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Comment by Cephlin | Hacker News Reader

I agree. You try to stop my kid from being able to contact me or the emergency services and my kid won't be in your school.

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I went through 10+ years of schooling where I could not immediately contact my parents and I and many others survived just fine. I think that school aged children having mobile devices probably does more harm than good when you factor in cyber bullying. Has there been an occasion where your child has had to contact you in an emergency?

For everyone who is misinterpreting this statement. I am not suggesting that jamming phone signals is acceptable. It isn't for the very reasons provided to the headteacher in the article. What I am suggesting is that children do not need access to their devices during lesson time, at which point the children are being supervised by a responsible adult (the teacher) who is able to contact emergency services or parents in the event of an emergency. Requiring students to hand in and retrieve their mobile phones from teachers at the start and end of a lesson is an entirely reasonable solution to the problem being faced by this (and probably many others) school.

That's anecdotal evidence. What's to say your experience reflects the experience of all children in school today?

please see my edit.

Me too! Now that you mention it, I've never even had to call 911 once in my life.

I guess we can just start putting cell phone jammers up everywhere and it'll be fine.

Perhaps you misunderstood me, at no point did i say jamming phone signals was acceptable. 24/7 access to a mobile device is what i was suggesting was unnecssary.

I often had to call my parents to pick me up, both because of snow days and after school activities. Depending on pay phones for this was a giant hassle.

It's also ridiculous that someone who has a life threatening accident near this school might not be able to call emergency services from their cellphone.

Your appeal to cyber bullying is also baseless unless you can provide some evidence that blocking cell phones at school will accomplish this. This kind of hollow emotional appeal is how we end up with draconian laws that don't actually accomplish anything except massive inconvenience.

You are conflating two issues here. I am against the use of jammers, the UK govt has strict laws against this for the very reasons provided to this headteacher and which you refer to when you mention accident reporting to emergency services. We have no disagreement on that issue.

I had those issues to, but the school notified parents if the school was closing early due to adverse weather and I made arrangements in advance for after school activities, same way I made arrangements to meet friends before we had mobile phones.

re: cyber bullying I never supported the blocking of cell phone access. My point was that we can survive without having them available to us 24/7. In a school setting having children hand them in and collect them from the teacher at the start/end of every lesson is a reasonable solution. Should some catastrophe befall the the student the teacher is there to call emergency services or contact the parents, if the catastrophe occurs on the way home or the way to school or at break time then the student has their phone.

Your previous comment, made in this thread, makes it sound like you supported the jamming. I completely agree that students don't need their phones with the 24/7.

I don't agree with having the teacher collect them and give them back out because that sounds like a massive waste of time, but students could keep them in their locker, or in their backpacks (with the understanding that use during class would result in immediate confiscation for the day/until a parent collected it), or whatever. They don't need them in hand during class, clearly.

Apologies if my first comment was unclear. seems like we agree.

There are other means for a child to make contact aside from personal mobile devices. Conventional phones, for example. At our local school, all mobile devices are put in lockers and are not allowed in class.

And in an emergency you can walk to the locker, retrieve the phone, and make a call. It makes no sense to require landline use in an emergency when mobile phones provide a valuable backup.

What makes no sense is y'all allowing your children to be spied on by Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Snapchat/NSA/GCHQ 24/7 on an age when they don't know better.

I'm sure the NSA and GCHQ are super-interested in spying on the inane texts that kids send each other while sitting in high school math class.

Had an email to all parents today, saying that if your child is unwell.. they are still not allowed to call their parents to let them know. I'm contemplating a strongly worded response..

You know the school is responsible for them while their in the premises, right?

Yes.. but if my child is unwell and feels like they want to talk to a parent.. and they have the means to do so.. I do not feel the school has the right to stop them.. especially if it might comfort the child.

The right to stop them? Of course not. They have the obligation of providing a telephone for it to happen. You're only making up excuses.

The schools have no landlines and/or public phones, is that what you're saying?

