Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools | Hacker News Reader

Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools

yle.fi

790 pointsfreetonik472 comments

It had to be a law because children are people in Finland and most Nordic countries with rights that adults just can't take away.

Current legislation allows the teacher to tell a student to put their phone away in a pocket or backpack, for example, where it will not be a distraction.

The use of phones during breaks cannot be completely banned, as students have fundamental rights. The Constitution guarantees everyone the protection of property, which also applies to students' phones. Restricting the use of mobile devices must be considered from the perspective of freedom of speech and the protection of a phone call or other confidential message.

Section 12 from Finnish constitution:

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Section 12 - Freedom of expression and right of access to information

Everyone has the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression entails the right to express, disseminate and receive information, opinions and other communications without prior prevention by anyone. More detailed provisions on the exercise of the freedom of expression are laid down by an Act. Provisions on restrictions relating to pictorial programmes that are necessary for the protection of children may be laid down by an Act. Documents and recordings in the possession of the authorities are public, unless their publication has for compelling reasons been specifically restricted by an Act. Everyone has the right of access to public documents and recordings.

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See also: Convention on the Rights of the Child https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... Wikpedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...

> It had to be a law because children are people in Finland and most Nordic countries with rights that adults just can't take away.

It's a strange concept to hold that there are rights that can't be taken away, but then take them away merely by passing legislation.

The keyword here is just.

They cannot simply order children to comply, there has to be same legal basis like there has to be for ordering an adult to comply.

Maybe I'm seeing this wrong but a public school is a government institution, right? It seems reasonable, then, that the government could say "no phones in here", just like they can say "no drinks in the courtroom".

Not all schools are government institutions or funded by the government. But it wouldn't matter to your point, because by that logic anyone who owns the building should then be able to make rules about what goes on inside that building, or any organization, etc. Much like how you have basic wardrobe etiquette, you could also have a rule that says no phones in a classroom.

Now me being Estonian, just across the sea from Finland, I was surprised to learn this needed to be a law in the first place since when I went to elementary/primary school smartphones and laptops were not permitted in the classroom. Didn't need a special law for that, it was just the school's rules. You either play ball or you get called into the principals office. This happens enough times and you simply get kicked out of the school.

Well sure, I tend to agree with that. Government buildings can be an exception because they're public and we more carefully constraint the things the government can do, and because you can be forced to go there.

I too am a bit baffled by the idea that you need a law for that. But, as I said, we have a different common law tradition in America that changes things. The only two big legal influences which I've read on are common law and the justinian codex -> napoleonic code path; scandi law is alien to me.

You have the right to get intoxicated, you possibly have the privilege to drive a car if you are licensed. It’s quite the shame that these shmucks legislated against doing both at the same time.

Those rights can't be taken away... without existing legislation.

There are many rights that can be taken away, freedom of movement for example in the case of prisoners, but you need laws in order to not make that taking away a crime itself. You can't just apprehend and throw someone in your basement because they stole something from you.

Same thing with children's phones, a teacher can't just take away the phone because they didn't have the authority before.

Now I'm curious. Is there a law that carves out specific exemptions for parents disciplining kids/teenagers like grounding, taking away phone and internet privilege etc.

Sure, I think this just looks a little alien from an American perspective because most of our rights are set up as explicit negatives to block the government from legislating them away, more than to prevent Joe or Jane Teacher from taking a phone. "Congress shall pass no law..."

I guess the nordics don't have a common-law tradition and so never inhereted the in loco parentis doctrine that allows schools to take substantial actions regarding students? I'm not familiar with their legal history.

You have free speech, but you can't say a certain threat that is in a whitest kid you know sketch. It's the same thing

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY&pp=ygUcd2hpdGVzdCB...

This has always seemed blatantly unconstitutional, though, intentionally abused to create a chilling effect. It's not something I have or will say, but if "I want to kill Fred" isn't classed as a Virginia v. Black "true threat", the government has no legal basis for charging. Technically the statute isn't unconstitutional, it's just widely-abused.

> most of our rights are set up as explicit negatives to block the government from legislating them away,

Of course, as we've discovered, those rights don't mean much, when the executive doesn't want to recognize them. So what was the point anyway?

They also don't mean much when state governments just ignore them and never get called to account (and I can point to examples on both sides of the aisle).

It's too early to make that claim. There are multiple branches and levels of government to deal with situations like this. They have worked in the past for smaller scale violations. They should work in the present for larger scale violations. The problem is that it takes time, it always took time, so a lot of people are going to get hurt in the process. (Granted, it is also important for people to fight for their rights because the current government is pushing the limits.)

> current government is pushing the limits

The Republicans* are. Important to be factually accurate here’s the Democrats have never done anything remotely this lawless and authoritarian before.

. . . aside from supporting slavery and then the Dixiecrats opposing civil rights, you mean? If you actually look at American history, the ugly parts are ultimately bipartisan.

> . . . aside from supporting slavery and then the Dixiecrats opposing civil rights, you mean? If you actually look at American history, the ugly parts are ultimately bipartisan.

You are really pushing both-sides-ism to its limits.

It goes without saying that if you have to go back that far in history to find an analogy to today's abuse of power, you are proving GP's point: the lawlessness of the Republican party is unprecedented in modern history.

The person I was replying to said "never before," which means that AND the internship of Japanese-Americans during WWII are squarely on the table.

I never voted for Trump and I don't support the power grabs he's trying to make, but I also understand America has a history of playing footsie with authoritarianism every 80-100 years or so.

Internment camps, a civil war over literally owning humans as property, the Alien and Sedition Acts . . .

It is not. The precedent is around ninety years old, but firmly within modern history. As Franklin Roosevelt attempted to enact his New Deal agenda, the so-called "Four Horsemen", often along with Justice Roberts and/or Chief Justice Hughes, repeatedly ruled against his alphabet agencies and sweeping social bills.

So, Roosevelt worked to find the necessary votes to pack the court. His "Judicial Procedures Reform Bill" was not so different from any of the other "judicial reforms" we've condemned when other strongmen around the world used them to strengthen their power. Politicians from Roosevelt's bloc spewed vitriol at the justices who were simply trying to do their jobs. In Iowa, effigies of the six justices who had opposed any of Roosevelt's actions were found hanged by nooses. Once Roosevelt secured political support and signaled his willingness to push for packing the court, the justices backed down and began ruling in his favor, repeatedly. Where months before it had struck down a New York minimum wage law, a nearly-identical law in Washington was deemed perfectly constitutional. The National Labor Relations Act was fine and dandy. Coal mining was suddenly interstate commerce after all. In fact, the Commerce Clause now covered everything; one clothing factory in Virginia was enough commerce to quality. Later, the court would rule that a man growing wheat for his own consumption was sufficient "commerce" to warrant near-limitless federal rule-making. After all, it meant he bought less wheat from someone else, so clearly it was within the feds' purview. Wickard v. Filburn stands as precedent today. The justices on that court kept their seats but gave up their power.

Now, another populist has shown up. One who has a different vision for the nation than that laid out by the neoliberal technocrats who have dominated American politics since Clinton. Trump has explicitly called out FDR's new deal coalition, the coalition emplaced by vaguely authoritarian means quite similar to those he is using, that was the underlying basis for politics for almost the past century. I don't care for Trump's vision much more than I care for Roosevelt's or Clinton's. But claiming that this is "unprecedented" only serves to point people away from the prior time in history when this happened, when we utterly failed to stop Roosevelt and remove his power. Perhaps learning from history is the better choice so this time we can do a better job of it.

This tradition goes back further than Roosevelt. In addition to being a notorious bigot and racist, Woodrow Wilson was open about the idea that the Constitution was outmoded and needed replacing so that a technocratic government could take its place.

You also have Roosevelt's first appointment to SCOTUS, a literal hood-wearing klansman and true-blue progressive. Broadly the progressive movement was also home to a high level of racism; more of the paternalistic variety than the hateful, but still led to e.g. forced sterilizations. Progressives today have abandoned that, but there was no such radical realignment for them.

Our history is ugly, but that particular detail needs to address the southern realignment where the Jim Crow-era Democrats moved to the Republican Party. I think it’s less about bipartisanship and more that there’s a group of people who both switch parties and influence within parties trying to accomplish their goal of maintaining their superiority over other groups. Their loyalty is to their group, not the party.

This isn't an accurate picture either. A good example would be Justice Hugo Black, Roosevelt's first appointee to the Supreme Court. Black remains one of the most noteworthy big-time liberals in the history of the court (with a few exceptions like Korematsu.) He was a southern democrat and a klansman; not a member of some shadowy cabal that exploited the democrats for political expediency but a true believer in progressivism.

Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure, and only through it can one be purified. None of us is free from history, none of our forefathers was clean, but neither are we responsible for their failings.

> Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure

Opposition to slavery isn’t exclusive to the left, but also if that isn’t hyperbole you really need a wider sample. By far the most common perspective I’ve heard from anyone in the anti-racist camp is that nobody is perfect because we are all shaped by our environment. The whole point of entire campaigns is to avoid reinforcing those biases because they’re so widespread.

This also touches on the perceived inaccuracy you mentioned: my argument is that the key part for Black isn’t the Democratic affiliation but the southern white identity. People are motivated by issues but some people prioritize that one above everything else, and that’s what happened with the southern realignment: some people valued white supremacy most and changed what were in many cases generational party affiliations, while others decided that things like labor rights or social programs mattered more and shifted correspondingly. It was largely the same people but they sorted themselves into different parties and that shaped the policies of those parties.

Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal. Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal.

So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for decades to come.

You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

As someone who has lived in the south (my family is not from the south), I’ll tell you that the Republicans were correct. The clan controlled the local counties (most important offices) and nobody would stop them from disappearing people or burning them out of their homes regardless of that the federal government said.

What changed was the people. Each generation has grown more tolerant. That finally broke the clan control and the millennial generation in the South is overwhelmingly not racist.

Unfortunately, the recent moves away from MLK-style equality to the radical Marxist-style equity (equity except for people who happen to be born white as they see it — very similar to Russian discrimination against children of formerly Middle/upper class people like engineers) seem to be pushing gen Z back toward racial supremacy (this seems true across the whole country).

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

The most interesting question is why republicans and democrats supposedly swapped parties in the 1960s, but the black vote shifted in the 1930s. The answer seems pretty clear. Black unemployment was through the roof and the New Deal promised jobs, so they broke with the part of Lincoln because they were forced to. As things stabilized, there was a risk of them switching back and once again creating a Republican supermajority which is what spawned support for a federal civil rights act by the racist democrats.

> You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.

LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.

A larger proportion of both House and Senate republicans voted for the '64 Civil Rights Act, true, but that doesn't change the fact that many preferred the state model. Goldwater, the party's nominee for president in '64, had been an outspoken civil rights supporter since before it was cool. He opposed specific titles on specific grounds because he, like many others, believed in upholding constitutional limitations on federal power, rather than just writing a bill and calling it solved. This was not as a proxy for racism, and Goldwater had been a major proponent of the prior two major civil rights bills in '57 and '60. He even spent many of his later years advocating for gay rights.

I am personally opposed to maintaining what I see as an overreach of the federal government. This goes back to the start of the new deal and stretches through much of what primarily the Warren Court found constitutional. Plenty of us "states rights" types are in favor of it on a whole host of other issues, e.g. many of the policies Trump promulgates. Please stop trying to erase the concept of local governance with hostile and incomplete interpretations of the past.

Technically it only takes 38 states governments, no? Certainly the Americans would never tolerate such an amendment, never the less it is possible.

Americans don’t have constitutional rights. It’s a fantasy that has crumpled the second it hit the reality of having a dictator as president and a political party that doesn’t care about laws. The Republicans have deported American citizens (children) who were born in America. The Republicans have arrested a judge in Milwaukee because they didn’t like that judge following the law.

This wouldn't be the first time that it took a while for the courts to redress wrongs. Dred Scott technically stood until rendered obsolete by the Thirteenth Amendment. Brown v. Board didn't happen until the fifties. The courts didn't catch up to applying the Alien Enemies Act to japanese during WWII until after the war had ended.

