It's time to take phones away from students

>Here we're talking about banning smartphones

The topic is about banning smartphones for students during school, not in general.

Even if social media was the best thing for your health since sliced bread, it's not appropriate for learning in a school setting.

I agree with you in the long term, but like the joke about solving something with regular expressions: now you have two problems. This is an argument for an intervention to reduce a certain harm in a certain way now. We should also, independently, pursue restitution. The article brings up smoking and that seems like a good model to me. We both restricted where smoking could occur and also went after cigarette companies - both efforts were worthwhile on their own and also were generally complimentary.

In your opinion, what would this look like? What would, say, Facebook be responsible for doing?

this is an interesting thought, but how workable is this? basically these companies are so powerful and US politics are so broken that I don't see any effective regulation getting passed any time soon

There's a lot of misunderstanding and oversimplification going on amongst many debating this issue, often with strong emotions. I think you're right that we need to be clear where the harm is coming from: social media and the corporations that profit from it. Blaming it on phones or even "screen time" misses the mark and makes it hard to specifically address the issue. If they take the phones away, kids will access via their laptops, watches, etc.

Now it's easy to say that we should put limits and regulation in place of these corporations, and I would agree. What I'm concerned about is giving more power to governments that have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent and prone to abuse/misuse of power.

I would like to think there's a way we can limit access to social media within schools, but the damage also occurs outside school hours. Maybe it's a good enough start though.

Edit: elaboration.

In the limiting case, this requires the social media industry to implement a parallel judicial system, or else make everything hosted there immediately legible to the actual judicial system in a way that overrides any other system of visibility control.

I'm not at all averse to imposing back on that industry the detriments it imposes on the society on which it feeds. I also don't think this or any other superficial solution of that problem is likely to net out better than the status quo.

But these costs are inherently unquantifiable. A smartphone is an enormously useful tool, even for a child. Social media isn't something entirely negative, just having a way to access your friends and family can be a huge benefit. And even if on the whole social media is a net negative, how do you quantity that into a "cost" the social media site has to pay?

> We didn't ask the tobacco companies to bear the cost of the public health impact they create.

We actually did, we just siphoned the lawsuit settlement money off to other uses.

I think it really matters who is talking. Which is easier for a school board to do? Take away students phones in their schools or force tictok to make their app less harmful.

> I'm confused why most of the discussion about these issues is based on blocking the means of access to the content rather than making those hosting the content responsible for it.

It's not just the content though, the device would be distracting if it was offline only. I wouldn't have been allowed to bring a portable television/dvd player into school either.

> Here we're talking about banning smartphones, rather than making the social media companies responsible for their various harms.

If you want to prevent minors from accessing certain content you need to check their age, thus to enforce real-life ID check, which users nor platforms want.

(And fortunately since I am all for, not against, an anonymous web)

I mean the article says right at the start that until 90s(!!!!) it was legal for kids to smoke in school and in fact some people have been advocating for keeping it legal. Madness.

> My wife absolutely panics at the idea of not being able to contact the kids

I've never understood this reasoning but I don't have kids. How is a child being able to contact their parents going to help in active shooter situation?

Dumb phones address the "kids contacting their parents" angle just fine, you don't need a smartphone for that. I also think that if parents are truly panicked by the inability to contact their child on a moment's notice, that is genuinely an issue they need to work on. It is neither normal nor healthy to feel that way. But regardless of whether they are justified in that stance, that too is addressed just fine by dumb phones.

It's important to note that the author and the magazines editor are not in control of this.

However, I do take the point that authors have a choice as to where their work appears.

I’m not even 40 and I remember growing up without internet access, much less a cell phone. I had to walk to a library to use their computers.

Thanks Steve

There was certainly a lot more conversations/debate around verifiable, but inaccessible, knowledge. You would ask a friend or family member something like, "what's the second longest river," and have a discussion about it if no one knew for certain or of two people had differing opinions.

Now we simply look it up which means we don't have those conversations. I feel that on a whole it's made us less comfortable with situations where one person thinks A and another thinks B that's spilled from verifiable knowledge to scenarios where personal opinions differ. Probably something something culture wars.

It also meant that if you told someone you were meeting them at a certain place and time that not showing up was a huge waste of their time and a larger social no-no. Nowadays people cancel at the last moment because you can be sure your message will be received.

> Just people going out into the world not knowing anything except what they carry in their brain and what is immediately around them.

