Why Schools Are Racing to Ban Student Phones
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/technology/school-phone-bans-indiana-louisiana.html
https://archive.ph/KSXxg
(Paywall free)
Why did they allow them in?
I remember we weren’t allowed to and our phones weren’t even as capable when they were “dumb”.
Fucking pagers were going to end teen life, shortly after Beavis and Butthead were going to ruin America’s youth. Then actual horrific data from teen phone use shows up and nothing happens because the Christian right is too busy focusing on people’s junk and banning books to raise hell about phones
Right? I remember if you got caught messing with it or it even making noise during class, the teacher took it and you picked it up from the office at the end of the day.
Overly concerned parents want their kid to always carry a phone/tracking device.
I’m sure Life360 parents played a not-so-small part in that decision.
Also school shootings might play a factor.
The biggest contributing factor was 9/11. My school had 3 pay phones for 1600 students. When 9/11 happened it was chaos. Tons of teachers were letting students use their cell phones (of they had one) so kids could call their parents, and no me had a problem with anyone that had a phone pulling it out of their bag to use it. It felt like almost overnight half the school had a new cell phone that no teacher cared about.
School shootings have just been a continuation of the fact that parents want to know their kids are okay at any given moment.
I’m just guessing that stories of kids trapped in classrooms during school shootings had something to do with it.
But that is purely a guess.
It’s a tough choice, right? Do we want our kids to be independent and capable during emergencies or do we want them tightly controlled and incommunicado at their desks?
I don’t quite understand why this is still a thing? Back when I was in school in the late 2000s, phones were banned. Couldn’t even bring it out even if you were going to use it as a calculator. Immediate 3 hour detection if you were seen with one. I got one for calling my mother to pick me up because I needed to go to the doctor.
I don’t understand how between now and then, the rules seemed to lax.
You haven’t really spent any time near a school system have you? I don’t even refer to them as parental units anymore, they are just banshees. These awful horrible screaming demons that want you to raise their kid but also never discipline them.
Nope I have not. I don’t have kids. I have heard your comment said by many other teachers around too. I don’t understand how it got to be like this. If people really don’t want the responsibility, time, money, emotional and physical investments of raising kids, they shouldn’t be having them.
It’s not nearly as bad when you view it from a parent because for every team there’s probably not more than 2-3 really shitty, vocal parents. And usually they can be kept in check by other parents (peer pressure can and should still be a thing when used correctly at any age level, it just takes proper leadership).
When you are on the other side all you get to see and interact with 75% of the time at best is the ugly, loud and rude. Full blast.
I got in trouble for trying to use a payphone to call my mother to pick me up on a day when they cancelled school after it started due to worsening ice conditions. I didn’t have permission to use the phone and my teacher got on my ass.
They want kids to be completely dependent and controllable.
I think they want kids to pay attention in class
The post you responded to was responding to someone that got in trouble for using a pay phone to call home when school was canceled.
Public school exist to teach obedience first and foremost.
Eh I don’t buy that, at least not as the primary goal. It’s more a side effect of the structure and resources of a class. When the classrooms were built to support 18 students per class, and the teacher’s union contract says they’ll have a max of 25 students per class, but in actuality they have 31 students per class, kids sharing desks and bumping elbows, yeah we kinda need all 31 of those kids to sit down and buckle up, or no one at all is going to get any learning done.
Is it the ideal learning environment for every student? Nope. Is it the ideal learning environment for any student? Probably not. But unless we’re willing to invest more in education, it’s what we’re working with.
My guy they literally have you pledge your allegiance to a symbol of the state before your anywhere near old enough to know what that means.
Anyone who doesn’t, and I can speak from experience, usually gets shit for it from the teachers.
Yeah the pledge is definitely weird.
They make for better unskilled laborors or cannon fodder that way. Wouldn’t want them to learn that they’re entitled to the pursuit of happiness or anything.
I don’t understand how between now and then, the rules seemed to lax.
Power of unions. Can’t suspend everyone.
Because smart phones are a more normalized piece of technology that (most) people have and use extremely often.
They have been banned for over a year where I live. I guess the people pushing back against this policy are just completely ignorant of the issue. Smartphones are incredibly addicting by design and, aside from the academic problem, exposing developing brains to such devices 24/7 is just a really bad idea. Having a space where children and their peers can be smartphone-free for several hours a day, several days a a week, should be seen as a positive thing.
