This is a weird comment. Did you really think most schools widely police cell phone usage in the year 2023?
What I am questioning is the why. Why did it stop. Why have the attitudes towards personal technology in schools swung so quickly?
Phones in schools seem like nothing but a distraction.
>> Phones in schools seem like nothing but a distraction.
> because cellphones became ubiquitous and admins never felt empowered to strictly limit them in schools
You're missing the point.
But there was a time when they weren't ubiquitous and admins did feel empowered to strictly limit similar distracting devices. It's anachronistic thinking to cite the present-day situation as a reason for a past change, when the conditions in the past were different.
This is purely hypothetical, but I could see a process for the change where teachers and admins were ignorant of texting, so allowed phones under the mistaken belief that they would not disrupt class, because students would only use them to make voice calls to parents outside of class (because it would be far easier and cheaper for students to talk to each other in person). Then a new status quo was established. Then the school's awareness of the harms came like a frog boiling in a bot: a little bit a time, and too slowly to motivate action until it was too late.
And the importance of cell phones to everyone’s lives (even children and teenagers) has massively increased since then. For schools to blanket ban them on campus or on the person of students in class would be swimming against a strong tide indeed. My guess is that the reason they don’t is that they believe that to do so would be constant war. And they aren’t paid enough for that.
When I was an elementary school student, I carried a few coins in the event that I had to call someone on a payphone. (Which happened very rarely.)
But today, we have no payphones. Well, almost none.
So what else could you do, with no payphone? Perhaps you could find someone else who had a phone that they could let you borrow. In years past, it wouldn't have been that uncommon to walk into a store or other place of business, or walk into your school office, and politely ask if you could use the phone. They might let you, or they might not, but it was a reasonable request.
I imagine today that it would come across a lot more suspicious. Why don't you have your own phone?
Both infrastructure and ways of thinking have shifted toward assuming that all individual people who might need to make a phone call have their own personal mobile phone.
Children being assumed to have their own phone is probably more of a grey area, but even so, things have changed, and there may be no going back.
And if they need to make a call, they go to the admin building, and explain why, and use the office phone.
Smart phones are constant dopamine dispensers. They create a dependency and cause human brains to go into withdrawal when not present. Once the science is laid bare I believe they will become severely curtailed in K-12 environments.
Are there _that many_ emergencies happening that the school office is unable to field calls from parents who need to reach their child right now?
I don’t see the “it’s like their wallet” argument either. That the phone is expensive and it contains personal information doesn’t mean it’s not disruptive to the classroom.
Ok, but yes, I suppose that does suggest that, for personal emergencies, the office won’t be too overloaded with personal emergencies to deal with all of them.
How often would the latency of getting to the office matter? I’m not sure.
If the latency of getting to the office matters, the teacher is already using the intercom to tell the office to phone in paramedics, and get the school nurse in to the classroom immediately.
I can't imagine any vaguely-plausible situation where calling parents (rather than the cops and/or paramedics) is the correct thing to do IMMEDIATELY and first. (SOP is for parents to tell the school about their kid's medical issues so that if they happen during the school day, their schoolday guardians will not be caught unawares... so "calling the parents to ask them what the shit is wrong with their kid" when the kid is in the middle of some serious medical issue isn't even vaguely plausible to me.)
Growing up I do not remember my parents having these fears despite there being a bomb scare (once during my schooling).
I remember my car breaking down and needing to walk to a rest area, to use a pay phone to call for help.
That and using pay phones generally as a convenience when I would bike miles into town, well that isn’t really available anymore.
I’ve had to knock on a door to ask a stranger to use their phone.
I’ve had to ask a store to use their phone.
A lot of this seems so strange now, like I cannot picture myself needing to rely on strangers and stores!
Thank you riverflows. I needed that.
1. Unintentional injuries account for 30% of all deaths of teenagers
2. Within that, suicide and homicide are the top two causes
3. Pretty sure its biological not narcissism that makes me want to make sure my progeny are safe esp when in a space that continually seems to be failing children and coming up with such mindbending solutions as more guns in schools
The school can totally do something about that, they just have to be willing to confront the student and enforce the rules.
What if the student beats other kids up, and the parent behaves similarly in response to discipline? Should the school tolerate that defiance, too?
The school obviously can't take the phone and throw it in a shredder or keep it for the year, but they can and should be able to keep it for the school day (and every other school day, if need be).
1: IIRC automatic suspension on first offense. Note, however, with most of the "zero tolerance" policies that were in place at the time, the offenses were significantly under-reported by the faculty.
Where do you even start? For a kid raised on phones, asking them to stop using their phone feels like asking them to cut off their hand. I imagine that most schools do have anti-phone policies, but there's a point where it's just too hard to enforce. Like other people have also mentioned, parents often pressure their kids to have phones in high school. As someone who went to high school after smartphones became popular, my mom would get upset when I want to school (or anywhere) without a phone on me. That means that teachers have to deal with a student body that's completely unwilling to follow the rules and parents that will back them up if you ever try. I certainly wouldn't bother enforcing a phone ban if I was a teacher.
It seems like this would be good reason to ban phones in school. I worry about the detrimental effects of not being able to concentrate. You could at least enforce school as a place to focus. If a student is using their phone during class, then they are not paying attention. It seems worthwhile to enforce this rather than give up on the kids.
Then there's the issue of kids having a high-value gadget that's easily damaged and at risk of theft in schools that never managed to solve old-fashioned bullying let alone whatever the kids get up to on social media these days.
If kids, or, anyone under-18 really, really needs a phone make calls, something like the original Nokia 3110 would be much more suitable than any smartphone.