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Comment by omh | Hacker News Reader

This debate seems to conflate two or three different issues.

1. Use of phones in classrooms 2. Having phones present in schools, but unused 3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren

(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.

(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)

(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues. The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.

Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".

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The fact that many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time is a part of the problem.

The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully phone-free quickly internalized the need for connectivity.

Raising children from a young age to expect and demand access to phone connectivity at all times is making this problem much worse.

No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen. The negative effects of perpetual connectivity are far, far worse.

Almost all humans (including those alive today) managed just fine to live life without a perpetual phone link. Teach children to do the same. The phone is a nice-to-have, not a necessity to merely venture out of the house on a routine trip to school and back.

>No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen.

Almost never happen? There have been 464 school shootings in the US since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

And probably none of them were hindered because students had their phones.

Yes, that is "almost never" in a country with 340,000,000 people.

Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.

> Besides which, "having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents.

Disagree. Being able to communicate to your family or emergency services that a shooting is happening and/or that you are safe or not is invaluable.

As a parent that experienced this two years ago, I can confirm. Hearing about a threat at school, followed by shota.fired, and receiving a call from my fleeing child are those "life in slow motion" moments burned into my memory. It didn't alter the outcome, but it was very beneficial to everyone's mental state.

It is very useful device, but sure- it doesn't block bullets. In a shooting it's mostly useful for contacting family and 911.

>"having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents

How could you possibly conclude that? Look at any timeline of a school shooting and there's often a lot of information going from 911 calls to inform the police on the number of shooters, the shooter's location, and where students are still alive/hiding. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin...

That's pretty close to "almost never happens" That works out the 33 a year, but there's something like 129,000 schools in the US. And when people talk about school shootings, they're typically talking about mass shootings, and there are even fewer of those (apparently 0.5 per year according to https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/4/e20230...).

And then there's the question of how a cell phone is actually supposed to help in such an emergency. If anything, I think it would be a liability.

As a parent that experienced such an event, my son having his phone let him message me that he and his class were literally running away into the woods and escaping the situation.

Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.

Still a niche case

School shootings are bad, but claiming cell phones with kids would change anything is rich.

Teachers and staff have phones. I’d be willing to guess that most schools still have a hardwired phone in most classroom.

Yes, almost never happens.

Your link shows ~600 people injured or killed in school shootings, across every possible education level (from kindergarten to college) in the course of 24 years. (Both injured and killed, the number actually killed is more like a quarter to a third of that).

That's an average of 25 people killed or injured per year.

Taking enrollment numbers from 2021 (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...) , it shows that in a given year, ~80 million people are enrolled in those same school levels.

That puts the odd of being injured or killed in a school shooting (if you're currently in school) at 1 in 3,200,000 per year.

So yes, odds of one in three million of your child being involved is "almost never happens".

deaths being rare != shootings almost never happen

many people shot are not killed. being a victim of a school shooting does not even mean you were shot.

ANY school shooting, whether people are shot or injured or killed, or whether the shooter simply misses and nobody is struck, is extremely rare in the United States.

That is to say, it almost never happens.

The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.

For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)

> many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time

That's a very polite way of saying "addiction".

Indeed it is. "Phone addiction" is the "smoking" of our time.

In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarettes!

Even at that time, there was strong initial evidence of smoking's harmful effects. It was largely ignored in favor of short term feelgood outcomes.

Perhaps in 2080 or so, we will look back upon today's era of always-on connectivity the way people now look at chainsmokers in 1955: "Wow, how could they ever do that? Didn't they know this was so obviously bad for you?"

There are many "smoking"s of our time. Food addiction is probably an even bigger one (cause of obesity and type 2 diabetes).

I'm actually starting to question whether smoking really was some huge public health success story. Or did it just go out of fashion? It's odd that we'd be able to tackle one thing like that then just completely drop the ball on it (see vapes) and not even begin to address other things like food/sugar and phones.

I don't understand (2); I (and probably you, too) never had a phone going to school, or playing outside, or doing most other things, and this was fine. If you really need to get in touch for the rare emergency that will probably never happen you can just ring the school. I sometimes see parents talk about not being in contact 24/7 is like [1].