This doesn't mean that we don't have constitutional rights. The whole point of an inalienable right is that it's an inherent right recognized by governance. The state can't take them away, only violate them.

As for your other points, I think you're actually keying on the wrong one; the administration's actions with Garcia are much more clearly wrong. The Wisconsin Supreme Court today temporarily suspended Judge Dugan despite the fact that four of its seven justices generally lean liberal, and are elected rather than appointed. We'll see if there's anything to the charges. If not, maybe we'll see each other at a protest, but it doesn't appear she was "following the law". As for the children, I believe that was due to a policy of keeping families together; if their parents must leave the country, they must follow or be placed in foster care.

Dismissing rule-of-law as a concept is both premature and counterproductive, in the sense that it only discourages people who could otherwise focus on using the checks and balances in place for this reason to rein in the administration.

AFAIK, yes, in loco parentis isn't a thing. Rights of the child (or, overall, the individual) are first and foremost. Children commonly have voice in e.g. court proceedings affecting them, too.

Nordic legal system is interesting - it avoids a lot of Roman/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon influence and is rooted instead in the old tradition of "Tings". (Nordic communal gatherings). Which means there's a strong base of communal consensus instead of precedent - in the small, reflected by the presence of lay judges in legal proceedings. In the large, reflected in the Nordic countries together having a set of very closely coordinated legal systems. (Since late 1800s, I think?)

It's super-interesting (if legal systems are interesting to you ;)

There is something called "tillsynsplikt" in Swedish law. Hard to translate, but perhaps "obligation of exercising care/authority".

This normally applies mostly to the parents of a child, but is taken over by the school during school time. The obligation comes with fuzzy yet extensive rights to enforce order, in whatever way and towards whatever goal can be argued to be in the big-picture-best-interest of the child or group of children.

Of course there are various laws specifically granting rights to children. To decide if a particular act is lawful or not, you (or a court!) needs to weigh all the relevant laws against each other.

Can't "just take away" ie, there has to be a law prescribing the removal of the right. Lawful rights vs inalienable human rights. Same thing exists in US. You have a right to certain things, like the right to privacy, but that right can be lost in the right circumstances as determined by law.

The difference here is that in the US, children don't by default inherit the same legal rights as adults and instead have a different set of rights which often means they never had a legal right to, for example, privacy or ownership, in the first place.

You should have seen what happened a few years ago during a thing called covid

Not at all. Libel can punish you for speech. Defamation can punish you for expression. If you break a law, you no longer can vote in some states (I heavily disagree with this, just stating a fact) or own a gun. Etc... Etc... This is very normal.

That's how it is everywhere. Constitution gives rights, exceptions must be set by law.

You have free speech... then comes the list of exceptions, incitement of violence, defamation (libel and slander), Child pornography, perjury, speech integral to criminal conduct, copyright infringement, state secrets,

And hopefully the constitution sets some bounds on said restrictions...

Otherwise a constitution becomes ineffective at some point.

There are such things as unconstitutional laws and laws that should not be observed nor enforced...

The US constitution doesn't give any rights. It restricts the power of the government to curtail rights that already exist.

I hope you understand that's just cute wording.

Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others. If you are robbed and nobody goes after the robber, the right to property does not de facto exist. The government must take an action.

The government doesn't need to take action when I already shot him dead, because they didn't infringe on my already-existing right to keep and bear arms.

The "cute wording" is important because the mindset matters. If enough of the population believes that rights are permitted to a person, they will attempt to revoke the permission. If they believe that rights are fundamental and inalienable, they wouldn't dare to think of trampling it in the first place. Of course, through the years, that perspective has shifted a lot away from the latter and to the former, to which I say "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

If you think that you have a right to shoot someone in the head, you're fucking nuts. Period. Go see a shrink.

> If you think that you have a right to shoot someone in the head, you're fucking nuts. Period. Go see a shrink.

To defend your life, liberty, and property you absolutely do have that right in most of the civilized world. Some places may put restriction on your ability to access a firearm, but self-defense is a basic necessity to have /any/ human rights. That said, I agree, trying to shoot someone in the head /is/ crazy, you should always aim for center of mass because it has a larger surface area which matters in difficult situations. That said, the person you're replying to never even uses the word "head"

And to clarify, I'm not saying kill someone over $5. But if they attempt to steal something of high value (monetarily, sentimentally, etc.) and you attempt to prevent that or get it back, and they put up a likely-to-be-lethal resistance, you have the right to put up a lethal defense.

Head, dead, I misread. Not the point.

You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. A judge and/or jury will decide whether it was reasonable. If it wasn't, you broke the law. They did not "take away your right" to kill.

FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.

> You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone.

You are trying to indicate a difference where there is none. It's not me that decides another person's life is less than what they're trying to rob me of, it's them by taking an action that necessarily forfeits their life when I must defend myself against their criminal act against me. A right to self defense is /necessarily/ a right to kill, because in many cases self-defense necessitates lethal force.

I have no desire to ever kill anyone, but the right to self-defense is absolute, it is the very basis of /all/ human rights and is based on a foundation of the simple principle of bodily autonomy.

> FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.

You seem to be thinking that /property/ is the issue, it's the /taking/ that's the problem. How does someone /take/ your property? They use force. You have a right to defend yourself against that force, and in fact you MUST do so, or you will likely be killed or seriously harmed by the criminal through their use of force. Yes, you also have a right to defend your property, but the real issue is and always will be the force a criminal uses against you. Taking property is a forcible act. There is a false separation in the minds of some people between property crimes and violent crimes, property crimes /are/ violent crimes, in all but very narrow circumstances.

Thanks for putting this so clearly. The way you laid out the argument really helps us make our case here in Chile. Our laws are already more in line with Europe (proportionality, duty to retreat, that kind of thing...) but we do have parallels to yours like a Castle Doctrine of sorts.

The progressives' attempts to make it even more complicated, which btw started with them outright wanting to outlaw personal firearm ownership, all failed. And now that the rising crime has people crying out for order, plus their dismal approval ratings, they will be voted out this December for sure, they stand no chance.

What helps is how you framed the idea that the act of taking something by force IS the violence, which is what we’ve been trying to get across here, something that most people are indifferent to, until they experience an attack to their personal safety. Mindsets have shifted here in the last five years.

Are you for real looking up to the US in this case? That's so sad. There are things you can look up to, but over all they are fubar.

Yes. Very much so. We have to stand our ground against those who want to strip us of our freedoms, consolidate their monopoly on force, and leave us defenseless. This is no hypothetical situation, this happened in Chile during the 2019-2021 protests. The left tried to push like never before for drastic police reforms, including proposals to defund the police, remove their access to firearms, and dismantle units like the Carabineros’ special forces, all with daily chaos and violent riots on the streets. The outcome? It led to massive unrest, rising crime, and the erosion of public trust. Now we see a return to public outcry, with citizens demanding the restoration of law and order and reaffirming the role of police in maintaining public safety. The attempts to strip police power backfired, and now, the same progressives who pushed these reforms are facing the consequences of that political experiment. We are so back, we are coming back hard. This is the answer you wanted?

Extraordinarily based, and this is coming from a peruANO. We aren't generally a Western Civilization so much as we are a broadly Mestizo-Amerindian one, and our political history is closer to Asia or Africa in terms of instability. We need more Bukeles in Mestizo societies and more Mileis in more westernized states like the southern cone.

You are working under the assumption that everyone who takes property also wants to do physical harm. It's very sad. Most people who take property are otherwise peaceful individuals and more importantly, they are rational just like you and me. They do not want to risk a bigger penalty by using force. Your mindset is one that escalates any given situation. With your mindset you are putting yourself in much more risk than necessary.

I'm going to assume that you are American, and that many Americans agree with you. I can only say sorry. You can keep turning a blind eye to the stats, but it will not change the facts. You will need to change this way of thinking to save your country.

You are working under an assumption that someone who /takes/ by force is satisfied with the taking. I am working from years of data and my own experiences.

It is sad. Communities should help everyone within them so that nobody has a need to commit crime. Unfortunately many people commit crime because they don't care about others or have deep mental issues, not out of need.

On average 1% of the residents in communities in the US are responsible for >70% of the crime, including the most violent crimes. Who are those 1%? Repeat offenders. Those who have made crime their lifestyle and feel no conscience towards their victims. They are not "otherwise peaceful individuals".

I am American, but unlike most I am well traveled, speak multiple languages, and volunteer regularly in my community. No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact that a small portion of the population feels entitled to commit harm to others with impunity and they are unconcerned with killing or maiming decent people while in the process of their crimes. You should be prepared to defend yourself or all you have is hope that you get lucky.

Rather than trying to make me into a caricature so you can dismiss me, maybe you should also look at the data or go meet some of these people who commit crimes through volunteerism.

Statistically, thieves steal higher valued items compared to food or diapers for their kids. Such things must be rectified by harsh sentences and more vigilant police forces. This is why East Asia has such a low crime rate, compared to the West. This isn't facts you speak of, but your civilizational guilt after your forefathers destroyed so many societies like mine. Hopefully, this multipolar world will rectify Western guilt society dominance.

> I hope you understand that's just cute wording.

It's a difference in wording that reflects a fundamentally different conceptual model of what rights are and how they work, which in turn has wide-ranging implications for how law, politics, and social interactions are conducted.

> Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others.

That makes little sense, given that the concept of 'rights' is a normative framework we use to evaluate the legitimacy of people's behavior. The whole point of asserting rights is to make moral/legal arguments against behavior that does transgress against other people.

Construing situations where those transgressions take place as 'rights nonexistent' instead of 'rights violated' defeats the entire purpose of establishing a model of rights in the first place.

For the same reason, it also makes little sense to employ a model of rights that attributes the source of rights to human organizations that have the capacity -- and often the intent -- to violate them.

"can't be taken away" here means "can't be taken away by parents."

Different countries fall in different places on the scale between "a child is strictly a property of the parent, with which the parent may do as they wish", and "a child is a human being which the parent has been given an obligation to protect from harm, but not to control." The US is a lot closer to the former, most European countries, and especially the nordics, are much closer to the latter.

The former enables parents to send their kids to a private school with a decent curriculum if the state school forces propaganda on them, but it also enables parents to send their kids to a school where they teach creationism or prohibit being gay. The latter prohibits teachers from taking away children's rights to get a tattoo or use nail polish, but it also doesn't give schools the right to punish children for infractions or take away phones.

Those are extremes of course, and most countries fall somewhere in the middle, but that point is different in different countries.

Well ethics aren't absolute. If it wasn't this way we would be stuck with a set of rules for all eternity, even when deemed incorrect at a later point.

No more strange than existing laws being reimagined to provide rights for those previously denied them. The strange idea would be that rights are cosmic and unchanging and not the result of a constant negotiation between individuals, groups and the state.

I think it was phrased incorrectly and that's leading to this confusion.

More accurately, I think, it's that children have rights under the law that must be respected. This changes the law and sets specific situations where these rights are specifically restricted. Outside of those situations, those rights still must be respected!

This is also a question of balancing the different rights. The Finnish constitution also states that everybody has the right to free basic education.

So wait did they ban it for teachers and staff as well?

If you look into it, you will find that some animals are more equal than others.

Staff are expected to use phones and other digital tools in order to do their job, so I don’t think this comment is as witty as you might think.

I wasn't trying to be witty at all. I was legitimately curious.

I didn't know teachers needed to use their smartphones for work. What do they need their phones for? Do they have landlines in each classroom to call parents or the office? Do teachers get laptops or PCs these days or are they expected to use a personal mobile phone to google things?

At my daughter’s school, they use a phone app to check the kids in as they arrive, and check them out as they leave. It replaces the paper list they used to have. Don’t ask me how it’s an improvement. I suppose they are able, in case of fire, to get an accurate head count that way.

The apps are often a part of some larger platform -- some of my friends have their kids in schools or daycares that do something similar, but the parents can also see the checkin/checkout info. I'm guessing at your daughter's school, the data is centralized in some way, which the admin can use for things like school-wide attendance statistics, which are often also tied to funding in some way.

