to cause depression, particularly in girls, and the brainwashing is ever more apparent.
If anything, this policy fails by not going far enough. I question whether kids should have access to social media at all before a certain age.
Rush Limbaugh was broadcast on the free radio, you could listen to it on $1 worth of junk parts if you knew what you were doing. The ease of access is not what made republican bigotry accessible or popular.
Sure, but we’re talking about a way different scale. “If you knew what you were doing” being a key word here.
It’s never been easier to come across this garbage when youtube/Instagram/Tiktok comes installed on most phones by default. What’s worse, there have never been so many grifters spewing the same shit.
Back in the day, you might have been able to call Limbaugh an isolated instance of a clear grifter getting paid to spread lies.
Nowadays, the Tate clones are so ubiquitous that it’s hard to point out the flaws in thinking because so many people seem to believe in them. But its just the algorithm feeding you more of the same, over and over.
It was almost the entirety of AM radio for the past 40 years. Sports and this right-wing trash. On in the background at every work place, hardware store, and cafe until Muzac took over. Had that ranting asshole and his friends pumping into our ears wanting it or not. Many areas of the country had only that and Country Music for hours in any direction.
When I said “if you knew what you were doing” I meant you can build an AM receiver out of literal trash with a middle school understanding of electrics but no one bothered because you had one built in to every car, every tape player, boom box, alarm clock, and anything else with a speaker. You had a radio in every room of the house and 2 in the garage even if you never turned it on. There’s no way to believe that phones have less cultural push than AM radio had pre-1990.
There’s no way to believe that phones have less cultural push than AM radio had pre-1990.
I mean, you can believe whatever you want, but the answer is yes there is.
You should watch the series Adolescence, btw. It deals with this exact topic. Its 4 episodes long and it shows how social media and constant connection and more importantly INTERACTION with everyone, has an effect that is fundamentally different from passively listening to AM radio.
Sorry, didn’t pay my Netflix cultural tax this year. Maybe I’ll sail the sees for it.
I highly encourage you to. 🏴☠️
What’s your point? Are you banning the entire Internet?
All this stuff is still accessible once the bell rings and before they get to school, just like it was when I was a kid. Kids were still going on YouTube/MySpace/ Facebook and more to share things. This argument doesn’t make sense.
You’re attributing the issue of algorithms to the medium itself.
Facebook and YouTube weren’t as good at recommending things back then. It’s not the internet as a whole that’s the problem, it’s what social media has become. Addiction skinner boxes. It’s not ok for kids to grow up using that.
And that is the fault of the parents who chose to hand phones to these kids. It is not the fault of the school, nor is it something the school should have to do anything about. (Edit for clarification: what I meant by “so anything about it” was schools aren’t responsible for teaching good and responsible phone use and self control, nor is it their job to step in when the parent is doing their job with teaching these skills).
I’ll also point out the argument that there was a push back then for outlawing video games and violent music because of its effect on young children and regardless of the validity of the danger to kids, it’s still the fault of parents who were allowing their children to listen to that music or play those games. Schools already likely have policies about cell phones, or at the very least policies about confiscating distractions.
You seem to have taken this as not support for banning phones in schools rather than what it really is. A criticism of this method for the deficiencies that it creates without solving the problem or even (more than likely) changing anything about the protocols already in place for handling distractions in schools except potentially creating a worse situation for the administration who have to now be responsible for these items en masse because students and parents are going to ignore this until it hurts them personally.
It also doesn’t teach students anything at all about moderation or the dangers of the internet, nor does it teach them anything about this tech which they will end up having to use as adults. And if you have seen adults with this tech you know it’s not just a danger to kids.
And that is the fault of the parents who chose to hand phones to these kids. It is not the fault of the school, nor is it something the school should have to do anything about
Okay so, because some parents are bad and fail at educating their kids properly, society shouldn’t take a role in correcting that behaviour and instead should just let kids be damaged for life, did I understand you correctly?
I don’t know where you’re from (although I can guess), but here in Europe, and this is an article about France, we recognise the state has a role to fulfill in society, we all pay taxes and expect them to be used for the benefit of all. I don’t see any problems with schools being the enforcers of government legislation in this instance.