On a practical level, "no phones at all" is just so much easier to enforce.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJP4dr_mioA

I agree that it would be fine to not have phones - we'd all cope.

But when my daughter hasn't got home on time if I can check her GPS and see that she's in the park then I can relax a little.

If she needs to say she's staying out late, using a group chat to let the whole family know is easier than trying to phone mum, then dad, then grandma.

Or she can include a photo showing how much fun she's having.

My life is richer because of communication on things like family group chats. It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose that

"Surveillance parenting" -- which is "helicopter parenting" magnified through technological tools the Stasi could only dream of -- seems likely to foster long-term dependence and anxiety that far outweigh the positive effects.

Yes, it's OK to not know exactly where a responsible older child is down to centimeter-resolution lat/lon coordinates at all times. Most humans, including most alive today, lived like that for all of history.

Some of that is rather different than "I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school" from your previous comment mentioned though. I'm just saying it's fine to send your kid to school without a phone. I didn't say anything about group chats in general or (3) from your post or anything else.

Why would three family members need to know that she's staying out late? I genuinely can't understand your comment because it seems like it has the obvious hallmarks of helicopter parenting. I don't actually know you and you're probably a much more reasonable parent than this comment portrays, and I don't know how old your daughter is, but it seems like you're not comfortable at all with not knowing much she's up to.

When I was a kid, my parent would know that I was staying out late... from the fact that I was not home yet. Sometimes he wasn't home yet, either, so no problem at all. If it was really late, as in it turned into a sleepover, the friend's parent would call my parent to let them know to expect me back in the morning. We somehow survived without 24/7 surveillance and GPS tracking.

Yes, you were fine. But you were also fine meeting up with friends, giving up when people are late, making plans, etc. Society has moved on -- plans are dynamic and people keep each other updated. If you're running late you let them know and they go to the museum without you and you know you can catch up. If you're in the area, you send a quick message to see if they're around.

With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now. When kids make plans with each other they don't have to make a ton of arrangements, they can just fly by the seat of their pants; they can meet up with friends, or ditch them because they're feeling tired without it being a big deal or requiring a game-of-telephone approach to communication.

The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it."

Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.

What are the "objectively harmful externalities" you're referring to?

There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a phone culture.

More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.

See e.g. https://kagi.com/search?q=summary+of+mental+health+outcomes+... -- there are far too many sources to even list here.

I appreciate that there is a body of research discussing possible implications of large-scale phone connectivity, but this does not meet the bar of "objectively harmful externalities".

I'm not even talking about methodologies or replication or evidence or p-hacking (all of which are huge challenges to this sort of research).

On a much more fundamental level, the statement "unauthorized smartphone use in a classroom setting is objectively harmful" is a defensible statement. I don't need a study to tell me that, nor should anyone. The extraordinary claim in this case would be the opposite, for which I would have to see tremendous evidence, and which even then I would likely not believe.

> With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now.

Because it's fucking up your kid's education. That's why. That's what this thread is about.

I'm so tired of this "it's just the way the world is" technofetishist apologetics. It's a complete non-argument that says nothing, and this type "it's just the way it is" resignation can be applied to every injustice or shortcoming in society every.

Phones in the classroom are clearly a distraction and should be disallowed. Phones in school seem mostly harmless and provide clear benefits.

I'm not saying "do nothing", I'm just not seeing a case anywhere of why phones in schools but not during class are "fucking up" anything.

You can make a serious case for banning phones in school as the easiest way to enforce banning phones in classrooms, and accepting the tradeoffs that this implies. But you can't just dismiss the fact that many people (myself included) see there being serious benefits of having access to phones outside the classroom setting without first addressing those arguments.

Yes.

Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as if it were a response to itself:

Replying to "society has this problem X" by saying, "Well, X is just the way society is now."

is not responsive to the proposition. It is merely repeating it in different wording.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

I get where you're coming from, but times have drastically changed. I feel we'd see better results in teaching kids from a young age how to responsibly use smartphones, use them for research, fact-checking, how to protect themselves, and building a healthier relationship with them.