Another use case is documentation - as they do activities, the teacher will use their cell to snap photos of the kids doing stuff. They can then use the school's app ("platform", I suppose) to send out a short note/summary at the end of the day, which parents can read on their end in the parent app. Also, reminders about things to bring tomorrow, notices about upcoming activities, etc. I am assuming they use these documentation items at the end of the year for grading, etc.

What next? Are they going to let the teachers drive cars and smoke cigarettes while forbidding students to do the same?

Pretty sure if a teacher in a school is found to be scrolling TikTok when they're meant to be teaching a lesson they're going to lose their job pretty quickly.

Have you interacted with humans anytime in the last five years?

People scroll TikTok or equivalent scrolly things as they drive, eat, poop, cook, as they "talk", as they walk, as they queue, as they "watch" movies and tv shows, during their down time, up time, in the bed until the small hours of the morning, people wake up on their day off and have a big plan and then... scroll the whole day. People go to the beach and scroll, they climb a mountain and scroll. They cycle and scroll, I've seen them do it.

If they can't hold it - showering, exercise, love-making (sometimes) - they get the thing to pump audio and/or visuals in their general direction, sometimes propped up, sometimes just strewn there. It's a riot.

And yes - people also scroll on these devices, if you can possibly imagine it, when they work. In schools, even! And in post offices, betting parlors, nail salons, cafes, while they do their only fans performance, you name it.

I've never been to Finland, don't speak a word of Finnish, and don't know much about Finnish culture, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if I had a 20c coin for every time a teacher in Finland scrolled TikTok for a minute or two during work hours, I'd have, roughly, a completely ridonculously large bag of 20c coins.

Yes, you're right, we should ban smart phones (or at least certain types of apps) for adults, too. But sadly there is no political majority in favor of that opinion, in Finland or elsewhere. (Wait, maybe they're banned in North Korea or somewhere? Not sure.)

(This is irony/sarcasm, please don't downvote. Haha only serious.)

Who is saying we ban smart phones for adults? I don't get how this is a response to what I'm saying.

Yeah the first thing isnt 100% true, there is no law here in Denmark, but in many many schools, kids hand over their phones in the morning, and get them back at the end of the day. Is up to the schools how they want to handle it

Does this mean that those little bags that some performers have their audience members put their phones into at their shows are illegal in Finland?

No.

Kids must attend school to get basic education. When government mandates attendance, it does not mean that they can use it as excuse to take other rights away.

In voluntary activities no related to necessities, there possibility to make stricter rules, because people don't have to be there.

If the goal of school is to develop children into young adults with good reasoning and analytical skills, a basic wholesome world and social model and some practical skills and basic physique, smartphones seem to contribute little and distract a lot from those aims.

Is that the aim of schools?

It certainly did not appear to me that way, here in Germany. There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing. For the other things you described I do not think they were ever considered.

All around school was a giant waste of time.

Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write. What an awful excuse. What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

> In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

I learned more in a single year on the job than I did in 3 years of university. That doesn’t make university useless

No, I don’t think that’s true. The 12 years of the pre-uni education set you up for being a member of society. You don’t see it because it became a part of you. You also learned to read, write, all basic math, geography, …

The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.

Why couldn't I have learned university courses and these other skills at the same time?

> Why couldn't I have learned university courses and these other skills at the same time?

Was that not offered at your school? It was at mine.

University level courses do presume you have some basic skills. But in many places, schools do offer university level courses for those who are prepared.

>Was that not offered at your school?

I think it would have been theoretically possible, but obviously logistically difficult as I would have had to skip multiple classes in other fields to attend.

It's also not like I was particularly interested in mathematics at that point in my life. I essentially chose my field of study based on what I had the best grades in. Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.

For the schools that offer students the ability to take university-level courses, students aren't "skipping" other classes.

> Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.

Many schools solve this by having different difficulty-levels of courses. My school, in the US, had three.

Germany has different levels of schools. I was in the one for highest education, targeting a university degree.

Schools in the US often offer different tracks within the same school but still offer different difficulty levels within them, including university level courses.

I don’t know. Why couldn’t you?

> In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.

Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.

In school I spend 8 hours listening to some teacher or playing silly learning games and did some busywork as homework. I never learned for any test or found any of the material particularly interesting.

In university I actually had to study, take notes, research the subject, study for many hours, etc.

>a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths

Hilarious to say this. As it turned out, my first semester of university mathematics was spent on learning everything I did not learn in school. And it made it extremely clear to me how badly school had prepared me.

You would think that school would put me in a position where university mathematics were just a continuation. Nothing further could be from the truth, nearly everything taught in school was taught in a way which made it useless for actual mathematics.

In school we learned nothing about: Sets, logic, deductions, Axioms or Proofs (which turn out to be really important!), we did however spend years solving integrals, which turned out extremely unhelpful for actual mathematics.

Seems experiences vary: For me, the first year of university mathematics was to a large extent a continuation or even what was covered in school (sets, axioms, proofs etc were covered in school). That said, that wasn't the case for everyone as far as I could tell.

You're either not arguing in good faith, have an unusual definition of "more", or hate school so much that it clouds your judgement.

Do you honestly believe that is you were sent to University (or some other educational institution) with absolutely zero school knowledge, not even literacy and grade school math, you would be able to learn everything you learned at school in less than one semester?

> Hilarious to say this

Really unnecessary snark, I'm trying to understand your position (unless you're just doing justice to your username!).

Two things:

1. You're not the only person in school. I sympathise that you understood the material quickly and wish you had been presented more advanced stuff (I do so too, it's a valid criticism!). But at least around me I noticed that most people were just barely catching it or even actively struggling. So yes, perhaps more "adept" students should be given more challenging material and students that struggle should be given more support so they're not left behind (interesting discussion to have; this has been touched on elsewhere in this thread), but it's important to realise that unless education is based around a 1:1 teacher–student ratio (unrealistic), this will always be a problem that is hard to work around.

2. You conveniently left out the parts where I mentioned subjects other than maths (I assume you studied maths in uni or an adjacent discipline). School is not just there to teach you whatever you end up needing in your academic or professional life when you're 18 years old. I'm glad I was forced to study history, and read literature, and learn a 2nd and 3rd language, and do physical exercise at least 2× a week, because while I might be curious and study science on my own I sure as shit wouldn't do any of these of my own volition as a kid.

> I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write.

It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.

You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.

> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.

> It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.

Nah. You are mixing up the skill 'writing glyphs on a piece of paper and retrieving that information via optical means' with 'being well-grounded in a wide array of subjects so you can express an idea in a way that is mentally stimulating to a potential reader'.

Neither takes 12 years to learn. The first, we teach within a year, at most. The second we do not teach at all, and the best 'writers' often are those who were challenged outside of school, by parents who gave them a rich, intellectually interesting environment, not within it.

We most definitely teach number 2. That's what English class is - you read books, plays, maybe documents, and then you write essays on them. You need to be concise, persuasive, have a unique voice.

Just because you, and other's, did not pay attention or were not good writers, does not mean we don't teach that. We do, for years.

There is no such thing as a 12th grade level. 6th grade is all the farther English is taught. There are sometimes things called levels above that, but they are not levels in English they are levels in some specific specialization and have more to do with that specialization than reading. (doctors would not be expected to understand deep computer science writing even though doctors have very advanced reading skills in a medical domain).

I understand Spanish only goes up to a 5th grade level while Japanese to 9th. This is a reflection on how complex the writing systems are, and not the kids, intelligence, or school systems.

The years after you have your basic reading down are used to learn other skills that are of general use in life for everyone.

I don’t mean “12th grade level” as in reference to a formal proficiency level.

I am saying that language arts can be, and often are, taught beyond basic proficiency.

You should have taken that semester when you were 4 years old then, you could have skipped fifteen years of education!

They did. Well at least officially. Being able to read was needed if you wanted to get married.

> Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.

From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.

Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.

> There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing

Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?

Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.

>Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?

It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.

Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.

>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world

None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.

> None of that I learned while sitting in class

School is about more than the part where you sit in class. The social skills, time and project management navigation etc. is all stuff you learn and do because of school but outside of class.

But if that is the goal of schools then we would drastically reduce the time students sit in class.

From what I know about Germany, they don't teach anything about the depths humans can go or how to prevent them recurring. They seem to just learn the Nazis were evil people and as long as you're not one of those, similarly evil things can never happen again. Also because only evil people can do evil things, calling out an evil thing is illegal because it implies someone involved is evil and that's an attack on their honour.

See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.

You have put your finger on something - the actual purpose of school is to socialise children (it isn't very efficient as a teaching system - tutoring is better and what the people who really care about educational attainment use). But a side effect is teaching them a lot of useful things.

And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.

>the actual purpose of school is to socialise children

I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.

>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.

I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.

To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.

> I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.

Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.

But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough.

I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.

Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.

> I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.

I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.

My view is that schools purpose is teaching everyone not only a common baseline in language/math, but also how to deal with expectations/responsibilities and other people (teachers and classmates).

By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).

Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.

Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.

I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.

Maybe AI will solve it :P

Don't forget that kid that was 1 point off from making the gifted track that now gets stuck with much worse options for the rest of their life even though they could probably pass the gifted track as well (at the bottom of the class, but still a pass).

I would expect everyone at all levels to do better under a more highly segregated model. In the desegregated model, faster students are artificially held back and slower students are left behind (unless the class operates at the level of the absolute slowest student). In a segregated model, you are better able to approximate a mastery learning approach, which is known to create vastly better outcomes for everyone.

The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation.

For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42117313

I'm quite skeptical about the improved performance for everyone from earlier segregation; this neglects the negative feedback effects from sticking low performers together I feel, and I dont see how you preserve any semblance of "common baseline", meaning that counting on a kid knowing some prerequisite concept is gonna be a complete gamble (especially after school transfer).

Your outcomes as child are also likely to plummet if you ever get sorted into the wrong bucket, which I feel is super unethical.

Personally I also really question the whole concept of pushing a grade schoolers "performance": What do you hope to gain from it? Looking e.g. at asian english tests I can see a likely worst-case outcome: Genuinely difficult and stressful tests (that even native speakers would struggle with) that just test some meaningless grammatical minutiae.

I fully agree that having optional programs and learning opportunities for talented/interested children is a very good thing, but I don't think dismantling the current system would really help at providing those (and they are always gonna be an additional cost, just like more segregation would be in practice). I also think that attempting to railroad children into (or out of!) those options is not desirable at all.

What would be the negative feedback effects? Are we talking misbehavior? If so the ultimately needed solution there is to discipline them. If it's merely being a slower student, then being among other slower students means the teacher can move at a more appropriate pace, so should see improvements.

If you get sorted into the wrong bucket, it shouldn't be a huge deal. e.g. my elementary school had I think ~5 classes per grade level, so you have bands for 20%iles. Teachers can target the center of their %ile band for pacing. With a desegregated model, teachers end up targeting somewhere below the median student for everyone, so people in the top 50%ile and bottom 20%ile are all poorly served. You don't have to necessarily stay in your band either; if you do well, move up. If you do poorly, move down. If you're primarily segregating by ability, not age, then you might need to e.g. move into a younger cohort's top performing band to get onto the right pacing, but you don't need to lose much time. This is in contrast to today's system where if you're not close to the median, probably half your time in school is wasted.

In larger schools, you could potentially group kids into 15-10%ile bands. The tighter the bands, the less of an issue if they end up in the wrong band (assuming they're not completely misjudged). Personalized education is again the limit of this approach. The closer you get to that, the better kids will do.

As far as curriculum goes, I don't see why you couldn't have a baseline. The faster kids would just get through it faster, and maybe move onto more optional topics. The slower kids would progress more slowly, hopefully with a slightly higher end target than we set for them today.

Hopefully the thing high performing kids gain is to maintain their interest in academics instead of having it beaten out of them by moving at what is for them a snails pace. Testing them on larger volumes of meaningless minutiae is exactly the opposite of the goal. e.g. don't give them extremely tricky arithmetic/algebra problems; teach them calculus, linear algebra, mechanics, chemistry, etc. Teach the grown-up topics, but let them learn it when they're ready instead of holding them back several years.

>Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.

In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.

> In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.

Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway.

My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful).

Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming).

To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.

> To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is.

What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.

If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal.

It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.

>We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.

I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.

I disagree. Most kids need to be forced a bit to learn something hard. Sure the kid who likes sports should play. However only exceptional kids will ever be good enough to make a good future playing sports. Most kids will grow up to realize that much as they love the game they will never make a living at it. Thus we need to ensure those kids don't spend all their time getting better, but instead spend time getting useful life skills that they will need as an adult. Much as "post scarcity" people like to think otherwise, we are still not in a world where many people can "slack off".

Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.

We do need and have a goal. As a taxpayer I'm paying for school for kids other than my own. If there is no goal of that, then I am wasting my money: give me that back so I can go on vacation. Let those kids play in a park or whatever instead of spending time in school.

The goal is wide and open ended, but there is a goal. Likely others can word it better than me, but it goes something like this: "to produce kids that grow up to be productive adults that contribute to society and make the world a better place."

We all are not the same, and even if we were there are many different needs. I need someone to haul my trash to the wherever it is handled, but my city only needs a few hundred such people (thousand?). A few other people need to ensure I have clean water. A lot of people need to ensure I have food. Some of them need to provide medical care. Thus we need to have multiple different outcomes (if you are just hauling trash you need less education than the medical doctors, while the person designing the dump needs more education than a basic nurse).

Because of the different needs in society there will and must be debate over what the curriculum should be. There is no way to teach everything. Time spend teaching one subject is time that cannot be used for a different one. There are many different ideas how to teach, and we need better science to figure out what really works.

I would argue that, no matter what your perception is, school is much more than "sitting in a room for 8 hours". Sure, academic advancement can be accelerated massively through home schooling, self-study or tutoring -- and many families take advantage of this fact -- but most school districts offer all sorts of non-academic enrichment programming (even including things like elementary school recesses here) that you don't get otherwise and which result in more well-rounded socialization than you'd get without an intentional effort to augment homeschooling with the same.

Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives.

Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).

I know several teachers. So these sorts of comments are always funny. I know math teachers who lack support but continuously attempt to present topics from different POV because some students don’t get it.

So some self proclaimed smart person “learned nothing”, and therefore school is a waste of time. At the same time, ignoring that maybe a school or system is indeed not prepared to handle some individuals (which is not good), or that maybe some teachers are bad, or maybe the system does not support their staff enough. But that can’t be the case because they learned nothing. Whole school system must be a scam.

As I wrote below. My most memorable math class was a teacher failing to explain fractions to me, what later became obvious to me was that the teacher did not understand fractions either.

I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.

Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.

I’m not blaming you. But as intelligent as you may be, you have discounted all the possibilities for the failure of you school or your particular teachers. Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?

I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.

>then the whole system is malicious right?

Where did I say that the intentions were bad?

>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?

No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.

>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.

We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.

All students at university were unprepared from school or only some, i.e., performance of different schools, classes, etc. would be heterogeneous?

Curricula are standardized. All students experienced almost the exact same disconnect. This is also not some secret, all Professors know this and some try their hardest to bridge the gap.

Maybe aligned/frameworked/pooled but no full uniform testing or single curriculum across all the states in Germany, for example - so variations exist and some schools might prepare better than others.

Then this is a failure of the system in Germany, and does not reflect the experience of many American kids. Some, yes, but not all. Primarily, it's the "smart" kids who didn't have to work for good high school grades who have a bad time in university, not the kids in the fat part of the curve who more likely matriculated having already developed strong study skills. In my experience, at least, the biggest difference between high school and college is that high school teachers teach and homework is for reinforcement, whereas college professors expect self-learning to be the core method of pedagogy and their role is to reinforce and contextualize the topics. Switching from one mode to the other can be rough, no matter how innately intelligent a student is.

> In university the expectations were drastically higher.

Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.

Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)

If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university

Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).

To add another case: When I was 14 or so, a science teacher taught the whole classroom that the reason stars twinkle is because of light being waves. I considered interrupting and mentioning pockets of air with different densities, refraction, etc... I decided not to. I didn't want to be branded (again) a troublemaker. I hope nobody else in that classroom remembers that lesson.

Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.

I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.

Incompetence is rampant in government jobs. Schools aren't technically government jobs, but there are many similarities in terms of incentives, hiring practice, dismissal difficulty, talent pool, etc.

In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.

"Incompetence is rampant" is enough. No, incompetent people do not get fired from the private sector either. The dumbest tech question I have ever heard from a tech manager ("why don't we do datamining in Flash?") was from an established guy at an established corporation that controls a lot of the things the world does and really, really shouldn't.

Most teachers are actually quite good and they're actively being held back by curriculum and being stripped of their autonomy.

I really, truly don't know how people form this opinion. Teachers are trained professionals with certifications and a degree. They know what they're doing. It's extremely likely they're far more educated in the subject matter they teach than you are.

Now, they're not miracle workers. Some parents expect little Timmy reading at a second grade level in Middle School to magically get great scores on his end of year exams. It doesn't work that way.

Why do you choose to remember that class and not the ones where you learned to write proper English?

Those teachers are admirable, but their actions are more of a 'nice to have' than the primary objective of the system.

And yet consistently the happiest, healthiest, and most developed societies are those with the highest levels of primary and secondary education attainment.

Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.

Quite a lot of Germans learn quite a lot. German schools expect quite a lot from students that do actually want to go to better schools. But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.

>German schools expect quite a lot from students that do actually want to go to better schools.

Not my experience.

>But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.

I was a good student though and did really well. I never learned for anything though and was bored in basically every subject.

There never were any expectations on me which I didn't trivially meet.

Hey, you are the genius who knew it all before learning and got highest possible grades with no effort. Congrats.

Overwhelming majority of people is not like that, they do not get highest grades, they do not get into gymnasium without effort, don't pass tests without effort.

Haha, are you serious?

He is. Today is the day you realise that thanks to your innate intelligence you had a time of privilege in school.

I felt much more privileged when I was at university and there were students far more intelligent than me, who helped me with the material.

I think so. And he is presumably right. You either

    - learned something -- aced the tests
    - had the opportunity to learn something -- didn't ace the tests but somewhy you still claim that you were bored

It is possible that neither happened, you just somehow knew everything. But that's highly improbable.

My point is that the actual content of school material was very low, especially compared to university.

Of course I did actually learn the material of the tests, but the actual learning outcome of my schooling is far worse then it could have been, given the 12 years invested.

What is this supposed to mean? "Most people need to work to get good grades in school" is a very self-evident statement, is it not?

>Most people need to work to get good grades in school" is a very self-evident statement, is it not?

No? I obviously had to put in a lot of work in university, but during school I never did, which was quite common, at least among my friends.

Even for the semi-standardized test at the end of school I tried learning, but I didn't know what to do, so I gave up.

Heavily depends on where you went to school.

Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!

Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.

Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium

“I basically learned nothing at school” is such a silly obviously wrong thing to say.

Really doesn’t help you make a point.

I spent 12 years there. Give the time investment the education results were extremely underwhelming.

Same here, full 12 years in the German school system and I can't say I would complain given where I'm at right now.

the goal of school and what it is used for are different thing. School is childcare

This is about Finland. They have a rather well-reputed school system that delivers in both areas.

At least used to. Last few years Finland's PISA scores as measured by the OECD have plummeted and now they are just a bit above average but nowhere near what they used to be.

What do you think are the factors that caused this fall?

Voting for right-wing politicians repeatedly. You know, tax cuts for the wealthy, education cuts in fear of national debt, and all that jazz.

Some common themes in the conversation are neoliberal cost cutting, failed attempts at inclusion and immigration.

* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.

* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.

* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.

* The amount of immigration and share of children speaking Finnish as a second language is rising and they are statistically more likely to perform worse (https://yle.fi/a/74-20018233, https://yle.fi/a/74-20016772).

In summary, Finland has brought the policies that have caused much destruction in other Western countries into their own education system, where those policies have also caused destruction, much to everyone's amazement.

Yep, this country is no longer that special by European standards. Childcare is still good, but later education and healthcare are very mediocre.

In EU only greeks are less satisfied with the availability of healthcare. Our unemployment rate is pretty similar to Greece and Spain as well. This is what right wing governments want I guess.

This is a really tragic thing that happened in Finland on April 1st:

https://yle-fi.translate.goog/a/74-20158685?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x...

It's usual in Finland to let babies sleep outside in the strollers (even when it's cold) but in this case no one checked how the child was doing for 3 hours.

In the news he/she was called a baby.

> * Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.

Politically, isn't this the ultimate fate of most developed nations? I haven't yet see an answer to this. How do you deal financially with this? The obvious answer is for people to be in charge of their own late stage health but is that possible for the average minimum wage worker?

I always felt like the teaching method in primary school was very much like "no pupil left behind". Teachers really tried their best to keep everyone up to speed on what they taught. If you were a huge troublemaker or just couldn't keep up with the (slowish) pace you would get moved to a special class where you would get more attention (even smaller class sizes) and wouldn't slow the rest of the group down.

As a "smart kid" it sometimes felt like waiting for everyone in class to grok something before moving on was a waste of time and that personally I'd learn very little, but ultimately I think it worked very well to ensure that everyone was on common ground.

At some point it was deemed that the current system wasn't inclusive enough so the special education for the troublemakers was gutted and they were put back into regular classrooms. At the same time, due to lack of funding and lack of teachers, class sizes ballooned from <15 to up to 30 or even 40 students per class in larger cities. I think there's some critical point where that system breaks down and now we're past it. The teacher has too many students to make sure everyone is up to speed, and giving too much individual attention in such a large class wastes everyone else's time.

Immigration has also played a role I think. Finland used to be quite monocultural, but that has changed. There are now more and more students who speak Finnish as their second or third language and as such have trouble keeping up. I don't think the solution is to stuff them into their own schools either as that promotes segregation and makes integrating into the society as an immigrant harder, and I don't pretend to know the perfect solution (if one even exists), but one thing's for sure: the Finnish school system was 100% unprepared for it.

The solution is almost always more teachers (though at some point you have two teachers per kid and that’s likely to be excessive).

A class of five can handle darn near anything; a class of fifty needs everyone to be as nearly identical as possible.

You can artificially increase the number of “teachers” by combining classes of different grades sometimes. 12 year olds can do great assisting 6 year olds.

Also interesting to note the gender divide in scores in Finland: https://www.statista.com/statistics/986939/student-performan...

Wow, that's a huge reading gap.

At least used to

The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.

I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.

I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.

That is not childcare.

edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.

> The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.

Yes. Former teacher here to tell you I cared about the children. :)

But seriously, in the United States teachers are considered "In loco parentis" which "refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. "

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

The thing is: smartphones exist. The young adults these children will become will live in a world where smartphones are an essential part of their life. Using a smartphone is a practical skill.

That's why I don't think banning smartphones is the best idea. It is probably better than unrestricted access, but I feel that school should teach how to use them well instead. It is a bit like with calculators, there are classes with calculators, classes without, and classes that teach how to work with them, their strengths and shortcomings.

I don't know how to do it in practice though. Airplane mode and offline educative apps may be a start.

Cars exist and are foundational to modern living yet we do not push kids to learn to drive until their later teenage years. Some countries wait until they are 18 and others choosing a couple years sooner.

Kids still get to walk with cars around, ride bikes, drive motorcycles usually a few years before majority, they also ride cars and are usually familiar with how they work way before driving.

I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.

We do, they're called regular cellphones. They can be used to make phone calls and even to send text messages, but they can't be used to access social media hellscapes.

Phone calls are for emergencies at this point. If it's not it's spam. Then Apple ruined SMS ( except for the US apparently?), nobody wants to gamble whether a message will reach a phone or the iPad sitting in a drawer still associated with the phone number.

So social things, like communicating with people, happens on social apps.

Kids also would be better with map apps, GPS, electronic payments and auto-charging bus/train pass if you expect them to have any independence.

All in all, kids should be the last ones IMHO to get real dumb phones. We might as well give them pagers if that's what we're going for.

