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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't believe what an issue this can turn into. Some parents will fight for their kid's right to use cellphones.

This right here. Parents ultimately run schools, and a surprising proportion of them get really pissy if their kids can't have phones in class. Schools aren't letting kids have phones because they want to.

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.

Parents now are the generation that grew up with ubiquitous communication connectivity.

For them, not being in touch is going to feel weird.

What's worse, in states with voucher systems, parents can remove not just their kid from the school, but their tax dollars too--so the teachers have to tolerate the phones or funding will dry up for the other students who are trying to pay attention.

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.

> 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.

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.

Whatever influence a non-elected person has over their police precinct should be equal to that of all the other non-elected people in that precinct. The voucher thing is like if you had a different sized influence based on whether you have a criminal record, since presumably you would then have a different relationship with the effects of that funding.

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.)

> equal to all other people in the precinct

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.

We need to educate parents better. The children of tech billionaires aren't permitted to use all of these devices or social accounts... because the tech elite know they are harmful to social and intellectual development.

Cigarettes are for plebes, after all.

I posted elsewhere in the thread that, with the limited dataset I have (which includes families at a few schools of very different kinds, not just, like, my friend group) it sure looks to me like there's a sharp difference between the way the culturally upper-middle (under Fussell's model—the working "professional" class like doctors and lawyers, executives, that sort of thing) and higher, and the culturally middle-or-lower handle device use & access with their kids.

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.)

Pretty wild.. what's the point in even making them go to school if you're just going to let them goof off on their phone all day? Just let them sit around at home watching TikTok until they turn 18 and have to get a minimum wage job

Schools could teach kids to do something useful with their phones so they can use tech to their advantage later in life?

How ho you think kids that never learned to responsibly use tech will do in college when they are on their own?

Kids can't even mutiply two numbers and they are supposed to learn the most complex device ever made from school? lol

At my work, there are certain areas that we are not allowed to have any cameras, and that includes all personal cell phones. I have a colleague whose daughter was at school during an active shooter incident, and she was able to use her phone but he was not able to receive her calls or texts. She was not killed, but I am glad she had a cell phone that day, and I wish he had his too.

policy shouldn't be defined by extreme outlier cases

I've run the numbers on "average likelihood of a given student being present during any kind of shooting on school grounds—the overwhelming majority of which aren't the kind of shooting one thinks of when one sees the term 'school shooting', anyway—at any point during 13 years of k-12 school, in the US" and it helped me conclude it's not a thing worth worrying about, even a little. (I do have kids in school)

The light phone mentioned in this article can still make calls and send texts

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.

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