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.
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.
They super, duper, do not :-(
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.
How ho you think kids that never learned to responsibly use tech will do in college when they are on their own?
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.
For them, not being in touch is going to feel 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Slightly different context.
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
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.