Also, everything else you wrote… I mean, it is obvious that your school system is very different from what I’m familiar with. Because yes, it IS the school’s responsibility to make sure that rules are applied properly in their premises, the money/resources necessary to do so are a secondary thought. This shouldn’t be something that needs to be explained, but well, here we are.
So, what (in France I know!) are you getting for said taxes that you were not getting before?
Because that’s exactly what I’m getting at. It is the schools responsibility to enforce the rules. The point is, it’s not the schools responsibility to take on the liability of what comes with that (ie. Holding onto thousands of dollars worth of tech with the ability to keep that tech in the same condition it was in when it was confiscated for an untold amount of time), it is the parents responsibility to make sure their children aren’t ringing such distracting material to school. And this means there are already likely protocols in place for distracting material. So what are you getting out of this ban?
it’s not the schools responsibility to take on the liability of what comes with that (ie. Holding onto thousands of dollars worth of tech with the ability to keep that tech in the same condition it was in when it was confiscated for an untold amount of time),
But it is, actually. Lol. It’s always been. I’ve had my phone taken in class a few times, and it was always returned at the end. It’s really not a big deal.
I don’t know what you mean by “Holding onto thousands of dollars worth of tech”. Its up to the teachers to keep it for the duration of the classes, and to return them at the end. They don’t need a safe to keep them in. It really isn’t that big a deal.
it is the parents responsibility to make sure their children aren’t ringing such distracting material to school.
It should be, but again, they aren’t. Which is why the schools must intervene. And it’s not really something they want to do, it is something they have to do, by government mandate.
So when one of these phones start a fire because it’s been improperly kept and the battery has a thermal runaway event?
If the phone is always returned then literally the law does nothing. The phone is being given back to the student? That’s a failure in the implementation of protocol or policy. You can’t use that to claim my argument is invalid because it literally does not make sense in this context.
You still haven’t answered what you are getting at here. These rules have to be enforced either way, so I don’t know why you think complaining your way out of it should even be a factor. It isn’t. Schools need to deal with it, simple as.
Or are you just saying “well, I don’t see how this can be enforced so they might as well not do anything!”?
I remember when people didn’t have phones on them 24/7 and kids didn’t die and parents could call the school if they needed to talk to the kids. Somehow we survived.
And a bunch of people didn’t but we don’t talk about them, it was the norm back then.
Teddy sniffing glue, he was twelve years old, fell from the roof on East 2-9, Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug, twenty six reds and a bottle of wine.
But people don’t like that song, so you’re right about not wanting to talk about it.
Speak for yourself, thats a constant banger at the jams with friends.
Well the #1 reason US parents want their kids to have phones is because so many kids die in school shootings and parents have a need to be able to get ahold of their kids.
That’s the #1 reason, no matter how illogical it is
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, you’re right. Kids calling 911 is what gets first responders on scene. Until kids in America can attend school without the threat of gun violence, banning phones is not an option.
Yeah I think the adverse effect of handing an iPhone to a 10 year old in Atlanta, when that teen is still highly impressionable unrestricted and unsupervised access to the internet is far worse than handing a kid a Gameboy on which they can only game, or a Walkman on which the worst thing they can do is listen to Cardi B.
And the fault of the parent who is the only one who can do anything about that child having unrestricted access to the internet of a phone. This is adding to the responsibilities and liabilities of the schools without solving the problem in a meaningful way and this is exactly what I’m being critical of in my statement.
If nobody has a phone you can implement other technologies to alarm if such a device is brought into the property etc. You can actually jam cell phone use in the area too. There’s solutions that would mitigate a school having to take on hundreds of confiscated $1000 phones which would be a huge liability and make them a target.
You compared smartphones to previous tech such as Walkmans, and I explained how they’re nowhere near the same in the extreme case (unsupervised access). No school is gonna confiscate the phones as long as the kids listen. And the kids need to learn to listen to parents and teachers. Discipline is sorely missing in the new generation. Look at that series “adolescence “ to see the real effects of giving kids a smartphone.
