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Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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.

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.

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