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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

This is very, very dangerous, especially if an emergency happens and the teacher is out of the room or slow to respond.

Yes, emergencies happened before cell phones. People died of them more often back then.

This reads like pure hysteria. Do you have any evidence or statistics about rates of “Classroom Emergencies” to base this panic on?

Specifically those outside of the US, we know that is an outlier.

Can you do this without bringing a completely unrelated country into it?

The United States of America isn't the main character of history.

That the US should not be the focal point of an argument about phones in schools is exactly the point that the parent comment was making.

I never brought up the US.

What misnome means is: Don't criticise this Dutch school rule if you can only do so using American school shooting statistics.

I never mentioned school shootings. Everyone else did.

This is beyond hysterical. Children have managed to survive in classrooms for a long time without phones. They were not at great risk of dying in them before cell phones are not at great risk of dying in them today, even in the United States with all the school shootings and whatnot.

Most classrooms probably have a landline phone on the teacher's desk. Any child can use that in an emergency.

If not, all the adjacent classrooms almost certainly have a teacher present, who will also be trained in first aid.

Remember this is the Netherlands, not the US. Happily, "emergencies" are not a regular occurrence.

Yes, because Dutch people don't have medical emergencies.

They don't seem to have medical emergencies that can't be solved by one of the surviving kids running out of the mysteriously unattended classroom and fetching an adult to triage.

"Mysteriously unattended"? You've been out of school too long.

We do, but we don't send tweets about it or stand around to record it.

I would bet that the number of in-classroom emergencies with fatal outcome that are prevented by kids having a phone is far outweighed by the number of social-media induced suicides and general loss of quality of life from mental health effects.

So interested in seeing some sources for “tragedies at schools causing death preventable by smartphone access during instruction”

What emergency in a classroom?

Dumb phones are just as good as smart phones for emergencies.

Even better I'd say

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-fixes-nightma...

Medical emergencies. Family emergencies.

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