I believe that, in retrospect, these schoolchildren will greatly appreciate this decision.
it sounds like because they have access to a school laptop, you're assuming the consequences of smartphone usage will still apply. what are the odds that the impact is actually identical? it's almost certainly not. and if i had to put money on it, i would say the impact is significantly reduced.
still there, sure, but this is a spectrum
A century ago in the US, a lot of support for Prohibition came from the impact of liquor, yet Prohibition itself also banned beer.
I can very easily believe that the backlash against dark patterns, against deliberately addictive apps (games and social media), against advertising getting squeezed into what would otherwise be normal conversations, against the surveillance that currently manifests as GDPR cookie popups because almost everyone both corporate and government would rather annoy people than stop snooping, may well lead to a new Prohibition on all such things.
But will this new Prohibition throw out the baby with the bathwater? Smartphones do a lot of genuinely useful things.
(Study haul? I don't know this term.)
Whatever you call a disruption in normal education such as when a teacher gets in a car accident on the way to work and suddenly there’s a non educational period for kids.
Supply teacher. No idea how the details were worked out, but there was always a substitute if the usual was unavailable for whatever reason.
Given more notice, the school phones supply teachers (or an agency for them). Some of these teachers will expect to be ready to get to a school with very little notice.
In the worst case, where the cover teacher has not had chance to discuss what lesson is needed, they're going to say "let's go through the last chapter in the textbook" rather than "I give up, fiddle on your phones".
But the GCSEs were September 1998 to June 2000, and the UK government loves to fiddle with education, so I wouldn't be shocked if you told me that had changed.
Also, study hall is an elective class. You still need to behave in study hall. The purpose is to study. Lunch could be an exception, but not really. There should be enough time to eat and socialize just a little. The lunch periods are not excessively long.
Chromebook’s still aren’t nearly as integrated into schools as you might expect.
Most study hall / libraries have a number of computer terminals.
There are enough stories about children dying because schools locked away medication. I have very little trust that schools will apply any common sense.
Yeah, schools have a history of issues. However, this policy isn't really new. It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.
Keyword "should".
> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.
Yep, the "easy" and extremely irresponsible solution.
> It was in place when I went to school and there were no issues.
Good for you, but
https://www.9news.com.au/health/boy-dies-after-school-confis...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/20/califor...
Leave it to the parents not the schools!
You have a literal internet connected computer with any function you could care to name, interactive touch screen display, full sound with headphones being provided by the student.
The situation we have now is that there are few apps that are suitable for a classrooms, even fewer which teachers would be allowed to use and none which are endorsed or included in the curriculum[1].
Meanwhile students phones have no central management unless by parents using a specialist app, are not automatically locked down to appropriate use during school hours, meaning they just get used for messaging and inappropriate stuff.
There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational tool the moment they walk onto school premises - the world just hasn't caught up yet and probably won't for a while.
[1] I don't know this, but I'm sure they're providing iPads or something if they're actually doing anything around this.
> There is no reason that a students phone couldn't become the world's most amazing educational too
Or, some new, advanced technology exists, therefore, because it is new and advanced, it needs to be applied. This is an affliction.
GP asked what use a smartphone would have, implying that it could only ever be bad. I'm just arguing that this isn't necessarily the case, not that we should adopt it or even that adoption is likely.
This is about a developing child’s mind and the precautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that social media is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to adolescent girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
I wish I had kids, but sadly not yet.
Myself, I grew up with a Commodore 64, whose user manual didn't only teach me to code, but was even part of me learning to read.
But everyone is different, what worked fine for me isn't necessarily even a good idea for others.
> This is about a developing child’s mind and the cautionary principle of knowing with the evidence we have now that it is extremely harmful to mental health, especially to girls. This is not the same as outlawing alcohol to grown adults.
Sounds like you agree with me that much of the current stuff is bad. I'm saying that some of the rest is both harmless and helpful.
And while the genie is out of the bottle, I want to minimize the exposure of social media. The smartphone experience is shrouded in social media. I want to do everything in my power to put her in an environment with other parents who have agreed to modify their environment. We’re looking at San Francisco Waldorf School. They even have a “computer lab” with designated screen time in the later grades.
There's a reason I was comparing social media to hard liquor (and, if you read between the lines, gambling) — we are basically agreed on the harms side of the equation :)
Something like a c64 would be even better.
I'm not even sure the detail — will it look like a Butlerian Jihad on all tech because AI is everywhere and enough people hate that, or "just" a ban on all social media (including this website) — but the vibes have been brewing for a while now, and it could well take the shape of smartphones being wound back to 8310s.
> As far as I'm aware, liquor and beer are also banned from schools and presumably always have been, before, during, and after Prohibition.
So it's fine for the analogy that phones might get banned from schools before some kind of larger social rejection on par with the example I gave, yes?
There's a reason why we don't let 8-year-olds drive, and its not just that nobody bothered to take the time to teach them.
And no, no matter how many times I tell my three-year-old the stove is hot, I'm not going to put them in charge of cooking dinner on the stove. Instead, I'll ban them from using the stove outside of extremely supervised limited circumstances. I'm also not going to put them in charge of chopping things with sharp knives either. Instead I'll find other more age-appropriate ways for them to participate in making the meal.
I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken. Actually, one could ask students to either put their phones in their bag or in a "safe phone-box", and still seize the phone if it's used.
Bringing awarness is important, when it comes to fighting addiction.
> I'm also not saying that teachers could ask nicely and then do nothing if the rule is broken.
But what rule? Clearly not some rule banning them, since your argument is there shouldn't be a rule banning their use. If the rule isn't a ban, then what cause does the teacher have to forcibly remove the phone? Is the student allowed to have the phone or not? It would seem like the idea a teacher is able to make the judgement call of policing the phone usage in the classroom and deciding when it becomes a distraction isn't working. And having it hidden behind a vague "causing a distraction" often can't easily be proven other than the teacher's judgement.
The teacher shouldn't have to deal with supporting their decisions of removing the phone they should be focused on teaching the lesson. Having a clear-cut rule that phones are not to be out in the classroom makes it obvious where the line is. If it is just at the teacher's discretion of what is a distraction, students (who are children and already often have a hard time with decision making abilities) would probably have a harder time understanding the edges of the judgement decision.
Sure seems like the simpler solution is to just have a blanket "phones aren't allowed" rule instead of the mess it is currently. No judgement call, no forcing the teacher to defend their position, the standards are clear from the start. Back when I was in school, about the time the iPhone came out, cellphones were common for highschoolers (age 13-18) but having them out in a classroom was strictly banned. If a teacher caught any student using a phone without previously having the teacher's permission, it would immediately be taken up and brought to the office and only released at the end of school. This seems entirely in-line with the program being implemented here.
> The schools have agreed that if any phone is used by a pupil during the school day, it will be confiscated.
Same for fire hazard in buildings or strict hygiene rules in hospital to avoid infections.
And thousands of laws that make people behave in general. Like prohibiting murder.