Ever seen a kid or young teenager interacting with a phone? It's not that they spend the day on Wikipedia searching for infinite knowledge, rather they mechanically swipe the next tiktok video or do the same on youtube. That thing is like a slug attached to your brain, draining all attention.

Smartphones are not harmful to everyone (unless you're also going to claim that smartphones are dangerous to you and as an adult you are not responsible for your actions when buying one).

Apple nor Samsung nor Google sells iPhones to minors - they are not able to get a contract for phone service. These devices are sold to adults and it is the adults that give the devices to children.

Forks are dangerous too, should we sue IKEA whenever a child hurts someone with a fork?

Nobody should have a smartphone? I know a lot of very interesting takes come up when the smartphones/kids debate comes up, but this comment certainly takes the cake.

Someone on here recently pointed out that a FitBit-style watch where the kid can still be tracked-by-location and maybe receive pager-style notifications is a decent compromise to giving your kid a whole smartphone. That way you still get to limit technology but still reap the benefits of being able to track your kid and also ping them to contact you if you can't get a hold of them.

This is me. I'm also the most technical person in my family and the only one with an analog watch.

I feel like being fully immersed in tech makes it that much more obvious. My children barely watch TV and we plan on waiting for smart phones until as late as possible. They’ll have a flip phone once they need to call for pickups from sports and such.

I wouldn't call it ironic though, when you know how the sausage is made and how toxic it is, it is a logical outcome.

In my child's elementary school (in Silicon Valley) there were no kids with cellphones at any grade level. The school didn't outright prohibit them (although they were discouraged), but all parents had agreement that it was an evil best postponed and cellphones have no place in elementary school. (Not coincidentally, every family had at least one, if not two, parents in tech.)

If anyone watched The Social Dilemma (2020), they interviewed a number of managers responsible for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma#Interviewee...

And of course the managers are repentant now with a few million in the bank.

To be fair, one-to-one laptops located on a school's domain can have social media websites blocked at the network level and the client level. Phones usually come with data plans, which means not even a filter on the WiFi would prevent students from accessing blocked websites, even while they're physically in the school. The article does mention this.

Making things illegal and not accepted works decently well. There wasn't a drug vending machine at my school, even though a few rogue students were probably buying and selling drugs at my highschool. Thus I was less likely to do drugs.

Very few handguns are in students backpacks, because we don't accept it. If we didn't accept cell phones, we'd have a lot fewer kids suffering from them.

This is about banning phones during class or school hours. Even though the war on drugs may have failed the general populace, the prohibition of drugs at schools has been largely successful in preventing drug use from taking place in classrooms and on school property. (the same with smoking bans at schools)

This is the same.

Which was the argument against prohibiting smoking at school:

> John Tolton, then chairman of the Metro Toronto School Board, was having none of it. Tolton doubted whether schools even had the right to ban smoking, and if they did, “it will merely drive smoking underground.” (He was also unconvinced of the dangers of second-hand smoke.) There were other concerns, including the belief that bans would drive smokers off school property, inciting conflicts with neighbours and exacerbating absenteeism. Some parents gave their kids permission to smoke, so (the thinking went) better to offer them a regulated space in which to do so.

Why won't the war on phones be as effective as the war on tobacco?

Funny you should say that, when the article specifically mentions how people said the same thing about "attempting" to ban tobacco cigarettes in schools last century, and how-- lo and behold-- while cigarettes do still exist, they're now considered socially unacceptable for students to use by all involved parties, and the percentage of students using them is negligible.

I don't necessarily agree with the article's assertion that cigarettes and cell phones are the same kind of problem in need of the same kind of solution (since phones have legitimate use cases outside of the problematic ones, and cigarettes don't). Just wanted to point out that the article specifically called out your argument, and you seem to draw a different conclusion about reality (war on drugs failed) than the article (students no longer smoke).

This seems like a totally sensible solution. Just lock up phones in pouches that remain in students' possession.

>They clicked the magnetic lock at the top of their pouches shut, then placed them into their backpacks or held them up to show teachers. The pouches would stay with them, locked, until dismissal at 2:45 p.m.

>The school reminded parents that there is at least one landline phone in every classroom — and in many cases two. Teachers also still have their cellphones in case they need to call 911 (the pouches also are not “bank vaults,” Dolphin added, and can be cut open in an emergency).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/01/school-cell...