Honestly if driving was teached at school and you get license once you graduate, that would be amazing

In NL, cycling proficiency is tested at school (around 10yo). You don't get a license though, and it's not really taught as many children already bike to school at a younger age.

I don't know how it is done in the US, but I definitely learned about cars at school. Including:

- Lessons about road safety (causes of accidents, number of deaths, etc...)

- In elementary school, navigating the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. Including going outside and crossing roads.

- In secondary school, basic information about traffic law, road signs, and information related to light motor vehicles (mopeds, ...)

- Though I didn't do it personally, some school had a class at a practice track, using pedal cars to learn about things like right of way

So while we didn't do actual driving, probably for economic and liability reasons, it is definitely part of the curriculum.

On the other hand, we don't teach kids in school the mechanical basics of automated locomotion, how to distill oil into usable fuel and how to mill an engine block before we allow them to get a driver's license.

Unlike modern education, which puts a massive emphasis on teaching how to do menial, useless things before going the sensible route [e.g. I remember vividly how we were tortured by doing table of values calculations in maths for what felt like weeks before we were allowed to use derivatives. I loved maths. Until that point. Then I hated the course (not the subject) with a passion.

Lo and behold, I enter university, and the first thing we do in Mathematics 101 is 'let's forget everything we have learned, we're going to start from the beginning'. Joy.]

I want to stress the point: Smartphones exist (and have existed for 15 years - a more modern 'scary new tech' would probably be LLMs). Banning these things from school will only keep teachers happy because they can keep their teaching methods from the 1890s alive for some more time, instead of using what is available to get kids educated better.

No, it keeps teachers happy because the kids are able to focus on the teaching instead of sneaking looks in their phones every chance they get. (Not all kids, etc, but certainly a lot of kids do this.) No matter what method of teaching you can imagine, a cell phone will be a distraction to a teenager.

> Cars exist and are foundational to modern living

I assume you are talking about North America here, because that is certainly not the case everywhere

The problem is they do damage, at home and as a teacher, you get to compete against the dopamine kick for attention - the whole day, even if the device is not around

Many real world distractions exist. Drugs and alcohol exist, and will be part of many of these children's lives. Just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean it belongs in schools.

Frankly, smartphones should be discussed in health class, much like drugs and alcohol, and in a similar tone.

It's not really smartphones by themselves that need to be discussed, but rather (simplified) the dopamine loop reward system.

Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.

Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.

Smartphone should not be compared to a calculator. The closer analogy would be kids bringing in their friends, cousins, music, games, photo albums, films etc into a class and interacting with them.

Glossy magazines, handy-dandy mobbing tools, porn, a kiddie slot machine, a big stack of totally random niche zines that include yes the icky ones, a kiddie panopticon, their anxious parents, a gaggle of marketers and influencers grooming their income streams (this is a fun game) and interacting with them.

What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mindless scramble for dopamine that concerns me.

I think there might be something to be said for the idea of teaching computer literacy on smartphones. There's often a real gap in comprehension of conceptual computer use in those who grew up in the age of ambient smartphones/socialmedia/etc.

That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).

Where my kids went to high school, a smart phone was required. The teacher would encourage kids to put assignments and tests on their calendar. They would use the camera to take a picture of a home work assignment written on a whiteboard. They used the camera for photo and movie projects. They had some twitter-like app for the teacher to broadcast to all students.

Here too, kids are enslaved to google, microsoft, AND apple as well.

That sounds like dystopia to me… the smartphone is such a crazy distraction to deep learning why on earth would you bring it into the space willingly.

Using the smartphone a a useful tool while avoiding the mindless scramble for dopamine is the skill.

Tbh an intensive class dedicated to teaching kids how to put their phone down would really be a good idea!

There are quite a lot of things you can mess around with. Install a custom ROM, a custom recovery or build a custom ROM from scratch. Use emulated players such as winlator for gaming. Use GrapheneOS for maximum privacy and security. Use termux for learning CLI. There are tons and tons of things you could do with that little rectangle screen

The time our kid spent doing that, even when shown the possibilities: zero.

I guarantee you 100% that this is NOT what a teenager is up to on their phone during the school day.

I mean, they COULD, but then they first have to develop an interest in science and technology.

The likelyhood of developing such an interest when hooked on tiktok videos of makeup influencers? 0%.

I think a PC is a more apt comparison. Yes we learnt them in computer class but they weren't in the Math classroom. Hell learning software engineering I didn't use my laptop at all during lectures.

For some reason, we learn math as if we were farmers in the early 1900s. We do not learn (Bayesian) statistics early enough to tell fact from fraud, what city dwellers and voters could probably use instead.

And applied math on a PC would be great, but we barely have applied math on a calculator.

And kids love calculators: only digital numbers are numbers. 2/3 is cleary not a number to anyone below 20 years of age, that is two numbers, we have to write .6666666\dash_over{6} down as a solution instead.

At least when I was a kid 20 years ago in the US, the math curriculum worked toward physical science and engineering applications (i.e. algebra, geometry, calculus), which also sets you up to understand probability/statistics. My impression was that's more or less standard all over. Has that changed?

I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement, but that seems like a problem worth correcting if true? They're going to need to understand fractions to do any math more advanced than elementary school level.

You know I used to think this but my cousins were raised extremely strict on phones and media consumption and today they're successful and well-adjusted. They didn't binge and lack self control when they became adults.

Fwiw, my local public school district (I have three kids at three different public neighborhood schools) does provide kids instruction like this, as well as lots of other programming around empathy, acceptance, drug/alcohol use, common health/physiology topics, driver training, etc. This is my tax dollars being spent on things that aren't core academic topics but imho absolutely help develop youth into better decision makers with a more holistic view of society than many of them might otherwise given their home situations.

The middle and high schools here ban phone use during class, and the high school confiscates phones (and grants detentions) for students who flaunt the ban. In practice, it usually works with teachers using those door mounted phone holders as a way to take attendance. Put your phone in the pouch when you get to class, and grab it when you leave. Occasionally, a teacher will also ban smartwatches if they become too distracting, but this is not common.

That said, many teachers take advantage of their students having phones to augment their methods & curriculum, and afaik this is the teachers' prerogative.

The thing is that using a smartphone is a _very easy_ skill. I mean, who are we kidding. These devices are set up such that the stupidest person can use them.

It's not 1995 anymore and we aren't walking in a line to the computer lab. These things are idiot-proof. You really don't need hours of practice everyday to learn how to use them.

It's probably still appropriate in 2025 for kids to go to the computer lab and learn to use an actual computer (ideally running some flavor of Linux so that they can learn to expect that the computer is a tool that obeys the user). Phones are both idiot-proof and expert-proof, and while you can use something like Termux as another commented noted (and I use it on my phone), it's sufficiently horrible that you'll never see the potential productivity boost, and will think that anything outside of "apps" is unreasonably difficult (because phones make it so).

So it's not that phones are easy enough to use that you don't need to teach them; it's that the thing you want to teach is the power of a general purpose computer, and phones try very hard to hide the fact that they are extremely powerful general purpose computers. You need to learn on a real computer to know what you even want the phone to be able to do.

I agree 100%. From what I've personally seen, I think younger people are actually becoming less versed in computers. There was a brief moment in time in which:

1. Most people had access to computers.

2. Computers were difficult to use and required building skills.

2 is no longer true anymore, so those skills are getting lost. Try asking a 15 year old what a filesystem is.

My daughter brings her phone to school with her

- If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school

- If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time

- If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it

- etc, etc, etc

There's a ton of reasons for her to have her phone on her. Enough so that, when she gets punished with phone removal, we generally still let her bring it to school.

The fact that the phone doesn't contribute to the schooling itself (although it does when she forgets something she needs for school) doesn't mean that it doesn't contribute to QOL overall by being with her at school.

All of those reasons can be solved with her using a public phone. My school growing up had a phone in the hallway by the main office for those reasons.

As part of the last generation to grow up without phones in (early) school, this.

The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones at every moment rings hollow...

Because grade school kids actually did just fine without them.

Things functioned, people got where they needed to get, emergencies were handled, etc.

Especially with pre- and post-school access, we're balancing a minimum of in-school utility against a massive danger to learning and development.

We should just accept we built addiction boxes and therefore restrict them appropriately.

I also grew up without phones in schools but in my opinion the problem is phones (and laptops, frankly) in class. If a student isn't in class, I don't see why they can't use their phone to talk to people or browse websites or whatever.

If they're in class, then 99% chance it's distracting them from learning. If they're not, I think personal autonomy is a good rule.

My argument against any phones from school start to end is that socialization and interpersonal skills are also learned in school.

Having a distraction box at hand slows that process.

Grade school kids aren't tiny adults: they're actively building the pieces that make them into adults (self control, emotional regulation, empathy, cooperation, etc).

I don't trust Google or Apple to sacrifice profits, at scale, to support those goals.

I agree with you. Also grew up through the full 90. To me, school is school, all of it. Not school, not school, but all time at school is: school. and imo personal devices in school is really bad news: period.

> The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones

Once again, for the people not paying attention. It's not about _need_. It's about quality of life. It's about easier, faster, better, safer.

Are there negatives to having cell phones? Sure. That's true for adults, too. And the benefits of having a cell phone need to be weighed against those negatives.

But saying "you don't _need_ a cell phone" is a straw man argument. Because nobody (that I see) says it's needed; they said it's worth it.

> Because nobody (that I see) says it's needed; they said it's worth it.

Oh, "need" is definitely the first-reach in these discussions. You should see Florida school parents go apeshit at the prospect of not being tethered to their little angels 24x7.

Granted, on HN, it does trend towards worth.

But imho that's looking at smartphones with rose-colored glasses. As people in the industry, you think we'd have more realpolitik perspectives about what modern smartphones are designed to do -- grab, hold, and monetize attention.

Its basically shitty parenting disguised with 'we care' and similar arguments as mentioned. Lets not forget about pedophile scare, that should convert the last remaining parents and make sure opposition is silent.

We raise kids mostly without screens (just some short old school cartoons on TV before bed if they behave well). Its harder, but kids behave much better compared to most peers (which can have 1000s of reasons and some out of our control, I know). We also limit sweet stuff, eat tons of veggies (so they do too and ie love broccoli, not sure where the proverbial hate comes from... maybe lack of basic cooking skills?). But the key is we eat same stuff, healthy food can be very tasty easily. We lay them down to sleep pretty early too.

Simply restrict highly addictive stuff, be it in food or behavioral like screens. It has no place when growing up, no matter how folks wrap it as a need. It forms neural pathways that are extremely hard to shed for rest of their lives, no need to fuck them up properly for life before they have a chance to forge their own path and make their own choices.

Here around public phones are gone since long, even inside schools. However, mobile phones that just do calls and SMS are still a thing. And anyway, the Finnish law is not preventing any of the use cases you mentioned as far as I understand it.

No they cannot. My school had multiple doors that could not see each other - more than once my parents were waiting for me at a different door from the one I was standing at waiting for them. We did find each other, but only after a lot of searching - sometimes we even passed each other as we both switched doors to wait at.

Okay, it did work out, but not nearly as well as a simple cell phone. Smart phones add additional functionality. (I can see on google maps where each kid's phone is)

So you had to wait a little extra for the benefit of a society where children aren't always on a screen?

Seems like a good trade to me.

To me it seems such a dystopian thing to inflict upon ones kids. All day long being monitored by a spyware spreading company, just for some small convenience and probable impacting their ability to clearly communicate where they are or will be waiting. Maybe this kind of thing is the reason why so many people are unable to make an appointment and stick to the terms agreed upon when making the appointment.

You are describing a minor inconvenience right?

The world is still better with smart phones and not having that inconvenience.

Now there are other downsides of smartphones. We do need to mitigate them. However lets not throw out the good just because of the bad.

I don't think you're taking seriously the opposite position that the world is not better with smartphones. I mean that seriously.

I do take your point though, this is probably the most reasonable, sane position:

> We do need to mitigate them. However lets not throw out the good just because of the bad.