And jamming is expensive and ineffective (you’ll end up jamming nearby devices not on school property too).
I compared it to previous tech because that tech was also considered a distraction and labeled with a similar brush and handled in a similar way to the way phones are likely handled today and it’s important to understand and take into account what schools are likely already doing in order to facilitate learning and prevent such “distractions”. This isn’t about unsupervised access. This was never about unsupervised access. This is about the distraction that phones and other materials play in a child’s ability to learn. And as that it stands to reason that A. Schools already have implemented protocols to deal with this situation when it arises. And B. That this law doesn’t really do much to fix the problem, but does add additional liability because now regardless of whether or not the phone is being a distraction it must be confiscated and then held for a parent to pick up. Meaning that A. It must in essence remain in the same condition it was in when it was confiscated (and it won’t because it would have to be charged at regular intervals and with new phones logged into occasionally to prevent media on the phone from being wiped). So this adds liability for the school. What protections does the school and school administration have under this law?
The effect of giving children smart phones is not going to be in any way mitigated by this law. This is not a ban on cell phones for children under the age of 18 full stop. It’s a ban on children being allowed to bring cell phones to school.
About ‘better at hiding them’; maybe so; but that will largely be down to how the rule is enforced. Some schools basically just say “please don’t carry your phone. Put it in your locker.” In those schools, basically every student has their phone in their pocket. Whereas other schools are more strict about it. The phone can be confiscated on site, and in some cases require the parent to collect it. In those cases, compliance goes way up.
As for ‘no phones for teachers and admin’; unfortunately, some of the jobs and responsibilities of teachers are done using a phone. Teachers are required to carry a phone during yard-duty, for emergency purposes. And teachers often use their phone to mark class attendance rolls. … But its definitely a bad look when a teacher is walking down a school corridor staring at their phone while student phones are banned.
As for the reasons for the ban… well, they are many and varied - including all of the things you mentioned. (liability, mental health vs bullying in particular, and distraction from class activities.)
Are they going to allocate money to every school to employ technologies to prevent cell phone usage on the premises? Unlikely because, as I said, this law is to prohibit students from having cell phones, not teachers or administration.
So what happens when a school now has to confiscate and hold $1000 phones en masse? It makes them a target for theft. It makes them a target for lawsuit in the event that any of those phones are misplaced, stolen, damaged etc.
Teachers and admins didn’t used to have cell phones in schools either. What are they doing on a phone that they can’t use a landline and a computer for? Why is a cell phone so important for yard duty? Why is it a requirement? What does the cell phone do that a landline can’t do?
Lol yeah criminals are going to raid schools to grab a couple of phones, sure buddy, take your meds now
Don’t know any delinquent teenagers do you? And don’t even start with the “must be American BS” because I’d be happy to Google some news stories for you.
I can tell you didn’t read either.
To avoid any risk of legal liability the school rule becomes “do not bring a mobile phone to school”, similar to the advice that schools give about valuables in general - especially on sport days. Bring at your own risk. This is especially true when it is a government policy - i.e. not the school’s decision.
Note, this article is talking about France. But as has been pointed out, France is not the first country to do this. I live in Australia, and my comments are based on the phone bans here which have been in place here for a few years (I think the state of Victoria was first, and all states have seen one-by-one followed that example because they see it as a good idea.)
The discussion about whether or not teachers should have smart phones is a separate issue. It has a totally different pros and cons, benefits and challenges.
Schools likely already have a policy about bringing valuables items to schools which applies here. They also likely have policies about objects that are distractions in class or not suitable for school environments with protocols in place to enforce and or deal with said objects. So tell me. Why is this different? I know the article is talking about France.
So, explain to me why this law is necessary? What does it achieve? What does it do that wasn’t already being implemented?
The primary purpose of making it a government policy is to defuse the endless arguments and pushback that schools were fighting to stop students using phones.
