What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Flashlight? LOL, they might not even wait for you to use it, just assume there's no way you're not going to do something dumb with it, and take it.
A handheld gaming device? Insta-yoink.
Note-passing? Notes confiscated.
Basically an ordered-from-a-back-of-magazine-ad spy kit of a miniature camera and voice recorder? GONE. And you might be on the way to the office for a chat, and parents called, if you'd actually been using any of it.
A glossy fashion magazine, seen out at any point that's not explicitly totally-free time? In the teacher's desk. (and that's on the tame side of the kind of thing one might be looking at on one's phone...)
A portable mini-TV or small radio? Jesus, of course you can't have that in class.
But smartphones? Nope, they can have those. Which is the exact same as having all those things above, and way more.
It's such a crazily-different direction for policy.
They super, duper, do not :-(
That we accept such authoritarianism in schools? It certainly does.
Devices that don't necessarily, but do tend, to make keeping the schedule harder, exist and aren't needed for education.
("What does a CD player at lunch have to do with that?" if enough kids start listening to music at lunch I 100% guarantee you issues getting them to the next class on time increase in frequency a ton, and that's before you consider that every thing you add like that to a school environment increases the rate and severity of, ah, physical disputes)
So yeah, of course you ban their use.
"You could just only ban them for students for whom they're a problem."
Yeah, you could, but now you're dealing with even more angry parents up your ass because "you're not being fair, and you're singling out my kid". And you're burning more time you don't have dealing with these issues ad-hoc. No, it has to be a blanket ban.
Schools could be a lot less authoritarian if they didn't have to serve kids (or parents...) who can't handle a looser approach, and if they could simply kick out very disruptive kids, et c. But they can't, so they're a lot worse, in a lot of ways, than they hypothetically could be.
Maybe that's draconian. But maybe it's just good sense -- our high school is close to #1 in the state for academic performance, so they are doing something right.
I recognize we’re an exception, but he has type 1 diabetes, and his iPhone is essentially a medical device that sends us updates on his glucose levels throughout the day.
I’d hope schools at least make exceptions for cases like this.
Of course, they absolutely do. I imagine failure to do so would be an ADA violation, at least.
My wife used to teach and had multiple parents, over a handful of years, who'd semi-frequently call their kids while they were in class. Just to, like, chat. A lot more would text with them, again, usually just to shoot the shit. Lots of parents are... let's be kind I guess and go with really fucking weird.
I think coupling where your kids go to school with where your tax dollars are going severely misunderstands the point of having there be tax dollars for schools in the first place. Having kids shouldn't give you special powers re: how your taxes are used.
It makes some sense considering the people with kids probably care much more about the details in how those dollars are spent. Not that there are not people without kids who are equally interested (esp. those who work in education), but on avg parents will have much more interest and much more visibility into how it's spent.
What's weird to me is thinking that parents shouldn't get some "special powers". It's like saying the people who live in a particular police precinct shouldn't get any special consideration about how that precinct is run.
It's just not how democracy works.
(It is, however, how pre-revolution France worked, the revolution was as much about getting rid of the system of privileges as it was about getting rid of the king. I think we should think twice about the extent to which we legitimize the practice of treating different types of people differently.)
Sure. I was trying to contrast those who live within the precinct to those who live outside it.
And any influence is bounded by the amount of variation that's acceptable between precincts.
For them, not being in touch is going to feel weird.
Cigarettes are for plebes, after all.
It's a big enough difference that, unless phones turn out not to have much of an effect (an... unlikely proposition, I think) on educational outcomes, I fully expect this to manifest as a widening gap between already-very-inequitable educational outcome stats for the (loosely) rich vs. the poor.
(Example: middle-class public school, 5th grader gets teased for not having a phone. "Your family must be so poor, hahaha!" Nearly the whole class has phones, and most of those have them on their person in class.
Bottom-edge-of-"fancy" private school—only like 25% of the kids in 5th grade have one at all, half of those aren't allowed to bring them to school, and the rest keep them put away, out of reach, during class and lunch and such—there is no teasing, not having your own phone, especially at school and certainly in class, is the overwhelming norm.)
How ho you think kids that never learned to responsibly use tech will do in college when they are on their own?
This seems to be more of a ban on social media apps in school, which I 100% support and honestly wouldn’t mind it being nationwide.
Of course you can run the numbers and realize this plainly falls way below the level at which anyone should be using that use-case as a justification for anything.