So you could not agree with your patent to meet at a default pick up point? Have we become this short attention focussed that any pre-planning is outside of our mental scope?

It can stay in her locker when she is in class, no?

These are good examples of why a non-smartphone is valuable and a smartphone is not necessary. Also the linked article states that they will be allowed to use their phone when given circumstances require, which I think covers the cases you outlined

> Also the linked article states that they will be allowed to use their phone when given circumstances require, which I think covers the cases you outlined

Yes. I was discussing things from the thread's title and the arguments in the thread that phones aren't useful at school. The actual action that Finland is taking (Children aren't allowed to use cellphones at school without permission, effectively) is reasonable. But it's also not what the title of this thread says.

All of those problems can be solved without smartphones, as evidenced by literally every previous generation dealing with them. If anything, my grumpy self would argue that not having means to contact my parents if I forgot something ensured that I paid more attention the night before to what I had to pack.

But I'm open to compromise: let's give children bring dumb phones that can only call and text.

Sure. I remember standing in line at the phone for 10 minutes as a kid waiting for my turn to call my parents when my activity was done. Cell phones are better. Smart phones would mean I could use the time waiting for something.

Smart phones when class is in session is a distraction and should be banned. However outside of class they are helpful.

10 minutes, that you could use socializing with other students/pupils. Well, I can see the problem, we cannot possibly inflict this upon our children.

We didn't though. A few did, but most of us were standing in line while our friends where elsewhere.

Lol, yeah, god forbid they make new friends in the queue.

> 10 minutes

We have forgotten that boredom is okay.

Of course we need our kids to use their time more efficiently, can’t have any idle time, no no /s

I did all of those same things while in school with a Nokia candy bar phone. I did waste some time playing Snake though.

Per the article this is a ban on using smartphones during class time, not a ban on bringing them to school at all.

That seems pretty reasonable to me. When I was in school if a teacher saw you using phone during class you might get one warning and then it was being confiscated.

Uh, yes, same exact reasons our kids have their phones with them to school. BUT, the phones are handed in, and when they are handed in during the day, the kids can ask a teacher either for their phone or for getting help using another phone. At the end of the school day, they get their phones back.

I see no problem here.

She can have a basic phone just for calls—like the ones designed for older people.Or depending on the school, they might have a system where all phones are stored when children arrive and returned after school.

> The law does not entirely ban the use of mobile phones at school, and their use will be permitted in certain situations. But generally, the use of phones *during class time* will be prohibited.

so, the finnish don't prohibit that at all.

PS: emphasis mine PPS: and i meant "the finns", not "the finnish"

> If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it

Curious what this will lead to.

When she'll get a job, if she'll forget her laptop at home, will she call you and ask you to bring it to the workplace?

Depending on where people are relative to each other, absolutely yes.

I’ve done similar for friends and family.

For most kids, the embarrassment of a parent appearing during the school day is enough to really negatively enforce forgetting things, at least after middle school starts.

I expect she'd probably drive home and get it. She doesn't have a car at 13 yrs old though. Nor would I want her walking home from her school at the moment to get it to the tune of 40+ minutes; so calling me is a reasonable option.

Could she get by at school without her computer? Yes. Is her school day more productive with it? Also yes.

Those are good reasons to have a smart watch with cellular capabilities.

They are not good reasons to have a phone at school.

In terms of QOL: there is a meaningful body of research about the impact of giving a teenage girl access to a phone on their quality of life.

https://adc.bmj.com/content/109/7/576 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...

I assume those effects are similar even if they're only using the phone before and after school.

Probably, but it would be much less reasonable for the state to enforce outside of school (both for practical and ideological reasons).

Probably not, and replacing checking it every 45 mins with a continuous 8 hours of no screen time matters a lot, and a ban is a solution alone.

Those studies speak about social media addiction, smartphone addiction, and excessive phone use and not about having a phone.

If you want to prevent the negative effects of social media and (designed to be) addictive apps, then you should ban social media and addictive apps, and not phones (because that would just mask the symptoms).

The schools here I have experience with are stricter about smart watches than phones - you can get everybody to turn their phone off all day or keep it in a locker, but it's much harder with watches.

The first two aren't in school. The last doesn't actually require a cell phone.

It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.

All don't need a smartphone.

The first two require she bring her phone to school with her. Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.

The last one doesn't require a cell phone, since the school has phone lines. But it's certainly more convenient to let her use her own phone than have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.

> It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.

Somewhat my bad.. but I was responding to thread's content and title.

- The article says "[Finland approved] a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools"

- The title of the thread says "bans smartphones in schools".. which is not at ALL what they did; they banned _use_ of smartphones in schools _without permission_.

And what I said was that my daughter brings her phone to school; she doesn't use it there unless there's a good reason (like I noted).

> Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.

I am pretty sure that no one would know if she just puts it on silent or airplane mode? But in any case my son's class did that for several months in 7th grade, due to an incident (minor but on the worrisome side) and with the agreement of the parents, and it was just fine.

> have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.

Maybe next time they will put more attention and in the meanwhile they'll share or borrow what's needed?

> > Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.

Yes they could for years NYC schools banned cellphones in schools which ment kids could not bring them in the building at all. Kids left their phones with nearby bodegas or in a van parked outside the school for a small fee. Basically a coat check for phones. This worked perfectly well and required zero effort on the part of the administration.

1) Point 1 and 3 can in many families be an impediment to the development of the child rather than a good thing. If you can always call on helicopter parents to solve your issues you do not get the experience that even if you mess up / get into a bad situation, in the end, you can solve the situation yourself -- or if it is not solved, that you at least survive it and life goes on. Important life skills.

2) The entire list can be equally well solved by dumbphones without TikTok and Snapchat. Which is what such bans as this is about.

3) It is always about pros/cons. In Scandinavia phones have (in my view as a parent and married to a teacher) essentially destroyed education wherever they are allowed in the pocket/backpack of the student during class.

Not to speak about downsides to social life. E.g., people not attempting dancing in high school proms because there are videos taken everywhere. People not showering in gyms due to phones. Just two examples. SO MANY things are killed by the phones.

The benefits have to be weighed against the quite massive downsides.

They banned phones on the high school where my wife teaches last year and she is basically a changed person. Instead of spending 50% of class time policing phone use, she can, you know, actually teach.

(She still has to deal with a generation addicted to dopamine, but a habit of phone confiscation during class is at least a massive improvement.)

THIS is it.

even all the above reasons are not actual reasons. None of these are a problem. you job is NOT to bring something to school because she forgot it nor to drive her to school if the bus doesnt show up.

> you job is NOT to bring something to school because she forgot it nor to drive her to school if the bus doesnt show up.

No, it's not my job. But it is my job as a parent to make her life easier where it makes sense (when it's not to impactful to my other responsibilities). And dropping off her computer so that she can participate in class does that (and makes her day in school more productive). And picking her up at the bus stop so she doesn't need to walk 5-10 minutes home, or 15-20 minutes to school... is a nice thing to do.

It seems like everyone in this thread against cell phones is arguing from the point of "well, you don't NEED this". It's not about need, it's about better.

I respect your opinion, I have children and I dont want to tell other parents what to do. please take it as an exploration of a what real necessity is and what the notion of better is in which context.

I fundamentally disagree that making life easy is the right thing.

what I am trying to say is, the feedback loop from a) forgetting something or b) the experience of missing out on something because of aspects of life that are out of ones control is so much better IMO and the phone is just 'convenient'

Of course that doesnt mean I prefer my child to be run over or die instead of protecting her/him or helping her/him

While I see the utility of a phone in places where children can't move around independently for one reason or another, I reckon that in Finland, most children walk or cycle to and from school on their own starting in like first grade. So there's no need for this kind of coordination.

Dumb phone does all that, too...

1. I don't have a problem with my daughter owning a smartphone and using it reasonably.

2. I'm not buying my daughter a 2nd dumb phone to bring to school with her.

"Bring it but don't use it (or leave it in your locker)" is a reasonable answer to me (and is actually what Finland is doing).

All problems you listed were solved differently before the age of smartphones.

ALL problems were solved differently before the age of smartphones. Breaking down on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and having to walk miles to find some way to ask for help was a damned nightmare; especially for a single female.

Lots of problems are solved in MUCH better ways now that we have smartphones. It's not about "can we do it", it's about "can we do it better / easier".

The school has phones in every classroom as well as the admin offices. Before I had a cellphone and needed to let my parents know I was staying after school or going home with a friend, I just used a landline.

Breaking down on the side of the road is completely different than being without a cellphone in a building full of landlines. It's disingenuous to compare the two situations. Breaking down on the side of the road is pretty much the impetus for portable communication systems. A kid being able to just text mom that they need a ride after school is convenient but not really critical enough to justify letting kids have their phones on them all day long.

> - If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school

When I went to school the bus turned up every single day without fail. We've learnt to accept less because you can just call a taxi.

> - If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time

We had public payphones that we could use. We've learnt to accept less because everyone has a mobile phone.

> - If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it

I remembered to bring what I needed every day or I suffered the consequences. I soon learnt. We've become complacent because you can just get it delivered using your phone.

All in all I don't really see how it's a positive, but it certainly seems to have considerable negatives.

Those can all be done with a fixed computer with a small delta of additional effort.

The thing to ask is if these conveniences are more important than the presumable benefits of making the cell phone inaccessible during school hours.

The thing is: these benefits manifest at different time-scales.

I’m ok with your child having to deal with a few inconveniences if it helps improve an entire generations mental health and development

If the bus doesn't show up? This must be public buses and not yellow buses. Call your council and tell them to fix the transit system. Meanwhile a child can walk home and get a ride, or show up to the stop earlier.

She can call from where she goes after school, no? Or she can go home first, or make plans a day ahead.

She can learn the consequences of not packing her school bags properly and keep a checklist to review each morning. The only time I recall in 12 years of primary schooling, where I had to get something from home after forgetting, was a prop for a demonstration in front of the class. I remember because it was the only time it mattered.

I am not familiar with your specifics, I don't mean to be personal. I don't have kids. But I am young enough to remember being one - I am also addicted to my phone, and I know how convenient it is to not plan anything and to instantly communicate with everyone. I am unconvinced that children in a controlled, supervised environment need a phone.

I say all this with humility because I haven't dealt directly with kids or the public school system in a long time.

...finally, if I did agree and say "yeah they should at least be allowed to have a phone on their way", it should absolutely be banned in the classroom. But what to do when the children inevitably break that rule? It doesn't sound like you would support them confiscating it, and it's a logistical quagmire to do so anyway.

But why smartphone then? Simple button phone would suffice.

Have you used any of the recent button phones? They are not particularly dependable things in my experience.

These are all normal childhood things that were managed long before smartphones existed. Yes, a mobile phone makes these things more convenient, but it is far from necessary.

Just give her a dumb phone? Kids don't need a smartphone to make a call or send a message.

I heard a variant of this recently. I told a colleague I don't use my phone for long periods, days at a time, that I miss nothing, am a happier person, do stuff with my time that makes me happier, etc, and she broke out in a mild panic, along the lines of:

"What about emergencies?? What about when you need to phone someone about X, or phone someone else because Y happened?"

It's a good argument - the typical phone in 1998 was a useful and practical device. Seriously, being able to ring people has many excellent and real use cases. Phones aren't just calling devices anymore, though.

None of these require a smartphone. There's no reason to jump to the most extreme solution where there are cheap, addiction-free solutions available.

So your daughter is using basic indestructible Nokia with endless battery, correct?

This is a really bad argument. None of this is a good reason for K-12 students to have their phone on them all day.

Get her a smart watch with cellular then.

Those are reasons for her to have a phone, not a smart phone that has unfiltered access to p*rn, social media among other highly addictive material.

Feature of flip phone is plenty for what you just described, which is what my kids have.

Smartphones, no. I'm not subjecting them to any algos, thank you very much.

Give her a smartwatch with cellular instead (like an Apple Watch). She can do all the things you mentioned using a smartwatch without the distraction of apps and convenient texting.

I agree with your take on the purpose of schools and that smartphones contribute little.

