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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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