6 ms·

Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.

by juunpp 1y ago

jarjoura 1y ago
Isn't the article suggesting that because students do not have access to their phones during the school day, they are suffering withdrawl? I'm interpreting the message that students should not have a phone at all or at least in limited capacity.
- healsdata 1y ago
  The linked article is clearly sensationalist and focuses on "experts" who are trying to make their career off this "crisis" (I expect they all have books lined up and speaking engagements). Meanwhile "As the New York Times reports, schools where smart devices have been partially or fully banned during instructional hours have seen incredible increases in student attentiveness and communication." As much as their opinion page sucks, I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times instead of someone who says "zombie apologists" in all sincerity.
  - jeswin 1y ago
    > I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times Quite the opposite for me. I don't have a problem with their opinion pages, because it's labelled as such and is at times interesting. I wouldn't trust their reporting though, least of all the numbers.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      > I wouldn't trust their reporting though If you don't trust the quality of reporting from the New York Times, who do you trust? Washington Post? Chicago Tribune? LA Times? SF Chronicle?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - jeswin 1y ago
        I use them (more than one) as signals, and draw my own conclusions. I had subscribed to the NYT for several years, and my view is that much of their reporting is just a narrative that the journalist prefers. There's a certain amount of wiggle room with facts and even numbers, and the journalists make good use of it. Distrust all media deeply. Not because there's an organizational directive to say something in a certain way, but they staff themselves with people who want to say something in a certain way.
healsdata 1y ago
There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students. > "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need." https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents
- create-username 1y ago
  Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents. Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food. It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible
  - mystified5016 1y ago
    No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.
    - dumbmrblah 1y ago
      I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting. Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.
      - ty6853 1y ago
        When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun. All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.
codybontecou 1y ago
They tend to be. One of the issues is the dopamine withdrawals they experience while away from their phone: "First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off."
BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Man I don’t know. Schools can be genuinely awful. Easily half of the educational value I received during my school hours was found while messing around on my laptop instead of paying attention. I’m sure I’m a rare case there, but these devices were my only escape from a dull, incompetent education system.
- ty6853 1y ago
  The customers are captive (pay or sheriff with guns show up to toss your ass out), the employer is spending OPM (largely funded to administration or special interest segments or overhead), and the student consuming has essentially no say since his parents have no money left to choose somewhere else after paying already for the public school. What could possibly go wrong where the only person with any real choice is an administrator who doesn't bear the cost or benefit of his own actions? The incentives could hardly be more misaligned.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    Precisely. I moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I got a more wholistic picture of the public education system than most. I’m not sure I met a single teacher that wasn’t overworked. In the richer areas teachers typically wanted to teach; in the poorer areas even that often wasn’t true (An issue of filtering and work environment, not a personal failing thing). I once had a history teacher who only showed movies for the entire year I had her. With us placated, she’d go lounge in the corner. But even the teachers who gave a damn couldn’t do much with the absurd ratios; it was impressive they even managed to keep kids in their seats and fights from breaking out. Any time the instinct to further police kids in schools arises, I get defensive. I know what that environment is like for the kids in it, and anyone would look for an escape while trapped in there. Schools right now function as weird little child prisons, somewhere to put kids while their parents (those who aren’t rich enough to do otherwise) go to work. If the schools aren’t gonna get any better (certainly not under this administration), then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?
    - jmye 1y ago
bawolff 1y ago
Its crazy to me that they are not. I was in high school in the mid 2000s, and if the teachers saw a phone it was immediately confinscated. What happened since then?
- balamatom 1y ago
  Kids who were in high school in the 2000s grew up and became teachers.
  - jajko 1y ago
    You meant parents for sure. It all starts at home, don't expect better behavior than parent is showing and enforcing.
