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Comment by mapierce2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see a more elegant solution than this, but it's a bummer. Smartphones are so useful; the world's information AND a computer in your pocket! The ideal would be to give students and parents an avenue to remove/combat the addictive elements of their smartphones, but most students (and parents) don't see those elements as a problem, but a feature.

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I view smart phones as two dimensional.

On one dimension they are a tool (like a Sheika Slate in Zelda).

On the other dimension they are a toy.

The problem for schools is that the tool and the toy are packaged together.

A further problem is that smartphones are consumer electronic devices, so businesses will strive to make them as addictive as possible and are unlikely to support creating some kind of separation between toy and tool.

So I agree that a ban is probably the best solution at this point. A ban with legal backing so schools can focus on education and not combating distraction.

> A ban with legal backing so schools can focus on education and not combating distraction.

Teaching how to combat distraction should maybe be a part of modern education.

But yeah you're quite right. Optimistically I'm hoping non-toy smartphones (like Light Phone, BoringPhone, WisePhone, etc) gain some market share.

We did just fine in schools before smartphones. Perhaps even better.

Do you mean to imply that education outcomes are unrelated to technology or that advancing technology may make them worse? Do you think there's a defensible abstraction of your claim?

We also did "just fine, if not better" in my role at the bank (vaguely) before digitization. I assure you, the efficiency upgrades of advancing technology pay for themselves many times over, even if there are hiccups and new learning to match.

Phones enable more education than ever before. The limiting factor is now motivation.

No, if you are online it’s much harder to pay attention to your teacher or the task at hand. There are a million distractions, all more interesting than class.

It’s time to have a higher standard of “technology”.

Phones aren’t some magical solution to better education. They are just a source of digital candy, digital crack, that pollutes minds with harmful or vapid ideas.

If you want an advanced teaching device, build one from scratch and make it nothing like a phone.

What are the concrete uses of phones in enhancing education? I've only seen

  portable calculator: fair, but why write problems that rely on calculators
  searching things up: just note it down for later
  taking pictures of slides: teacher can just post the slides

Meanwhile, there's genuine and well-founded concern that smartphones lead to firsthand and secondhand distraction, which undermines the teacher and disrupts learning. The main thing I see phones enabling is rampant social media consumption.

Another thing to think about is how these things obliterate creativity - In school If I was bored I would doodle in the back of my notebooks during class. Drawings of things, places, trying to do nature scenes. But mostly drawings of machinery, robots and electronics nonsense. Towards senor year when I learned some programming it was code. Those little ephemera works feel important - exercises of the mind, creativity.

Contrast that to mindless consumption of corporate controlled media channels which is what smart phones inevitably lead to.

Think about how these mega companies are making billions of dollars by robbing your children's attention thus their education right in front of you. 100% ban the phones.

Aye, I even remember that sometimes my solution to boredom was to skip ahead to some farther chapters and look for new content to learn.

Kids these days suck.

It's not that they obliterate creativity, it's that they shape it in one or two very specific ways. Let me tell a story with some background as an example:

Our rule in our family is that smart devices are a reward; finish your chores, get x number of minutes on tablet; do a good dead unasked get x number of minutes on tablet, that sort of thing. The one major difference in our family is that all smart devices (save for GPS) are banned on road trips/car rides. Boredom is essential to the developing mind and fosters imagination and creativity. I am convinced of that.

Recently, we had some of our child's friends over for sleepovers around his birthday. We live in a rural area, so playing in the woods and dinking around outside are sort of standard. Some of the kids' parents were uncomfortable with us just letting them go tear ass around in the woods, so I went with them to supervise (another issue entirely). I noticed that the games they played fell into two categories; those influenced by smart devices and those not.

The kids who had little- to no-access to smart devices built dams, played forts, looked at bugs and tried to figure out how to make them fight - the sorts of outdoor activities you would expect to see on Leave it to Beaver or some other old show like that.

The kids who have constant access to smart devices played as if they were in fortnight or some other videogame and were narrating their experience/acting like a streamer in more and more outrageous ways to get attention from their friends.

It's not that they weren't creative, but they were creative within incredibly specific parameters established by a videogame company.

So, I don't know that they obliterate creativity, as much as they focus it into something that is different sorts of creativity. Good, bad, or indifferent I don't really know. I think it's probably bad, but don't know for sure.

> The kids who have constant access to smart devices played as if they were in fortnight or some other videogame and were narrating their experience/acting like a streamer in more and more outrageous ways to get attention from their friends.

Not much difference than pretending to be the thunder cats or GI Joe when I was a kid. But the whole shouting for attention thing is disturbing. Someone here once pointed out that kids emulating influencers is giving kids the same mental issues that hollywood actors have from maintaining social images. It's disturbing.

If left unchecked these behaviors go beyond playtime and into careers.

Kids without harmful social media influence will often go into careers where they do useful things.

Kids who watch rich influencers all day think about how they can make money making YouTube content, or playing video games or acting like an NPC, or even just starting an OnlyFans.

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