Not the smartphones themselves are addictive, but all these annoying social apps, advertisements and notifications are.
There are ways around this. Kids should learn how to use their phones for managing their lives. And actually, they do at some point - to a degree.
Smartphones are incredibly addicting by design
lmao. My phone is literally not addictive.
Which smartphone do you have?
Nothing you said changes the fact that smartphones are designed to be addictive and that many people, particularly children, are addicted to them. Designers literally use the same techniques as casinos to develop addictive behaviours in the user.
I’m glad phones weren’t banned when I was still in school but it would’ve been better for me if they were. I think this is one of those things where we need an authority to prevent us from doing something that’s bad for us because we’re not going to do it ourselves. It’s equivalent to mom telling you to eat your vegetables.
Here in Europe many schools are doing this too. As a father of an (almost) teenger, I’m they are.
Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!
We got our oldest a smart phone a few years ago. Based on that experience, our younger two can buy their own smartphones when they’re adults because we’ve decided we’re not going to repeat that mistake.
Sort of the same here. Our 17 and 14 year olds were the last in their classes to get one and I still felt it was too early.
And for those without kids, here’s my actual story about what smart phones do to children: I was recently visiting an enormous aquarium abroad; just tank after tank of impressive displays.
As we arrived we realised, ok wow, shark feeding is literally now, let’s go watch it. It had obviously drawn an enormous crowd of families but eventually we got ourselves into a position where we could see. And then my wife tapped my shoulder and pointed and I noticed what she had noticed: At prime viewing position, on these pedestal sort of things, were sitting a row of teenagers, all of them, to the very last boy and girl, hunched over and staring at their smartphones.
LITERAL SHARKS WERE BEING HAND FED RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM and they couldn’t give a shit because PHONES!!!
No, you’re right.
I strongly disagree, this should be a decision for parents to make, no need to get the law involved. However, schools can and should have a policy that phones need to be off (or at least silenced, no vibrate) during class, and they can check it if excused to go to the restroom or something. But I would never agree to a law banning access to phones for minors, that’s a violation of parental discretion.
We ban gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, media for children, because of harms we understand that they inflict on children. Should these be parental discretions too?
Largely yes, but within reason, and only when under direct parental supervision. Drinking and smoking can be part of religious or cultural practices, so a small amount of that should be completely acceptable. But these should only be allowed within the home, with an exception for media, which should be allowed w/o supervisio with explicit permission (e.g. a written note or verbal confirmation at a theater or something).
Allowing these could constitute child abuse, but I don’t think there should be a blanket ban.
Ok, good to understand your viewpoint. It’s clear you seek an entirely different way of managing vices for children. I can appreciate the world you’re describing, where responsible adults help and guide their children to maturity.
I live in the U.K., not sure where you live, but it is my utmost conviction that many parents here do not guide and shape their children and that should your approach to vice management be instituted, you’d see an heap of children slip into dependency before 10.
But you may live in a different part of the world, one where your approach could work. What do I know?
I live in the US, and we certainly have our own share of problems with parents sucking, but other people sucking shouldn’t impact my ability to make choices for my own family. Rules like these merely restrict law-abiding citizens like myself, those who would let their kids have a phone, drink, smoke, etc won’t follow the law anyway.
These types of problems are often pretty easy to detect at school or something, so we should probably instead focus on empowering social workers instead of creating laws that are unlikely to do much.
There are good and bad ways to use a phone. It’s not comparable to things like cigarettes.
True, but there is good and bad ways to use media (educational content done well vs cheap Chinese children’s TV) and we do have age ratings there.
You’re right that cigarettes are universally bad (smokers would argue not, of course, and probably highlight social moments, pauses to reflect etc) but much of my list has good and bad sides. I’m perfectly open to removing cigarettes from the list, but it doesn’t change the validity of the other areas where we regulate minors’ usage.
I’d argue that gambling doesn’t really have good sides and alcohol is ambivalent at best. We could compare it to other media like TV, that’s perdectly ok. But when it comes to restrictions concerning other media, they are not as strict and act mostly like guidelines for parents.