If the rule is a case-by-case thing implemented by individual classroom teachers, it doesn’t work at all - because students will quickly see and exploit differences in how the rule is enforced by different teachers. It means the phones still get used, and any attempt to remove that distraction becomes a massive battle of “why are you targeting me. That other student is allowed to use theirs. The other teachers don’t mind.” etc etc.
Having a clear school-wide policy mostly fixes that; but it still gets a very similar effect from the parents. “I give my child permission, because they need it for such-and-such reason”. It can be dealt with, but it is genuinely a large burden on the school. But having a clear government policy removes that battle for the school. The answer is always clear “it’s a government policy, it is not our decision to make”. (By the way, there are still some exemptions for medial reasons; but again, there are no case-by-case arguments, because the policy is the same for all schools.)
So in short its about consistency; to reduce conflict between teachers and students, and between schools and parents.
Flip that argument around for me and tell me what that argument is. Because what it seems like it boils down to is a version of favoritism which will still exist and be taken advantage of under the law. What does this law fix exactly? How does this law prevent favoritism?
I don’t know what you mean by favouritism. The reasoning for the phone ban goes something like this:
- Teachers and education researchers have agreed that children are less productive in school due to mobile phones.
- But preventing children from using their phones in school creates significant additional workload, due to conflicts and arguments.
- Various governments have recognised this, and have created a law which can remove the phones without the workload.
If you’re talking again about the fact that teachers are allowed phones but students are not, then I’m disappointed. I’ve put in quite a bit of good faith effort into talking about this stuff. At the start of our conversation I felt that I was answering genuine questions, and perhaps helping clarify why someone might want a law like this. But now I’m starting to feel like that was entirely wasted, because you never wanted to think about it anyway - you only wanted to fight it. That’s how I’m starting to feel. Maybe I’m wrong, but this ‘how does the law prevent favoritism’ seems like a totally bullshit line to reasoning to me.
Different laws and rules target different groups of people for different reasons. There’s a huge list of rules and responsibilities that apply exclusively to teachers and not other professions. And there’s a heap of rules that apply to children and not adults. There can be different rules for different reasons. As for phone usage, I’d personally be totally fine if all smart phones were phased out for everyone for all purposes across the entire world. But I do think it’s a false equivalence to say that if phones are banned for students they should also be banned for everyone else. It a totally separate argument. And note: I’m not introducing this law. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t design it. I don’t even live in the country that the article is from. I’m only try to outline what I understand to be the motivation. If you think something negative is going to result from this law, you should try to outline what that is. What-aboutisms are not helpful.
I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.
It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐
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Tragedy in a French school:
“Maman! Maman! Ze school is out of baguette and fromage! Please come pick me up! I am about to le faint!”
Disgusting.
Lmao is that the comment that got removed?
“The video footage of the Ulvade TX shooting has been edited to remove the children’s screams.”
I think the French will be fine, lucky fuckers.
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I think what they’re implying is that this kind of thing doesn’t really happen in France. At least not at the rate it’s happening in the U.S. So they don’t really need to worry about not having cell phones.
To an extent it’s the same with Canada. We’re pretty lucky school shootings aren’t a common occurrence. What’s the worst that can happen here? The school runs out of maple syrup? (Of course I’m joking!)
We’re pretty lucky
Luck has nothing to do with it. We’ve actively decided to allow this shit to happen. The USA isn’t unlucky, we just fucking suck.
Yeah, you’re right. The whole system in the U.S. seems to be set up to enable these kinds of events.
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Uh… I’m actually French Canadian. My comment was meant as a joke.
Edit: I really didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. And if that happened, I apologize.
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Don’t gaslight me. My comment was a joke and you reported it just to fuck with me. You’re just harassing me at this point. Stop.
Good, you don’t need smart phones in school
For anyone screeching that you do: No. You don’t.
We’ve been without smart phones for millenia, literally, and we were fine without. You will be fine without.
For anyone screeching that you do: No. You don’t
I have a feeling that you haven’t gone to school recently lol
Educational resources are blocked that you literally cannot do your assignments without accessing. Teachers will tell you to use your phone to access it.