But my concern is that actions like these teach students an additional lesson: That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes. Children and teens absorb a lot, and while they don't always absorb the contents of their lectures, they do typically absorb how they're treated and how that implies they can treat others.

The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.

>That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes

It is acceptable for public schools, whose mandate is education of the youth, to enaxt restrictions on behavior to that end.

And smartphones are an addictive item. I want school to be fun and engaging. That doesn't mean every kid who's been raised on an iPad since age 0.5 will put down their phones if the teacher has rizz.

>But my concern is that actions like these teach students an additional lesson: That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes.

Well, of course it is. Organized society largely rests upon this principle. In the oppressive ones coercion is exercised arbitrarily or by a select few, and in societies based on rule of law it is exercised, well, using law.

>The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.

Maybe. Or maybe the pesky slot machines and gossip aggregators are impossible to compete with, if you leave the adolescent attention economy in the hands of the almighty free market. Either way, banning cell phones certainly won't hurt efforts to engage students, if any.

Agree school could be more interesting—but the idea it could compete with highly addictive drugs, er youtube et al is laughable frankly.

We put a lot of restrictions on minors and what they can do or be done to. On top of that, some things which would be ok in a different setting would be inapropriate and disruptive in a classroom environment.

Also, with regards to the motivational aspect, I would not expect a toddler to be able to make the appropriate choice between a healty meal and candy. I do not expect a teen to be able to restrain themselves from the pubescent games of social media prancing and paying attention to the class teaching.

> [...] how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.

Is there any precedent for this that we can model / reproduce? Any country or region where students are considered academically successful, while having unrestricted access to the internet in their pocket?

If it exists, it would be very worthwhile to understand what gives those students such strong self control. Do they do it on their own? Are they somehow admonished/shunned publicly for that behavior?

I deplore the fact that schools need to resort to banning phones.

When I was younger I imagined a world in which computing devices would be a boon to (young) people everywhere.

But many apps appear to be detrimental to people's mental health, both young and old.

Possibly this can be changed. Maybe separate app stores are a solution (think f-droid)? Or maybe we need to start looking a lot harder at apps that might actually be user hostile.

Computing devices could have done that except the people making them built hellscapes with black hole level gravity to sell us shit we don't need so now we have to treat computing devices like cigarettes and begin limiting their use in meaningful ways and teaching society to shun them, not because they couldn't be amazing, but because they are not now and probably won't be given Big Tech's stranglehold and inherent evil.

Apps are the result of darwinian competition for engagement in a user base of billions.

It’s a horrible way to optimize technology for addictiveness.

Not sure if there is a fix for that.

Counter point: Materals which are needed/useful for education should be provided by the school and used at the teacher's discretion under their supervision. A personal smartphone shouldn't have any place in classroom activities since it is an obvious distraction and not equally accessible to all students.

Smartphones were just starting to be common right around the time I hit middle and high school. Teachers let us use them whenever we wanted, more or less, but if there was something we were supposed to be doing, we were only allowed to use them for educational purposes.

We were often encouraged to use them, in fact. If there was ever a question someone asked that the teachers couldn't answer, or they heard an argument between students about something that could be solved by looking up hard data, they would invite us to take out our phones and look it up. One of the teachers would occasionally make little websites and apps related to whatever we were learning at the time. Sometimes we were shown interesting blog posts, educational youtube videos (before it was an industry), personal sites from people who make things. It was reinforced again and again that they were for discovery first, creation second, and anything else third.

I feel very lucky for that to be how I learned to interact with them. The fact that we have magic machines that can answer any question in our pocket, that can take photos and connect us to people and teach us languages, yet we've corrupted them to the point that people are willingly giving them up and banning them from educational settings, is one of the greatest failings of modern society in my view. Or rather, an indication of even deeper and more troubling problems.

A big thing these days are kids have no respect/fear of teachers. Misuse of phones doesn't have a solution where the teachers can't act on it and parents don't back up the teachers.

I don't remember anyone "misusing" their smartphones when I was in highschool because the fear of getting it taken away was massive.

I think what Finland did is the right take because these are devices which kids do not need.

They can call their parents if required from the main office.

This is fantastic and once again shows why Finland is a pioneer in childhood education and why Americans and other countries are so far behind.

> why Americans and other countries are so far behind.

Americans sure, but not all other countries e.g. in Singapore, many schools make the students put their smartphones in lockers and don't allow access at all during school hours. In case of emergency, they can call from the Main/General office.

The internet is great. A kid even in bumfuck nowhere can today, with a 100$ phone or computer, browse the biggest encyclopedia ever written in human history, read every book every published more 100 years ago (or more recently, if willing to pirate), watch lectures from the world's top universities and professors in subjects from physics to art conservation, listen to more concerts that you'll ever be able to in your entire lifetime, etc etc etc, all for FREE. Tell someone even 30 years ago that she would be able to hear the best orchestras in the world, on-demand, from rural Macedonia or whatever, at no charge, and it would be a vision of an utopian future. And yet here it is.

Unfortunately when you buy a phone you don't get a link to libgen or a youtube account with DW Classical or Veritasium pre-installed on your phone screen. You get tiktok and instagram and similar slop. If even adults are vulnerable to these turbo-addictive attention harvesters, how can kids hope to escape?

I don't think it's the quantity of apps that are the problem. Khan Academy is famous by now. There are world-class education apps, it's just that education apps have never taken off that much. The problem is in the competition for your joy, some apps win and some apps lose.

At my daughters' school, the rules are roughly:

* no phones during classes or during breaks (with the exception of lunch break, I think)

* phone can be allowed by teachers for a particular class and purpose

* if a student uses a phone while it's not allowed, the phone will be confiscated until the end of the school day

* (there might be a more severe rule for repeat offenders)

IMHO this strikes a pretty good balance between allowing phones for coordinating transit to school and back home, and no distraction in the class room.

In Finland the confiscation is the problem (or rather WAS the problem, until this law).

Children are people, people have specific rights. A teacher is just a random person as far as the law is concerned and can't take someone's phone away any more than an usher in a movie theatre can take someone's phone for being disruptive.

By that argument, it sounds like schools in Finland have zero authority. How does punishment work? What's stopping a kid from going anywhere they want at any time or doing litterally anything that isn't outright illegal?

If Finnish children have the same rights as adults, does that mean the children are also subject to the same legal punishment as adults? Can a Finnish child be jailed or fined for the likes of theft, assault, or battery?

I don't know, but I would hope that it works because parents are expected to teach their children to behave. Also just because they can't take their phone or punish them, it doesn't mean that they can't suspend students or fail them.

> I don't know, but I would hope that it works because parents are expected to teach their children to behave.

Unfortunately that hasn't proven to be a reliable method here in the United States :(

> Also just because they can't take their phone or punish them, it doesn't mean that they can't suspend students or fail them.

I'm not a teacher but my wife is so I can only speak to what I've heard from her. And by her accounts, out-of-school suspention is ineffective because you're essentially rewarding misbehaving children with not having to come to school. She also isn't allowed to lower a student's grade for behavioral issues. Their grade is supposed to be purely a reflection of how well the know the material defined by the curriculum.

I'm aware that the US isn't Finland, what works in the latter might not work in other places. The US has gone to the far end of FREEDOM and is paying the consequences. Certain countries managed to reached an acceptable level of disciplined freedom.

Presumably there are laws that give teachers some rights to act in the place of parents and control students. However those laws did not include the ability to confiscate property preemptively.

At my daughter's high school, kids are expected to pay attention, take notes and get assignments done. There's little restriction on phone use unless the kids are explicitly supposed to be doing something else with their hands. Kids are even allowed to use personal laptops/chromebooks. They routinely send kids to Ivy leagues and top 10 engineering programs.

I would be very interested to know under what kind of condition such rules work, and where they don't.

It's an academically selective public city school. Very diverse student body in all dimensions (ethnicity, wealth, lots of immigrants). Most take public transit on their own. Kids there are just kinda treated like adults. They're definitely brighter than average, but not necessarily more mature or responsible.

I'd recommend watching Social Studies to get an idea of what phone use in schools can look like. It's filmed in LA but I'm sure can be applied generally.

The amount of anxiety on show is really saddening.

https://thetvdb.com/series/social-studies-452444

I'm totally in favor of this, but there's something poetic about the country of Nokia banning smartphones.

Is this just smartphones they are banning? Can kids still use oldschool Nokia phones?

The main (literal) takeaway is that teachers can now confiscate phones.

Over here, at the other end of the Baltic sea, there's an ongoing debate about phones in the classroom and some schools have regulations in place regarding the use of electronic devices, but these are largely toothless as otherwise they would infringe on the right to property.

I graduated high school before the smartphone era, so I don't have much of a point of reference, but I'm leaning on disallowing at least Wi-Fi/mobile data - that's the largest source of distraction in my view.

> they would infringe on the right to property.

Can children bring in portable hifi systems? What about those squeaky chicken toys? Or a water pistol?

My sister's friend brought a microwave oven once and started making grilled cheese sandwiches during recess. He was told to unplug and never bring it again, but it was not confiscated.

My classmate brought a super-sized calculator to class for tests, as he had a medical condition which allowed him to bring "a calculator". The buttons made a lot of noise but, again, it was not confiscated.

Can you make grilled cheese in a microwave?

Probably some disgusting prepackaged microwavable "cheese" sandwiches.

Turns out you're right: https://foodisstupid.substack.com/p/can-you-make-toast-in-yo...

The hot pockets "crisping sleeve" makes this possible.

the hifi system has a much better chance at attaching itself to freedom of speech protections than squeaky chickens or toy guns.

Where they not already?

In America they started off banned as soon as kids started getting them in the early 00s, but then some years later the bans became unenforced or even undone because, apparently, parents said that their kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)

But that shouldn't apply in Finland at all.

At least in my time they were pretty much banned. You could have your phone on you but if you got caught using it during class, they'd just confiscate it. Of course, some exceptions apply like if a teacher informed of some upcoming event, you could pull up your phone and set it in your calendar without getting chewed out. Not sure what's happened since.

At my son's school, they have to put the cell phones into the "phone hotel" at the beginning of the day, and they pick them back up at the end. But it is performance only, really. If the kid really wants a cell phone, they'll just put an old one in the phone hotel and keep their real one hidden in their bag. But even that isn't really done all that much, as they're required to have laptops for class and they can do anything social and/or distracting they'd want to do on the phone on the laptop instead.

I went to primary school in 1999-2008 and it was the same for me. After that I started my secondary education in business school in 2008 and there were basically zero restrictions on smartphone use. Smartphones probably became ubiquitous in primary school after that too, but this law seems to also target secondary schools which sounds stricter than it used to be.

School shootings do happen in Finland, although they're rarer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viertola_school_shooting

And thats no reason to let kids do empty highly addictive activity unhinged instead of getting prepared for later life. Emotional reactions != smart ones.

No, I agree. Just give the kids brick phones if you're that worried.

It's Finland. The school should give a Nokia 3310 to each kid.

> parents said that their kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)

It really is a dumb argument. Your primary concern in a school shooting should be getting out safely not messing around with your phone. One more 911 call won't make police any more effective. The phone isn't making you any safer. If anything, it's a distraction putting you in danger. Once you've made it to safety, you won't have any trouble contacting your parents whether or not you have a smartphone.

> kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)

Considering the US is a country where two dozen cops stay out of a school with an active school shooter until they have run out of bullets ... yeah, it is. No-one wants to hear the local TV station run the dying screams of their children. Better not give them phones so they can call for help (or give the cops information, which would be pointless to begin with).

Is it possible to fight Internet addiction without banning stuff? While it helps to ban smartphones during school, it won't stop these kids from logging on for 5 to 7 hrs after school. We need to find ways to make people (not just kids) more resilient to Internet addiction without resorting to widespread bans, which are both hard to implement, unlikely to keep people away long term and dangerous for other reasons.

Maybe it does help increasing resiliency by forcing them not use the device for the day? Whether it does that will be found during the next few years. Why is it unlikely in long term?

You pose this as a question, but I find it's quite easy to say "we need to achieve this some other way" but then not having a concrete suggestion what that other way could be.