But your kids are being addicted!!! They’re literally zombies!!! They need to be saved by the state!!! \s
Yeah, it’s too bad there’s absolutely no other way for anyone to deal with this problem aside from having the police potentially arrest me or my kids for having a phone. Just think of all of the victims of this heinous crime should the police not have the authority to parent my kids for me.
Stupidest thing i’ve heard this week
Society used to think crack was bad, and then invented smartphones.
Banning phones in schools needs to be done very cautiously.
In my high school, one of my teachers had one of the best cell phone policies I’d experienced, which was simply, if you had your phone out, she’d just say “hey, what are you doing on your phone right now?” It didn’t matter what exactly it was, and there was no judgement passed, but it kept us engaged if we got too distracted, encouraged us to find and share interesting new topics over just doomscrolling, and led to some legitimately informative and valuable conversations.
Other classes would let you use your phone after you got your work done, which acted more as an incentive for completing your work, rather than something you had to sneak in between the teacher talking.
That said, my high school was a competency-based school, which changed the incentives for self-governance of the learning process compared to traditional high school. And of course, it was high school, where most students had better self control.
That might say more about the state of education than the dynamics of phone use in the classroom, but I do feel like schools often try to make students conform to the system as their almost exclusive goal, rather than making the system work for the student, and thus, harsh anti-phone policies aimed at increasing attention in the classroom actually just make students even more angry at the system of schooling, and less likely to enjoy the process of education as a whole.
I have mixed feelings. “Because I said so” can get compliance in high school, but that’s mostly it. It’s not going to be that effective. At the same time, a lot of this overly permissive parenting seems like a reaction by people who are upset about being told no as kids and that will lead to problems, especially once they get into places that don’t care about constantly trying to have a debate back and fourth.
Before phones, students were distracted by fidget toys, tamagochi, bubble gum, various collectibles, comic books, ordinary books, paper notes, drawing, pen twitching, etc.etc.
Students always find ways to get distracted. Take away everything and they’ll still be rocking on the chair.
So if the purpose of banning distractions is to make students more attentive, well… it’s just not going to do that.
Then there is online bullying. Has bullying actually increased or are we just seeing it more, because it’s now documented? Banning phones in school won’t stop it from happening outside school hours anyway.
I’m not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it’s pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.
The smartphone is a different beast. Hardware and software companies spent millions of dollars of R&D to create the most psychologically addicting and attention demanding device as possible.
May I gently ask if you have children in the phone age range?
I have never seen anything with such a hold over teenagers.
It’s absolutely crack. My nephew and niece is 7 and 4, they don’t watch a lot of tv and aren’t allowed on the phone a lot, but when they are it’s fucking crazy. They don’t even have to do anything on it. When he was 5 and his friend was also 5, we had a Christmas family party. My phone was on the table and it blinked. No joke, they were like zombies, starring my phone down. He reached for it and i told him not to touch it. Their fingers kept moving on their own, and all they could to is stt the time, yet that was the most interesting thing in the universe to them. They were unable to not touch it.
When they are allowed on the phone for like 15 minutes all they do is to watch the biggest most meaningless garbage i can imagine. They would pick looking at a phone over pretty much anything. Before my sister had kids i would always think the whole ipad kids thing is blown out of proportion and i would teach them things with it, because after all, it is a useful tool. Not anymore, fuck that. I feel bad for ipad kids, i can only imagine the brain rot.
I have kids that age and a little older, and we have strict rules on screen time because of this. When I ask what they want to do, two will be uninterested in watching something on the TV or tablet, but if I let the other do it, they’ll all watch whatever is on the screen. My kids will try to grab my phone from me randomly during the day, and if I’m doing anything on my phone or computer, they’ll try to see what I’m doing. If I let them watch something on YouTube or something, they’ll watch stupid, high-engagement videos (e.g. Minecraft “challenges” or whatever), and my oldest was practically addicted to a toy review channel (they weren’t even interested in the toys) until I banned YouTube entirely (we let them choose how to use their allotted screen time).
There’s no way I’m letting them have a phone until they can demonstrate the smallest bit of restraint. I’m considering leaving my old phone around for emergency calls, but I know the moment I let them access it, they’ll get on the internet and watch random videos.
I think devices can be a fantastic learning tool, and I sometimes let them use my devices for educational reasons occasionally, but even then, they need strict limits on total time and per session time. We let them “earn” time by reading, but again, we have those strict limits so they don’t binge.