If you have some questions for someone who is actively in highschool right now, I’d be happy to answer :)
edit: tone
we didnt have clean drinking water either, or daily showers, we lived without soap for millenia
Lol, we definitely have had clean drinking water for far longer than we have had dirty drinking water, thank the industrial revolution for that. And try skipping a shower for a day - you’ll be fine. Soap also has a long history https://www.soaphistory.net/soap-history/ over 4000 years
So literally wrong on all three points. Perhaps you need to read more instead of doom scrolling and swapping nudes on your smartphone
I’m pretty sure there can be other bad stuff in water that existed before the industrial revolution
Sure, loads of sewage. But it also had smaller settlements, less people, and human waste was recycled more in times gone by too. Far more water was far more drinkable even 150 years ago
You have died of dysentery.
“So literally wrong on all three points. Perhaps you need to read more instead of doom scrolling and swapping nudes on your smartphone” This made me feel like I was on reddit not lemmy lmao
Old habits die hard. But the most teenager comment I have seen on lemmy needed a rebuttal
Motherfucker how long do you think humans have been around for? Okay, sure, soap has been around for like 6k years, wow, such a long time. Modern humans have been fumbling around figuring shit out like an untrained ai model for the last 60k-160k years. Quick math shows us that for somewhere between 54k and 154k years of our history as a species, no soap. MILLENIA!
Drinking water: you’re making a distinction between clean, as in unpolluted by chemicals and other substances, and cleaned drinking water, which has been processed by humans to make it fit to drink with a lower risk of causing illness. Clean water has obviously been around for eons, but cleaned water, as I believe OP was describing, is a much more modern concept.
Showers: “try skipping a shower for a day”? Motherfucking neckbeard no, shower every fucking day. Try it, people might find you somewhat less repulsive until you open your mouth.
To get back on topic: I bet you pull your phone out at the urinal
For me school was a great way to learn almost nothing of any use while occupying 11 years of my life with pointless time filing busywork that I hated every hour, minute and each and every eternal second of of. The only thing worse than school has been work and my consolation is that at least it’s not forever!
And yet here you are writing English.
You take what you’ve been given for granted.
That doesn’t take even 1% of 11 years
No, but everything else combined does. You wouldn’t even be able to perform basic multiplication tasks without school, let alone solve more complex problems. School teaches you the basics for higher education, be it Uni or vocational school.
The large bulk of it was not. A drip feed to fill the weeks months years
You wish you would have been home schooled?
To be honest I’m disappointed we haven’t seen more progress into “VR schools” yet. Where you are fully submerged into a learning experience. While your blood is constantly analyzed and drugs to increase concentration and energy levels are dispensed. Ok maybe not the last part.
I wish it didn’t waste most of my youth
Well who doesn’t once they get older haha. But I seriously wish I wouldn’t have had a laptop or smartphone with keyboard and typed everything I learned as a question / answer flashcard. So I can review them. Some kind of flow inducing learning environment. Of course everyone learns differently, but I imagine there are huge gains possible with software and learning courses with current technology.
We’ve been without a lot of things for millennia
I wanna preface this with I had a small keyboard slide phone in school, not a smart phone by today’s standards, but I am firmly against this archaic mentality.
It doesn’t address the elephant in the room, classrooms have become painstakingly boring. There is no real incentive for the student to actually do well anymore, or even pay attention. This is exclusively for the k-12 system though, as the issues seem to have become non-existent entering the college and university system. I went from being a solid D/C student in high-school to being an A/B+ student going into college
I spent my time in grade school fucking around and barely paying attention, this was without a smart phone. I couldn’t keep focused on the class subjects, and so therefore I gave up. The college system has the process down-packed, it’s laid back, not hours on end in a row learning useless shit you won’t need, and you have the freedom to either listen or don’t, there isn’t the constant pressure from professors “You are failing you need to do better” like in high school. Plus the professors seem actually happy to be there and they make the content more enjoyable, its not just droning on and on on a subject.