If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.

> If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.

Then you don't know kids, because this is not how (most) kids work, certainly not at a young (pre-teen) age. And even in teenage years/puberty this kind of reductionist simplistic reasoning doesn't really apply (and is also one of those non-arguments that can be applied to everything).

And no one is argueing against all smartphone usage by kids. Or at least, I wasn't. Just saying people don't need to in touch on the way to and from school.

>Then you don't know kids

I'm the oldest of 5 siblings and have helped multiple family members, friends, and neighbors with their kids. I feel comfortable enough to say that I do know kids. In total, I'd say I've helped raise 15-20 kids in my life.

I wasn't allowed a phone or internet access by my parents until I was 18 and off to college, by then the iPhone 5 was out. Even when I did go to college, they refused to get me a phone at all, stating that the front desk of my dorm will walk up 5 flights of stairs to my dorm to tell me I had a call. My aunt had to buy me a flip phone.

You know what I (and my siblings) did when we lived with them? We would buy a schoolmates old iPod touch, PSP, or Blackberry Storm and hide it in our pillow cases. We'd ask for a specific e-ink Kindle because it had a button hidden in the settings to access an "experimental" internet browser.

Kids are creative, and if they want something, they will get it.

>> 1. Use of phones in classrooms ... is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.

I disagree. For a few years I taught a university class and very much appreciated the kids having their phones in class. In discussions I would often task someone with looking up or confirming some pertinent fact or law. They would usually use their laptops but I didn't much care whether the used their phones. Students having ready access to information can be useful in a classroom.

This isn't really about university classes but elementary school and high school, and no one denied that phones can't be useful on occasion – just that the downsides outweigh the upsides.

And many highschoolers are just one summer vacation away from a university classroom. Imho a great many highschool seniors are better behaved and take classroom time much more seriously than the average first-year uni student. We should not ball all kids together, as would happen under any total ban on a particular tech.

Well said! This is the same problem I have [1] with the messaging around this sort of thing and I don't know why people can't back up and figure out a more consistent approach to these separate issues.

One thing I hear a lot from parents of middle school and high school children (mine are just entering this domain) is that there's a deeper problem of teachers losing control of students -- even when they have these policies, the teachers and administrators are unable or unwilling to enforce them. I don't know what the solution to this is, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40718848

> teachers losing control of students

Outside very "leafy suburb" areas, this was a problem long before smartphones existed.

Smaller class sizes couldn’t hurt

> But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".

Always seems to boil down this way. There is no place for nuanced discussion in US school policy. "Zero tolerance" was just a crystallization of existing all-or-nothing trends.

The problem with the phones and social media is bad discussion is that ... school's can't fix that. It's just too far outside their ability to control.

It's worse than that. The meme is now the extremely vague and dangerous "screens are bad".

But in general I believe this is true. I don't think it's as vague as you think it is. I'm not sure I would agree with "dangerous", but definitely "unhealthy".

Apple should jump ahead of the problem and allow schools to control screen time and focus modes.

The side effect may be that kids start asking for Android phones which would be the exact opposite of what Apple wants

The last thing Apple is going to do is put a bad taste in the mouths of it's most obedient golden geese. Apple stock would probably halve if kids stopped socially shaming each other into buying iPhones.

First thing I would do is to wonder how I could enforce that ... for fun and games on others.

And really if we're talking about having to enroll a device into some sort of managed device system, schools don't have the time or manpower to manage tracking every kid's phone that is in the school.

And if we're talking about something you don't actively choose to enroll, we're back to my fun and games.

There is a potential clash here between control and privacy.

A few years ago Apple blocked[1] some parental control apps because "they put users’ privacy and security at risk"

This actually came up with our school. They tried to use an app to control student phones but it was fundamentally limited by these Apple restrictions.

[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/04/the-facts-about-pa...

> group chats are really good

Does your kid need group chats when they're in school with their mates?

Moreover, when a kid is perpetually glued to a screen absorbed in a group chat, they are much less likely to interact with others who are physically around them and ever develop any actual mates.

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