(nb. the vast majority of school shootings you'll see in the statistics aren't the sort where kids having phones matters, they're e.g. targeted attacks on a single person, gang- or otherwise crime-related targeted attacks, violence that just by happenstance takes place on school grounds outside and perhaps not even involving any students or staff; all of which tend to be over almost as fast as they start and aren't an ongoing threat to bystanders once they're over, and even those aren't terribly likely to be something a kid is present for during their school career, on average)
... to be more clear, if you run the numbers, they're still kinda not. Our reaction(s) to them aren't rational (though, one can understand why)
I'm not sure smartphones have improved on this? If a kid gets a call in class the teacher's almost immediate reaction is annoyance, because there was no chain of authority that led to that distracting element. Now the kid's on the defensive and has to explain that it's their parent, and the whole class gets to wait while the kid awkwardly has this conversation while simultaneously communicating with the teacher that it's a legitimate request, etc. And that's for legitimate emergencies, to say nothing of the troublemakers that will intentionally coordinate fake calls to get out of class and hang out with their friends.
I am somewhat sympathetic to arguments that lots of things we took for granted growing up really are not especially acceptable today but there are limits.
Allowing smartphones for everyone is an unbelievable distraction.
ADHD tangent aside my point is: I can see the need these days, however I like the idea of a dumb phone that just has the basics. Definitely no tiktok, facebook, etc.
But let's assume a rare mass shooting actually happens (I forbid this thought)...will there be any point calling your kids? A phone will be more of a liability than an asset at that point..
That we have so many school shootings is shameful.
That we've decided a good reaction to them is to traumatize huge numbers of students (and staff! My former-teacher wife has stories...) over something that's, as shameful as the cases of it are, in fact extremely unlikely (specifically, an indiscriminate mass shooting at a primary or secondary school) is also shameful.
During active shooter situations, the school isn't going to call the parents of the students. They have other things to worry about. The kids are calling their parents directly.
Schools have communication plans for exactly this situation.
If you have a kid in school, you will be aware that schools have no qualms about communicating directly with parents via automated texts, emails, and phone calls, constantly, about nonemergencies. The volume of communication from schools is overwhelming. Putting out a notification about an active shooter incident would be easy. The trick would be getting the school admins to just send it out as a simple message, and not as a link to a Google doc containing a scan of a printout of the notification.
the parent wants to know if their special snowflake(s) is okay. these automated systems are absolutely not going to tell them that, and aside from that information, anything else is just seen as the school trying to placate people.
To do what? Come save them Delta Force style?
If such an unfortunate thing happens, the kids are dependent on law enforcement, not parents, for safety.
That would probably be the primary thing I'd imagine the parent is worried about. If you have a kid in a school with feckless police that stand outside while kids are getting shot at, then yeah, some parents probably are a better rescue option.
Slightly different context.
Previous discussion (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943649
I think the most cost effective solution is probably buying the cheapest used A12+ iPhone one could find. Factory restore, then setup Assistive Access or parental controls, which can limit any ability to install apps or settings without a different passcode to unlock the phone. Have a friend or partner set that passcode so you can't be tempted to add anything smart to your Dumb Phone.
The one thing that I noticed immediately is it seems to still use micro usb.
Without usb c it is a non starter, especially at that price.
Agreed, didn't notice that! I was also thinking the limited iPhone may be a better route for teens, parents, schools.
Not only for when they break / lose it, but also may be received better socially.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nokia-1-77-Inch-Feature-Phone-Singl...
I'd happily give this to my own child so they can reach me in emergencies, but there is no risk of them going on TikTok or anything else. It's "just" a phone.
Because this is an advertising puff piece for the light phone. I’m going to guarantee you that someone in that company has connections to that school.
These days phones are generally built from a SoC which already includes more capabilities than just calls and text, and run an operating system which already supports those capabilities.
If you don’t want certain features they can be turned off (check how locked down you can make an iPhone via parental controls, for instance) but it’s hard to avoid paying for them in some way.
And if what you said is true, then why give these kids light phones in the first place. I’m almost wondering if someone from the light phone company has some connection with that school.
They’re trying to build something which people need to find at least a bit palatable. A phone without the ability to play music and podcasts would have very little chance of selling for $300, they’d be up against those senior-oriented big button phones which sell for incredibly cheap.
Edit: I’m also not seeing anyone say that their school allows only light phone
Private schools, perhaps counterintuitively, have greater ability to enforce rules that some parents dislike, than public schools. They can organize around and enforce a general culture in ways that public schools cannot, and this ability increases the more prestigious they are. Families self-select to be generally agreeable to and aligned with the school's culture, and bad fits can simply be sent away. Public schools have to deal with whatever mix of families they happen to serve, period. Private schools are sometimes pointed to as being more-accountable to parents, and that's sort of true, but they also have much greater freedom to tell a loud minority of their "customers" to, frankly, go eff themselves.