The only things removing a phone from a classroom is going to do is remove a potential learning tool, and just annoying your students even further. If your student doesn’t want to learn, removing items isn’t magically going to make the kid learn. Make it entertaining, do something OTHER than this stupid info cram shit where you just regurgitate information constantly. There is zero incentive on almost every subject you learn to actually want to learn it. You don’t learn any type of life skills, you don’t learn anything for your career/future. Hell they don’t even teach cursive anymore. My sister couldn’t even read a physical clock entering 7th grade. They don’t teach it. But you can bet things like “what happens in the 16th century” will be taught, or what basic cell structure is (I couldn’t tell you, I forgot all that info leaving that class room).
Like I get needing to know history, and basic mathematics, but the current schooling system is a overburdened plug of useless information for society. Everyone knows it, everyone lies to their kid saying things like “yea you will definitely need to know what beware the ides of march means in life”. If things were taught that people knew would be useful in life (or at the very least explained HOW it would be), and it wasn’t just a professor saying “ok class open your book, this is the lesson” for 3/4 of the year, you might have a better student attention span.
We oughtta send the kids to the mines again, god forbid they might discover something they never knew they’d like studying at school.
Type 1 diabetics would like a word.
Yeah who needs the wheel either? We survived 450,000 years without it. And don’t get me started on paper. Paper can be used to make paper airplanes or spitballs. What a distraction! Kids should chisel their assignments onto stone slates like our ancestors did.
If wheels could brainwash a kid, completely distract them, and make them throw a tantrum when you take it away then we might have to worry about them.
Except they can, remember fidget spinners?
Literally anything can distract kids and make them throw a tantrum when you take it away. Have you ever met a child?
You’re being purposely obtuse.
Yeah you’re right. Young children are renowned for their vast attention spans, or at least they used to be before cell phones were invented. Nobody ever passed notes, made paper airplanes, graffitied on their desks, or drew pictures in class prior to 2006.
I’m a grown ass man and I can barely get off the phone. The kids don’t stand a chance brother.
Perhaps you should get checked for adhd
I understand the paper, but why do they need wheels? Why are you leaving out guns?
why do they need wheels?
Carts, busses. There’s wheels in lots of stuff.
Why are you leaving out guns?
Well, you see, unlike the wheel/paper/mini computers with built in calculators calendars document editors email and research tools, guns serve no legitimate purpose in a school.
Do they not have full sized computers? It’s dubious that there is any legitimate educational value to smartphones in schools either.
School exists to teach you how to function in society. In our society, like it or not, everyone has a cell phone. Let’s focus on teaching them to integrate this tool into their lives in a productive way.
No, you’re being facetious. Go sit in the corner.
People werent fine either, why dont you just google 911 calls from kids and see how many would have been better off without phones
Maybe you should fix the systematic problem instead of doing surface level fixes that impact the freedom and mobility of minors.
This is solving a systematic problem. The problem of social media companies having free reign to make kids addicted. This will give french kids more freedom to think and do actual things with their life.
Taking away their addictive propaganda gadgets is freedom, lol.
Wouldn’t no phomes increase mobility since parents cant trqck their location
We didnt have any kind of phone when we were in school
I had pagers.
Except I was not born yet when pagers were a thing
Good on you France!
I hope more countries start realizing how important this is. We have more than enough evidence demonstrating the damage that comes from being permanently connected, or even online for more than a couple hours per day, and minors are taking the worst of it because they are developing under those conditions.
Stupid. Kids are more informed and hooked into current events than ever before, specifically because of phones and the Internet. Hell, half of most peoples’ jobs are looking up reference material online. You want kids to succeed, hand them a big list of the best places to look for the answers and let them use their phones on the test.
A good reason for banning smartphones is social media addiction. Not internet searching. Its currently normal for 12 year olds to be on their phone 6-12 hours a day. And because of peer pressure parents can’t do anything about it. A kid without a phone is isolated because everything happens in chat and social media.
There are more thorough solutions like age gating social media but a blanket school ban is a good start. If you still don’t believe me you should really read up on what smartphones do to a kid. Addiction, lack of self control, no attention span, nearsightedness, the list goes on. Based on leaked research by TikTok itself btw.
