- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Seems like a good trade to me.
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 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.
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.
But I'm open to compromise: let's give children bring dumb phones that can only call and text.
Smart phones when class is in session is a distraction and should be banned. However outside of class they are helpful.
We have forgotten that boredom is okay.
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.
I see no problem here.
so, the finnish don't prohibit that at all.
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?
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.
Could she get by at school without her computer? Yes. Is her school day more productive with it? Also yes.
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...
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).
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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 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
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).
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".
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.
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.
The thing is: these benefits manifest at different time-scales.
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.
"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.
Smartphones, no. I'm not subjecting them to any algos, thank you very much.
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.
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
The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 am saying that language arts can be, and often are, taught beyond basic proficiency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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
Really doesn’t help you make a point.
* 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. "
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I assume you are talking about North America here, because that is certainly not the case everywhere
Frankly, smartphones should be discussed in health class, much like drugs and alcohol, and in a similar tone.
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.
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).
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?