An observation of trends I've seen with a limited dataset but that I suspect generalizes pretty well:
Better-off, if you will, parents, or at least those with a "higher-class" cultural background (Fussell's upper-middle and higher—doctors, lawyers, executives, in short) are giving their kids phones later, restricting use more, and are more-amenable to restrictions on phones imposed by schools, than lower-class (Fussell's middle and lower) parents. These factors tend to significantly reduce student phone use in ritzy private schools, "captive" nigh-private-school public schools, and the tip-top of other upper-tier public schools, compared with practically all the rest of the school landscape.
I fully expect this to widen already-large class differences in education.
> A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class.
> When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.
Flashlight. Probably not necessary 99% of the time at a school, until it is valuable.
Calculator. "Approved" graphing calculator replacements are stupid expensive, in many cases more expensive than the phone they're replacing.
Camera. We didn't have a ton of these at schools in the 80's, but they weren't entirely absent either. Useful for documenting (and yes, perpetuating) bullying.
Music. Even in the stone ages, we had music and headphones. Great for study hall and general focus.
Dictionary/Encyclopedia. Sure, folks can use bound volumes, but that's not a skill they'll use. Searching for things on the internet at large, is absolutely a skill they need.
Anyways, mixed thoughts. I'd say I turned out fine, but I had to re-learn a lot of mis-information innocently passed on by my peers and teachers.
The article actually addresses the lack of camera as a positive in that it greatly increased interest in photography courses.
The Light Phone they are using can have some basic utility features like a music player, calculator, calendar, etc.
That being said, I'm cynical this is just an ad for Light Phones lol.
> I'm cynical this is just an ad for Light Phones lol.
It is definitely a bit over the top on the praise for it.
I get that social media and texting are distractions in the classroom, but I really don't buy that a blanket ban is the solution. That's just draconian and brings to mind all the other arbitrary rules/limitations I had/have to deal with as a student which just built up resentment and encouraged malicious compliance rather than any respect of the school.
Also brings to mind the old joke about teachers telling kids to solve even complicated equations (without convenient numbers) by hand because "you won't always have a calculator at hand", and how wrong that turned out to be.
Edit: Come to think of it, it's interesting that social media sites haven't thought to do something about this as a PR move. They could sell beacons (specifically to schools) which if the phone detects, it notifies the teacher. Not being able to get away with sneaking a look at a phone would quickly reduce the issue of having to tell kids to put their phones away.
The article says the students received phones with some of these tools:
> instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps
Parents obviously worry about their children. Parents exist in a community of other parents that uses phones belonging to children to keep track of their children. It was very hard for me to wrap my head around how strongly parents expect to be able to reach their children at any point in time. Most solutions (e.g. Yonder Pouches) end up shutting down location services not to mention the ability of students to say "yes I'm find". This leads to way more resistance to these policies that I ever would have expected!
“Buxton School is a private, coeducational, college preparatory, boarding and day school for grades 9–12 located in Williamstown, Massachusetts.“
I mean, it’s one thing to take away a kid, cell phone and offer them nothing and then another thing to take away their cell phone and offer them
“When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.”
If the students become disruptive instead of just wasting time on their phone it could have a negative impact in many schools.
Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here's What Happened
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/technology/florida-school...
I'd prefer my kids to keep their phone, but only able to contact me during school hours (otherwise the device is as useful as a brick).
> there aren't very many good self hosted edu software resources
I'm not sure if that's a problem, but that feels like one.
This would be a nice experiment: Divide the students into two groups and let one group come to school without phones and let the other group stay home and learn the same material from their phones. If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students staying at home with their phones will learn the material much faster.
The only good thing about the school is that you get to hang out with your peers. The education system is not good for teaching.
Kids aren't looking at Wikipedia on their phones. Statistically speaking, they are probably looking at some AI generated TikTok video compilation of funny inside jokes, or something.
> The only good thing about the school is that you get to hang out with your peers.
Not if all your peers are too zombied out looking at their phones everytime they get a free moment between classes
The public education system (at least primary/secondary) is not about maximizing a few students' learning potential, but the average education of the collective.
Our current system does need major reforms, but to send kids home with phones to learn on their own? Not an effective solution imo.
Extremely wrong. Most people don't have the will and motivation to learn complex stuff on their own without external pressure, especially stuff they're not naturally interested in.
There's a reason people still go to college despite all the knowledge being available freely online. There's great value in learning in a structured environment alongside peers with whom you can freely exchange knowledge.
Tough call, folks!