Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I can see it going either way.

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.

View on HN

Do you have kids? I have a 4-year old girl. And while parenting is so much harder without iPad and iPhone, my daughter is genuinely more interested in the world and imagination play than looking at screens. At age 2, was curious about the other kids with iPads, but now she shows no interest in screens. And we’re doing fine with static or minimally electronic toys. She has a whole adolescent/adult life ahead of her of screens.

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.

Good for you, and good for her.

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.

I had a computer growing up. It wasn’t always connected to the Internet. I had dial up occasionally. But I cannot imagine my child growing up with social media is a good thing. Facebook, MySpace, Instagram, TikTok didn’t exist when I was a kid.

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.

> I want to minimize the exposure of social media

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 :)

Right, as they get a bit older, a wholesale screen ban is generally not the answer, we have a ban on consumption-oriented devices, but they have free rein to a raspi 400 with raspbian on it, and kidpix+dosbox/tuxpaint/scratch/other creative software.

Something like a c64 would be even better.

There are so many ways to teach kids to code and read that a smartphone/tablet is totally unnecessary. I refuse to believe for a second that my kids are at any disadvantage for not having screen time at home.

what useful thing does a smartphone do during school hours?

Looking stuff up during lunch or study hall. School hours != in class but it often means doing assignments.

Lunch time is supposed to be a break from studying.

(Study haul? I don't know this term.)

I'm assuming voice entry mistranscription of "study hall"?

Auto corrupt of study hall, also known as a free period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_hall

That would be very unusual until the final two years of school in England.

As a predefined period sure, but I assume kids in crutches still skip PE and whatnot, though you might be calling it something else.

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.

> 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.

The school's own teachers would cover for an injured colleague in an emergency like this. The lesson timetable will be written to ensure there's always some teachers free.

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".

I only saw them in A levels, not during my GCSEs.

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.

They pretty much all have chromebooks or laptops these days that can perform the same actions if it's school related.

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.

Try to juggle a Chromebook, textbook, and a worksheet on a one of those single seat desks and see if you start reaching for a phone.

Chromebook’s still aren’t nearly as integrated into schools as you might expect.

Then maybe the good answer is to fix the facilities.

Depends on the schools. There are many that don't issue physical text books, or rarely do. But that's really not any different from my college experience (with a larger laptop no less). Also, if you are using the textbook and worksheet, you really shouldn't need anything else.

Lunch is a good time to disconnect. I think teaching kids to having moments where they can just enjoy company and socialize is a good thing. Same reason we have a no screen policy during dinner time at home.

Most study hall / libraries have a number of computer terminals.

Most kids on most days do use it to disconnect, but conversely most kids also use it to do an assessment or study for a test at some point.

Dumb phone things, apps for blood sugar monitoring, checking public transport delays,....

There are enough stories about children dying because schools locked away medication. I have very little trust that schools will apply any common sense.

All the things you mentioned were normally handled without phones a generation ago. They should be able to get medical exceptions for medical devices.

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.

> They should be able to get medical exceptions for medical devices.

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...

We're talking about phones, not lifesaving medication.

Exactly, schools even get things horribly wrong when it is literally life or death. How much more wrong do they get if the stakes are lower?

Leave it to the parents not the schools!

All the same things as internet connected computers in general — world's information at your fingertips, quiz apps to reduce the delay between doing a test and finding out what you need to focus on, etc. — except easier to take on field trips and hook up with heart rate monitors during PE.

What useful things could a smartphone do during school hours.

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.

with [1], you already said it. iPads serve that function. Have these really improved classroom education, or is it just a more convoluted, fidgety way to get through the materials?

> 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.

I think my broader point is that whatever technology has been adopted hasn't had a noticeable effect and that's due to the usage, attitude and hence supporting infrastructure to adopt them.

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.

Fair enough, I follow. but we've had about 20 years now, and it doesn't seem like any improvements have materialized, if anything, there's only negatives with kids being on their phones during school time. it's ok to axe to put this one on the loss pile, and move on.

This doesn't sound particularly analogous to Prohibition. Mobile computers are being banned from schools, not from everywhere. As far as I'm aware, liquor and beer are also banned from schools and presumably always have been, before, during, and after Prohibition.

I was trying to suggest that at least some of these things will be banned everywhere, not that they have already been. Small scale prohibitions happened well before there was enough drive for the 18th Amendment to be proposed.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com