When my kids can be trusted with a phone, I’m not going to let them bring it unless they have a legitimate reason to have it at school (e.g. they have an after school activity w/o a fixed end time).
You’re really good at writing compelling fiction.
Maybe y’all are just boring AF to these poor kids? I would greatly prefer a phone over somebody condescending to me.
I have children, including a teen, and they have phones.
One thing I do notice is that they’re quite a lot better at putting the phone away when they’re with friends doing stuff or at family dinners than their grandparents who keeps checking notifications and answering calls regardless of when and where.
They grew up with phones and they have a much better understanding of when it’s socially acceptable to use it.
They know not use the phone during class, so there’s really no good reason to ban it entirely.
That’s your kids which are in the minority.
Their friends are pretty good too. Whenever they hang out they do other stuff. They plan to meet for some purpose and that’s what they do. Keeping up to date on social media is something they do on their own time when they’re bored.
It’s like they grow out of it, once they’ve seen enough crap.
I know one family like that. Kids prefer activities to phones. But the rest not so much. The kids get together and do things in spurts separated by phone time. Usually whatever they are doing, at least one of them is on the phone. So it is really kid dependent.
deleted by creator
I think you’re missing my point.
I doubt the sports jocks use their phone during sports ball practice?
Seems like a sports jock attention problem more than a phone availability problem.
Your anecdotes and your kid’s anecdotes might not represent reality either. But somehow y’all are (violently) banning phones for everybody.
Exactly.
I’m surprised to see users on Lemmy being this dead set on banning stuff for kids just because "we tried nothing and it doesn’t work*
Social media is bad, phones are bad, I get it, but banning is not the solution.
Kids will grow up in a world with both social media and phones. IMO school should prepare them and be a practice ground for it, so they don’t make the same mistakes as we - the parents - did.
Like posted elsewhere, my kids are better at it than I am. Banning phones is projection all the way.
I’m perfectly fine with disallowing phones during class, but an outright ban is an extreme reaction completely missing the problematic issues and potentially making it worse.
True
Citations needed.
Some drugs are just stronger than the others.
Phones are literally not drugs.
They literally are (or are distribution channels thereof). Designed by some of the best psychologists.
Addicting maybe but they literally are not drugs. More akin to gambling addiction then any sort of drug dependency. There’s a gigantic difference between the two. Sort of bothers me when people throw them in the same pile as they are so much different when it comes to how to deal with those types of addiction.
Fair enough. The “substance” itself is missing, so the drug itself is not being there.
I’m not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it’s pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.
While I don’t disagree, social media is the problem and what are schools going to do about that, except for banning phones? You also can’t compare getting distracted by a pen or piece of paper, to a phone with bright colours and notifications, specifically designed to be as addicting as possible
Social media is a problem for sure.
Also, thank you for asking what schools are supposed to do.
The problem is schools not managing to encouraging pupils towards learning.
I know I’ve said this before, but the teachers curse is that nothing is taught until the pupil understands it themselves, and is willing to absorb the material put in front of them. Encouraging pupils to want to learn ought to be top priority for any school. Banning phones is a lost cause, because they’re already lost at that point. They’re bored, so they rock on the chair or fiddle with a phone. I seriously don’t think that social media addiction is the core issue here. It’s an issue for sure, but it’s not what is keeping kids from learning. Boredom is.
Regardless of technology, paying attention is entirely up to their own willingness to learn. Teachers should be feeding the desire to learn, not in a “fellow kids” kind of way, but by showing them why the curriculum is important to them.
I totally acknowledge that there’s no reason to have a phone in class and that social media is bad, but it’s relevant not issue in teaching.
Fair points, although I’m not sure that’s easy to solve. Some teachers are more interesting than others, but schools, especially middle and high schools are too generic for a whole class to be able to listen. Not everybody is going to enjoy chemistry class, while others are just not going to be happy in PE or foreign languages (me). I think a major rework of the school system is required for this to be kind of solved, but it’ll never go away completely.
I think putting all the responsibility on schools is not the right approach, they’re probably already doing their best, but that just doesn’t work on every kid
Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in “zero-tolerance” policies that do things like punish the victim because they were “involved” in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.