In China they don’t destroy their own kids because they already know the effects. TikTok shows different stuff there (educational content and propaganda), and kids are limited to 40m(!!!) per day. Everyone is going to deal with scores of fucked up kids while they don’t.
They also use their phones a lot to harass each other, they can film, and take pictures of any other kid at school and post it online to harass them. Bullying has been really increasing thanks to phones in schools.
China limits social media because they repress free speech and political association. TikTok and other social media was a huge part of why there was such an outcry over the invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. They doubly limit what kids can see because students are often hugely influential in political activism - especially in China, where students were an integral part of both the revolution(s) and Tiananmen Square. China’s gov is pants-shittingly terrified of another student-led revolution/crisis/etc and keep a very close watch on what the kids are saying and seeing.
Kids have no clue how the internet works for actual research. They just endlessly scroll and gobble up all of the Nazi bullshit that’s spread around. The internet is dead. Smartphones are highly efficient propaganda gadgets.
Even though it’s easier to find information than like 30 years before, kids nowadays do NOT look for news or some other “sensible” information. They watch stupid TikTok videos and things like that (yes yes, there’s always some exceptions). Smartphones has become a big problem in schools. You would know that if you followed the news.
The cover image for this piece smells AI generated
Eh, checking out the source (Drazen Zigic via Getty Images), he seems legit.
I suppose it is possible the submitter used AI uncredited, but I doubt it. For one thing, there are other images of the same models in the artist’s page. Second, the state of AI image generation when this was submitted (June 2023) was pretty terrible for things like this.
More likely is that the image “looks like AI” to you because most image generation models were trained on Common Crawl, which includes at least tens of thousands of curated (royalty-free) images. In other words, AI models generate images that look like stock photos because that is what they know how to generate.
I’m still not convinced that this is the answer to helping kids concentrate & learn more in school.
there is no “the” answer but it can be part of an answer.
I think it is fine but we also need lessons to properly interact with the technology. Scams, fraud, disinformation and checking sources were handled very abstractly at best and archaic at worst.
Gen alpha is significantly worse than prior generations on tech. Them having their phones on them doesn’t teach them, they consume on the lowest level. They don’t learn the actual Internet skills prior generations had to to survive.
I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.
I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.
It is. Phones are the #1 distractor in school
Boring lessons are pretty big distractors. I seen kids fall asleep and daydream long before smartphones were even a thing. Make learning fun and the kids will engage. Confiscating their possessions is a hostile move that never goes down well.
It’s not enough that they need to work all year and deal with angry parents over every F. Now they need to be infotainment competing for attention with anything a kid can find on their cell phone.
day-dreaming isn’t intrinsically bad. People do need time to think about stuff, and have their mind drift from topic to topic. Some modern teaching practices advocate deliberate “brain breaks” for students.
The issue with phones isn’t so much that students are sometimes off task, but rather that the phone consumes their attention entirely. It uses up the students’ useful concentration as well as their ‘rest’ time.
My classrooms banned phones so I played games on my graphing calculator or did the old fashioned drawing.
Smart. Anything to avoid learning!
It’s necessary. Phones are far worse than prior to phones, and I’ve seen both sides of it.
Boring lessons is a fact of life. People need to realize that not all education can be interesting. Sometimes you gotta suck it up, sit down, and learn. And I say this as someone with crippling adhd
This is not about socialization lmfao. different topic.
Good. Boredom is the key to learning. Well it should be interesting on it’s own, but take what you got.
Of course the manner of learning in most schools is not ideal, kids find it boring for a reason, but without distraction they might latch onto some bits of information just to survive the class.
Maybe if school wasn’t 95% time filing garbage and busywork. I’d take a crashcourse video over what they served in school any day and hour of the week.
Boredom is the key to learning something it’s just very likely that it won’t be the thing school is trying to teach. Especially if the thing school is teaching is the thing boring you.
This mentality is why I almost failed higbschool. Boredom fails us who need to be constantly invested.
Yeah, different education methods should be used for different learning capabilities. I’m thankful my teachers in elementary school quickly learned that as long as you kept me busy with new info or math problems I would be happy.