    - balamatom 1y ago
      You raise an interesting point. In the years when I was forced to consume the mandatory blessings of the Prussian system, a common occurrence was teachers constantly blowing up at the class, with the common theme of blaming our unruly behavior on how our parents hadn't taught us how to behave. In turn, it's my understanding that my parents weren't the only parents who believed that to be the teachers' job. Neither side seemed to realize that they were setting an example with their behavior; nor acknowledge that we were actual conscious human beings who are choosing our behaviors in response to our environment, and were we to be presented with any remotely convincing reason to shut up and listen, why, we would've gladly done so! And of course the only reason teachers could ever muster was threats of scarier teachers or the headmaster or expulsion. Which usually worked for about a minute, threats of violence not being particularly interesting. Especially as it turned out how the new, sterner teachers actually cared to teach us stuff; the evil Director turned out to be a nice intelligent lady who was totally fed up with herding "credentialed experts" in shrill schoolmarming; and expulsion would've been the path to salvation, were it not for the parents who feared it like the devil. To think how good-faith we were as kids, and how ridiculously did society fail so many of us. Our only responsibilities as such were to inform our parents of the frequent irregular parent-teacher conferences which were mainly teachers begging for money and complaining about our behavior and, and twice a year have the teachers sign a note confirming that we were going to school, so the parents could claim some form of welfare payment. Therefore, we had to learn it all from TV, CS1.6, GTA and later PornHub. Now we're in the White House -- or in the trenches by Kharkiv.
georgeecollins 1y ago
They are banned from the classroom at the school I send my kids to. I think it gets tricky when you have classes where you are expected to use a tablet or laptop, which is surprisingly common now. The same school has pretty sophisticated IT, so the wifi the kids are on blacklists a lot of websites. But still somehow my son said there was a kid in one of his classes watching a TV show during class.
lapcat 1y ago
> Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. It's not that simple, because as the article says, "these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system" and "they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school".
- lnrd 1y ago
  Is "dopamine withdrawal" really a thing? Is there any studies about it? To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems of social feeds and especially short form content. But is there any science behind it that could classify it as an addiction? I would find it hard to imagine that kids at school are in physical pain and psychically unable to do something (which would be symptoms of real withdrawal). I think it's more reasonable that they are just bored and annoyed because they can't access their favorite form of entertainment. I remember how bored (and restless to go home) I was in middle school the day after I bought and started playing GTA: San Andreas, is it that different? I'm sure the education system need to update a lot of ways of teaching as they are indeed outdated and extremely uninteresting to a young audience, but I also think that phones should absolutely not be allowed in a class rooms (same way we couldn't play a videogame or watch tv in there).
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems I agree. I think the key point from the article is this: "they behave like addicts". The "dopamine" part is inessential to the diagnosis. Smartphones are like a drug, similar to or analogous to a drug. If they were literally a drug, causing overt physical withdrawal symptoms, then we might have taken the problem more seriously already.
  - intended 1y ago
    dopamine self regulation is easier to think of.
- throwaway290 1y ago
Aeolun 1y ago
Phones are banned in the school my kid attends. It’s fine. Students put them away when they arrive, and can take em out again when they leave.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
We've had a problem for a very long time that kids are convinced that school is 1) not worth it, 2) not necessary, and often 3) a waste of time and in some cases 4) harmful to them. I think we should take a look at the education system and figure out how to make it better align with what actually interests kids instead of trying to force them to learn what we think suits them. Most kids would get off their phones if school was interesting to them. Sure, you'll always have bad apples. Rather than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, we should realize there's a mismatch and try to correct it. Phones are a problem, but they aren't THE problem. School itself is the problem, and has been for a VERY long time.
gilbetron 1y ago
My son is in high school, and at the Parent's assembly at the beginning of the year the Principal announced that he would be doing what he could to ban phones at school (kids can have them, but they can't be out during class). Half the parents cheered, the other half booed. FWIW, I was one of the cheering parents. But you can't enact policy when half of the parents are against it. And this is at a school that is top 20 (out of 1100) in the state, I can't imagine what it is like for the bottom 50% of schools.

Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.

by juunpp 1y ago

Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.

jarjoura 1y ago

Isn't the article suggesting that because students do not have access to their phones during the school day, they are suffering withdrawl? I'm interpreting the message that students should not have a phone at all or at least in limited capacity.

healsdata 1y ago
The linked article is clearly sensationalist and focuses on "experts" who are trying to make their career off this "crisis" (I expect they all have books lined up and speaking engagements). Meanwhile "As the New York Times reports, schools where smart devices have been partially or fully banned during instructional hours have seen incredible increases in student attentiveness and communication." As much as their opinion page sucks, I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times instead of someone who says "zombie apologists" in all sincerity.
- jeswin 1y ago
  > I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times Quite the opposite for me. I don't have a problem with their opinion pages, because it's labelled as such and is at times interesting. I wouldn't trust their reporting though, least of all the numbers.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > I wouldn't trust their reporting though If you don't trust the quality of reporting from the New York Times, who do you trust? Washington Post? Chicago Tribune? LA Times? SF Chronicle?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - jeswin 1y ago
      I use them (more than one) as signals, and draw my own conclusions. I had subscribed to the NYT for several years, and my view is that much of their reporting is just a narrative that the journalist prefers. There's a certain amount of wiggle room with facts and even numbers, and the journalists make good use of it. Distrust all media deeply. Not because there's an organizational directive to say something in a certain way, but they staff themselves with people who want to say something in a certain way.

healsdata 1y ago

There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students. > "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need." https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents

create-username 1y ago
Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents. Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food. It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible
- mystified5016 1y ago
  No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.
  - dumbmrblah 1y ago
    I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting. Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun. All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.

codybontecou 1y ago

They tend to be. One of the issues is the dopamine withdrawals they experience while away from their phone: "First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off."

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago

Man I don’t know. Schools can be genuinely awful. Easily half of the educational value I received during my school hours was found while messing around on my laptop instead of paying attention. I’m sure I’m a rare case there, but these devices were my only escape from a dull, incompetent education system.

ty6853 1y ago
The customers are captive (pay or sheriff with guns show up to toss your ass out), the employer is spending OPM (largely funded to administration or special interest segments or overhead), and the student consuming has essentially no say since his parents have no money left to choose somewhere else after paying already for the public school. What could possibly go wrong where the only person with any real choice is an administrator who doesn't bear the cost or benefit of his own actions? The incentives could hardly be more misaligned.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Precisely. I moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I got a more wholistic picture of the public education system than most. I’m not sure I met a single teacher that wasn’t overworked. In the richer areas teachers typically wanted to teach; in the poorer areas even that often wasn’t true (An issue of filtering and work environment, not a personal failing thing). I once had a history teacher who only showed movies for the entire year I had her. With us placated, she’d go lounge in the corner. But even the teachers who gave a damn couldn’t do much with the absurd ratios; it was impressive they even managed to keep kids in their seats and fights from breaking out. Any time the instinct to further police kids in schools arises, I get defensive. I know what that environment is like for the kids in it, and anyone would look for an escape while trapped in there. Schools right now function as weird little child prisons, somewhere to put kids while their parents (those who aren’t rich enough to do otherwise) go to work. If the schools aren’t gonna get any better (certainly not under this administration), then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?
  - jmye 1y ago

bawolff 1y ago

Its crazy to me that they are not. I was in high school in the mid 2000s, and if the teachers saw a phone it was immediately confinscated. What happened since then?