I do not think kids and everybody else are standing a chance against all the money that is thrown at making and keeping them addicted.

So I fear if we do not want them to be addicted we have to prohibit things (it does not need to be smartphones, it could be mechanisms on these devices).

Bingo. The decline of smoking wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for banning smoking in most public places and everywhere indoors, removing cigarette vending machines, etc.

Prohibition didn't work for booze, doesn't work for drugs.

Why would you be expecting better results for this ?

Smoking ban in bars and restaurants seem to work. So doing same with phones in schools during lesson time does not seem unreasonable.

This and taxes, it's much much harder to get cigarettes as a teenager now because of the price

I agree it is not unreasonable, but I'd also note that bars have their livelihood at stake. While a child has their phone at stake, you cannot threaten their livelihood without a trip to prison.

There are no material stakes to the child other than losing their entertainment device. Might as well break the rules.

Limited restrictions for specific times and places is totally reasonable, I read the parent comment in a larger scope as it was about stopping addiction.

If you would like to prohibit e.g. gambling mechanisms in games or social media you need a legal framework and then you investigate and fine the firms that don't adhere to the rules. This works very well in the EU as seen by the example of apple and facebook last week. It's not perfect but what is?

The EU still largely allows for lucrative gambling mechanisms, they just can't be predatory or deceptive. Which I agree is probably the best approach, coupled with advertisement restrictions etc.

I think you're right in a way because if school wants to prepare kids for work, then they'll have to get competent with tech.

But at the same time, I think banning smartphones is perfectly fine because you can still use computers and stuff. It's not like they're going back to quills and ink.

Smartphones fry your attention span and enable bullying. And if parents want to have emergency contact, you can always have a simple mobile phone with texting/calling.

> I think you're right in a way because if school wants to prepare kids for work, then they'll have to get competent with tech.

1. Educational is not vocational training. Schools should give kids skills and a foundation, not teach them how to use particular technology.

2. Not all jobs require much knowledge of how to use technology.

1. Correct, I think you've changed my mind on this and I'll investigate further. Though they should probably get foundational knowledge on tech literacy.

2. True, though less true over time. Even in the non-tech jobs you're now constantly using technology. In the trades, you need to know how to operate a CNC machine. As a nurse, you're operating medical devices that are getting more and more powered by technology.

>I think you're right in a way because if school wants to prepare kids for work, then they'll have to get competent with tech.

They are failing spectacularly on that front anyways. You don't learn useful skills by being handed a remotely administered tablet or Chromebook, which is what schools provide.

Growing up we had computer class in school, where we did BASIC programming and worked on typing, and this wasn't a particularly good school system. Moving towards "you'll learn computers and typing by having them in your face all the time" feels like a considerable regression in both computer and general skills.

I saw this in the Netherlands: Chromebooks with which the children did their research online, submitted their homework online, got them graded online, organized their workgroups, schedules and meetings online ...

Actually </s> they were learnig vital skills like Agile Sprint management! (I don't know if they ever physically met for standup meeetings)

Using a dumb-phone is the reason a pre-teen neighbor of mine got bullied. So much that she ended up stealing money to get herself a smartphone. Shortly afterwards the parents folded and became less strict with their anti-consumerism stance.

yeah but isn't that precisely what banning smartphones in schools fixes? Nobody said anything about outside of school.

Sorry, I was not clear.

Absolutely smartphones should be banned, at least during lessons, and at best during the whole time in the school, recess, etc.

Giving a child a dumb-phone in an environment where everybody else uses a smartphone doesn't work. If smarphones are not banned then _all_ will end up with a smartphone, and socialisation difficulties, etc...

This is a case where individual freedoms end up in collective damage. Maybe I'm an outlier here but I'd ban all kinds of social media all the time.

In Uruguay in the 1980s there was no TV before 10am. I liked watching cartoons a lot, but I'm glad this made me do more interesting stuff in the mornings.

> Is it possible to fight Internet addiction...

Yes!

> ...without banning stuff?

What incentive do companies have to do this? It seems quite profitable for them?

I am quite strict here with my comment; but honestly, I can't see much reason other than making new products that are made as an "anti" movement, but companies will just find new ways to get people hooked -- because it is profitable for them to do so.

Easiest way to fight addiction is to remove the triggers, like seeing your phone. Requires less willpower.

No, I don't think there's a way without regulating addictive feed-based content machines.

As much as we would like to tout some individualised solution for this, there's no way for all individuals to be trained to resist products designed for maximising its usage. There are armies of smart people being paid to think about ways that will make users be "engaged" with their products for as long as possible for it to be profitable, armies of experts in user behaviour, developers that can churn out good quality digital products, designers who can make the experience feel smooth. It's all geared to be addictive since the incentive is to capture as much attention as possible.

Is it possible to fight gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, drugs addiction, without banning them? Yup, it's costly, relies on a lot of regulation, control from the State on what kind of behaviour these companies can engage, and so on.

The addictive thing is not the smartphone but what it gives access to, without a conversation about what kind of regulations could curtail the addictive side of the real culprit, social media, there's no way out on an individual basis.

Banning smartphones in schools is akin to banning cigarettes' commercials, you aren't banning the stuff completely but at least trying to curtail its reach. We need more of this, social media has a lot of benefits so I don't think it should ever be outright banned, we do need more talk about its downsides and potential mitigations on a societal level.

Irony being, the cold-dark nights have helped a generation of computer programmers from the Nordic countries.

Can we fight smart phone addiction without removing the smart phone from children's pockets?

Now replace 'Smart Phone' with anything else that is addictive. It's not rocket science folks.

I wonder how many people don't realize there are classrooms all over the United States where kids literally play on their smartphones and text all through class and don't pay any attention at all. They do F work and it gets graded on a curve up to a C. The teachers are powerless to do anything about it.

Do you think that banning smartphones - or attempting to - will fix any of that?

It will absolutely stop the playing of video games in class while the teacher is attempting to teach.

There was this TikTok internal memo that stated something like:

US teenagers are the ideal target market for TikTok, because they (get to) spend so much of their time on that app.

Brazil ahead of Finland:

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-bill-phones-schools-restri...

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-02-07/new-la...

Lots of nitpicking in the comments. Personally I support this law. Some years ago Finland made some changes to their educational system, that resulted in highly improved outcomes. Looks like they're trying out a good idea here also.

Note that this means "in class" rather than "in school".

”in school” is left for the school to decide. The can ban in breaks too.

I wonder if there's any alternatives to this that teach actual discipline when it comes to phones. Methods that actually attack the reason kids are using phones in school (boredom, social anxiety, uninterested in school etc.).

I remember being a kid and I wouldn’t need any reason to using smartphones at school. And we did bring banned things like walkman, gameboy, dumb phones,… And we only needed to spend 5 hours there.

I think this would be reasonable except for all the billion dollar companies pouring their money into researching how to keep the kids on their phones. The solution supposes that there's a state of mind the child could have that would give a smaller intrinsic need for the phone and that would be that, but this falls down when there are better funded and more powerful entities than the schools and parents pushing extrinsic motivations to stay on the phone for longer and longer.

What I hear from teachers is they are constantly bombarded by notifications. They aren't idly playing on their phones. They're constantly responding to things happening.

There's seriously no alternative to banning them, and I don't even see the interest in trying.

Social media is lipstick on a pig. There's verbal and physical abuse, exclusion, name-calling, stalking and all sorts of inhumane behaviour towards each other in real life. Social media just digitizes that and is a reflection of the ugly parts of the socializing aspect of human life.

The ~10% good that comes from keeping in touch with people, for example, is not really worth it especially for kids.

Whatever you do you are going to have to deal with the negative aspects of society in-person, and we've all kind of accepted that. Social media just doubles the problem.

The difference is that physical abuse, name-calling and stalking require the people to be actually present and risk (physical) consequences.

When done from the safety of one's own couch at home, surrounded by family, there are no consequences to name-calling, cyber-stalking or spreading rumours about someone.

Not sure about other US school districts, but LAUSD (Los Angeles) had this going for several weeks now - https://abc7.com/post/los-angeles-unified-school-district-ce...

Why does this unpopular campaign get to spam to Hacker News? It's pretty obvious someone is coordinating these posts to influence this community. Posts and comments that gesture to the idea of banning kids and teens from using phones seem to get rapidfire posted all day long, with little mention of the lack of expert consensus on the topic, or anything that suggests phone bans actually hurt social wellbeing.

Or maybe technically-adept people are very aware of the dangers of the addiction rectangle?

Pretty sure a lot of people would like to reduce the reach of brainrot-boxes on our society. This garbage is worse than cigarettes for kids.

NY just banned cellphones in schools. I don't know the exact details but its being called "bell to bell" presumably the whole day.

A committee in Quebec also recommends a full ban on cellphones and electronic devices at schools.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/commission-cellphone...

Thumbs up. I think this is a step in the right direction.

No matter how you flip it, net result is negative. These apps are like crack, and it’s morally right to protect developing brains from that.

Great to see Finland taking a balanced approach to phone use in schools - keeping the focus on learning while still being practical about when phones are actually needed!

If I were a Finnish child I would start working hard on getting my parents to emigrate, or at least send me on an extended exchange program to a country where I can still use modern tech to connect to the global network, meet other likeminded people, have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and learn any subject I'm interested in.

What a ridiculous reply. We're talking about banning smartphones during *class time*. There's nothing here that warrants leaving the country. Jeez.

Classes in Finland are not so much better than anywhere else that they make giving up the internet worthwhile. Children learn more in 15 minutes on their iphone than they do in 15 hours at school.

And you know this because...?

Would you really need to be doing that during school hours though? When would you even have time to do any of that anyway, outside of your lunch break?

That's setting aside that "have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and learn any subject I'm interested in" could mean Wikipedia, or it could mean short-form, attention-wrecking candy on Tiktok.

We all know the advantages of smartphones. What we dont know yet are the harmful effects of the smartphones on young minds. I just hope we are not stunting the mental growth of our kids just because we dont know the harmful effects. Like how smoking was allowed everywhere initially and now we ban it everywhere.

This was mostly a kind of political posturing law by a deeply unpopular government. Teachers and schools already had the authority to ban phone use in class, including that they must be put into a cabinet, and most in fact already did.

Austria did too.

Hungary too

Netherlands too. They are also banned during breaks. Schools where the ban had been implemented reported more concentration of students in class and more social interaction between students. Various studies show that contacts between students are returning, now that they are no longer hunched over their phones. There is much more conversation and social contact.

Dutch Government research: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2024/07/12...

What about smartwatches? The Apple Watch is very capable, I wonder if this will become a loophole.

Phones, tablets, headphones, laptops, and smartwatches according to HS.

https://www.hs.fi/suomi/art-2000011201797.html

What about Smartwatches?

Awesome, finally!

FINALLY

They did this at my kids school. Then issued them all with iPads which half the software they need to use doesn’t work properly on iPad size devices.

Total fuck up.

Kids should not have access to anything more complex than a Nokia with a flashlight.

TI calculator with Doom?

Kids have access to what their parents give them - I suspect most parents shouldn't be trusted with a flashlight or a nokia.

Bringing my first android phone to school in high school helped me learn linux when i was into rooting.

I don't think phones are the problem. I think it's more social media. Schools find it less effort to ban phones vs how to work with them.

The nanny state is a troubling trend

Phone bans in schools have been going on for 20 years. Yeah we didn't have smart phones back then, but with tactile buttons kids would text each other without even looking at their phone and keeping it in their pocket. Before phones kids were playing snake on their TI-83 when they weren't in math class. At it's core these devices are just a distraction when they're supposed to be paying attention.

We've have smart phones since ~2007 and you're right students did use t9, they could also be doodling in class not paying attention.

I find it weird that all of these schools have contracts with https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch. It's one thing to discipline a student who has their phone out it's another thing to compel all students to give up their own devices or install managing software used to spy on kids.

This isn't really about helping them succeed. It's more about training them to accept being watched and controlled all the time. Instead of teaching kids how to manage their attention or use technology responsibly, we're teaching them that they don’t own their time, their devices, or even their personal space during the school day.

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