How do I bring up my contact list on this thing? Where's the screen? These are some funny little buttons. What's this slot for? Wait. You mean I'd have to carry quarters around? All the time, just in case I might want to make a phone call? Can't I use Rixty or Bitcoin or Paypal or something instead? What if I just need to send a text?

It would be a lot like asking the kids who attended school before mobile phone ubiquity to use morse code over telegraph lines instead of touch-tone dialing on the public phones or the phone in the office.

If you want to force kids to live in the past, do it in history class. Otherwise, adapt your policies and curriculum for the times in which we all live.

I think expecting kids to remember one emergency contact phone number in case they're not able to use their mobile for whatever reason is entirely reasonable, and not remotely comparable to expecting them to be able to use morse code.

No, it would be more like expecting me, when I was a child, to know how to send a morse coded telegram, when I had my parents' phone numbers memorized, and the touch-tone land-line telephone is right there.

Or it would be like expecting a kid able to send a morse code telegram to write a letter and have it delivered by the postal system, when the morse key and telegraph line is right there.

Or it would be like expecting a kid who knows how to write a letter and use the postal addressing system to inscribe and fire a cuneiform tablet then pay a random itinerant to carry it to the next town, when there's a post office right there.

It's unnecessarily forcing someone to use the previous generation of communications technology.

And if mobile phones were 100% guaranteed to be charged when you need them, that would be fine, but since they're not, asking a child to memorise a few digits so they're able to use someone else's phone in an emergency is perfectly reasonable redundancy.

Also, as far as I know, there wasn't ever a time when people knew how to send telegrams, but didn't know how to write letters. Indeed most people didn't know how to send telegrams with a telegraph key at all, they'd just write up their message and take it to an office to be keyed by an operator. A process which is largely identical to posting a letter.

You know you can recharge a cellphone, right? In fact you can make a call while it's still charging! Guaranteed one of your friends has a charger you can use.

Guaranteed? What makes you so sure? And then you need to find a power socket you can use (not difficult in a school, but could be elsewhere), and wait for the minimum charge level, and then wait for it to boot.

But if you know the number, you can use your friend's phone in a few seconds.

Same reason you're sure that one of your friends will have a cellphone. The numbers make it exceedingly likely.

You can't call an "emergency contact phone number" from a payphone without the right change unless that number is 911 (or the local equivalent). My kid[1] can't call me from a payphone in an emergency. Not only does my kid not carry change, but won't know my number. I don't even know my own mom's number.

And yes, the secretary/front desk/whatever can call me on behalf of my child, but that seems pretty ridiculous, too when everyone already owns a cell phone.

[1] My kid is two years old, so this is obviously academic for me at this point.

>You can't call an "emergency contact phone number" from a payphone

Of course, and you probably couldn't even find one in the first place.

But you could borrow a friend's phone, or ask a teacher to use a school phone, or even just ask someone in a random store if you're desperate. Just having access to that number without a charged mobile takes you from helpless to having many options, and it takes minimal effort. (Hell, write it down if you have to.)

Sure, but you could also just call on your cellphone like everyone else does all the time. What is the point of complicating it? It's totally reasonable to ask your kid to memorize your number in case of an emergency (or their cellphone actually breaks). That's entirely different from saying it's reasonable that kids can't use their cellphones and need to rely on pay phones.

Yes? That's exactly what I said.

This whole thread was about banning/blocking cellphones. Your initial reply made it sound like you agreed that this was fine because kids should memorize an emergency number anyway. I see now that wasn't your intent.

Man, you live in a padded bubble. When the real world slaps you and your children in the face with a shovel you're all dead.

I haven't used a payphone in at least a decade. I haven't carried a calling card in nearly two decades. I have change in my pocket that could be used for a payphone maybe twice a year.

It makes no sense to expect students to use a payphone in this day and age. How many schools even have working payphones now? I bet most had them removed or disconnected because no one uses payphones anymore.

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