balamatom 1y ago
Kids who were in high school in the 2000s grew up and became teachers.
- jajko 1y ago
  You meant parents for sure. It all starts at home, don't expect better behavior than parent is showing and enforcing.
  - balamatom 1y ago
    You raise an interesting point. In the years when I was forced to consume the mandatory blessings of the Prussian system, a common occurrence was teachers constantly blowing up at the class, with the common theme of blaming our unruly behavior on how our parents hadn't taught us how to behave. In turn, it's my understanding that my parents weren't the only parents who believed that to be the teachers' job. Neither side seemed to realize that they were setting an example with their behavior; nor acknowledge that we were actual conscious human beings who are choosing our behaviors in response to our environment, and were we to be presented with any remotely convincing reason to shut up and listen, why, we would've gladly done so! And of course the only reason teachers could ever muster was threats of scarier teachers or the headmaster or expulsion. Which usually worked for about a minute, threats of violence not being particularly interesting. Especially as it turned out how the new, sterner teachers actually cared to teach us stuff; the evil Director turned out to be a nice intelligent lady who was totally fed up with herding "credentialed experts" in shrill schoolmarming; and expulsion would've been the path to salvation, were it not for the parents who feared it like the devil. To think how good-faith we were as kids, and how ridiculously did society fail so many of us. Our only responsibilities as such were to inform our parents of the frequent irregular parent-teacher conferences which were mainly teachers begging for money and complaining about our behavior and, and twice a year have the teachers sign a note confirming that we were going to school, so the parents could claim some form of welfare payment. Therefore, we had to learn it all from TV, CS1.6, GTA and later PornHub. Now we're in the White House -- or in the trenches by Kharkiv.

georgeecollins 1y ago

They are banned from the classroom at the school I send my kids to. I think it gets tricky when you have classes where you are expected to use a tablet or laptop, which is surprisingly common now. The same school has pretty sophisticated IT, so the wifi the kids are on blacklists a lot of websites. But still somehow my son said there was a kid in one of his classes watching a TV show during class.

lapcat 1y ago

> Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. It's not that simple, because as the article says, "these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system" and "they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school".

lnrd 1y ago
Is "dopamine withdrawal" really a thing? Is there any studies about it? To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems of social feeds and especially short form content. But is there any science behind it that could classify it as an addiction? I would find it hard to imagine that kids at school are in physical pain and psychically unable to do something (which would be symptoms of real withdrawal). I think it's more reasonable that they are just bored and annoyed because they can't access their favorite form of entertainment. I remember how bored (and restless to go home) I was in middle school the day after I bought and started playing GTA: San Andreas, is it that different? I'm sure the education system need to update a lot of ways of teaching as they are indeed outdated and extremely uninteresting to a young audience, but I also think that phones should absolutely not be allowed in a class rooms (same way we couldn't play a videogame or watch tv in there).
- lapcat 1y ago
  > To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems I agree. I think the key point from the article is this: "they behave like addicts". The "dopamine" part is inessential to the diagnosis. Smartphones are like a drug, similar to or analogous to a drug. If they were literally a drug, causing overt physical withdrawal symptoms, then we might have taken the problem more seriously already.
- intended 1y ago
  dopamine self regulation is easier to think of.
throwaway290 1y ago

Aeolun 1y ago

Phones are banned in the school my kid attends. It’s fine. Students put them away when they arrive, and can take em out again when they leave.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

We've had a problem for a very long time that kids are convinced that school is 1) not worth it, 2) not necessary, and often 3) a waste of time and in some cases 4) harmful to them. I think we should take a look at the education system and figure out how to make it better align with what actually interests kids instead of trying to force them to learn what we think suits them. Most kids would get off their phones if school was interesting to them. Sure, you'll always have bad apples. Rather than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, we should realize there's a mismatch and try to correct it. Phones are a problem, but they aren't THE problem. School itself is the problem, and has been for a VERY long time.

gilbetron 1y ago

My son is in high school, and at the Parent's assembly at the beginning of the year the Principal announced that he would be doing what he could to ban phones at school (kids can have them, but they can't be out during class). Half the parents cheered, the other half booed. FWIW, I was one of the cheering parents. But you can't enact policy when half of the parents are against it. And this is at a school that is top 20 (out of 1100) in the state, I can't imagine what it is like for the bottom 50% of schools.