To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is “phones may not interrupt class.” Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what’s happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they’ve already completed their work, and that’s acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they’re supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn’t get in trouble. The parent will hear, “Brayden was using his phone and he didn’t get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me.”
If you’ve talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They’ll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher’s discretion versus an outright ban.
tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.
I’m sorry, but there’s a wildly huge difference between bubble gum/collectibles/comic books and internet connected cell phones.
I was terrible at paying attention in class, but I always made it through by hearing just enough to get by… until I was in my final year of college when some of the classes got internet connected desktops at every desk. In normal classes I’d be fine, but in the classes with a computer where I could IM with friends I failed miserably (literally went from straight A’s to C’s and a couple F’s in college classes because of internet connected computers being in front of me all the time). And that was a desktop with only a couple friends I knew who also had IM on at the time. I can’t imagine how poorly I would have done at school if every one of my friends had messaging on every minute of every day, not to mention mobile gaming and social media.
I think there is a difference.
Yeah, the tamagotchi are games, but they are a game in the singular sense.
All the things you mention as distractions except the food items are contained in one phone multiple times over. Heck, you could probably even find a bubblegum chewing app.
That’s the distraction potential contained in one phone.
hide the issues instead of solving them.
And thats really all they care about.
I don’t wanna click. Too easy to cheat?
The article is about how smartphones have made people lazy. So incredibly lazy that some people aren’t even reading short articles from reputable sources, but are instead using smartphones to write comments on the internet begging strangers to summarize things for them.
That was brutal.
Ha! Funny.
I made this 5 second comment just before bed, so it wasn’t so much being lazy, but not having time to click on anything else before calling it a night.
And it worked out because someone else was kind enough to give me a TL;DR and I got to bed on time.
Nah, people are just better at prioritizing.
Seems to be a combination of students too distracted playing on their phones and difficulty policing behavior on social media bleeding into school time. They give an example of students filming a student being bullied on school grounds and the video being uploaded and shared on social media. I’m not sure banning smart phones during school hours is the right solution, but it’s certainly a tricky problem to deal with.
The paywall free link is instead captcha walled.
I do the audio captcha. The image captcha never works for me, especially over VPN.
ITT:
And you couldn’t communicate with those friends after school and on weekends?
I assume by “moved away” they meant to somewhere further than they could feasibly travel as a highschooler.
I meant communicate by phone. The person I was replying to said they needed their cell phone to talk to those friends who moved away, so I was asking if the person couldn’t communicate by cell phone after school and on weekends.
This reads like a bad faith question, or a question from someone older than like 60.
It’s not a bad faith question, and I’m not older than 60. I am older than 40, though.
Seriously, though. The person said they needed a cell phone IN SCHOOL to get through high school because all of their friends moved away and they didn’t like anyone at school. I get needing to connect with friends who aren’t nearby, because I moved around a lot when I was a kid. I also get not being friends with people at your school, because that happened to me in high school as well. But even in the days before cell phones at all I was able to stay connected to my friends at other schools who lived farther away than I could ride my bike to. And I’ll go ahead and throw out my old man bias and agree that cell phones are amazingly better at helping us stay connected to people far away, but you don’t need to connect to friends during school. You can do that after school and on weekends.
I’ll go ahead and be an old man here and say maybe one of the reasons the person had a hard time connecting to other people at school is because all the people were on their phones with friends the whole time. Nobody is looking for new friends when they are constantly “surrounded” by old friends. That said, before the internet was a thing there were also people with no friends at their school, so I’m not saying everyone would make friends if they just got off their phones.
There’s time during school hours too to communicate with friends, yeah. I think their idea was that students shouldn’t be messaging those friends during their classes, which I don’t think is an outrageously ask.
Boomer thread
Schools are literally prisons. No phones allowed. No filming of the bullying and harassment. No incriminating evidence against the guards.
agreed
Build a Faraday cage into the walls so that only wired connections will work. Boom, no bans required. Actual necessary calls go through the office landlines, like they did in the 1990s. (Probably impractical, especially given the refit required for existing buildings.)
I can think of an America specific reason to not block all communication with the outside world in a school. Even if every room has a wired landline that worked and was accessible to students and teachers
That’s because you lack the political will to fix the actual problem, which isn’t an issue anywhere else in the world and has absolutely nothing to do with communications.
There are still windows, assume they are in classroom. There are RF blocking windows but those are quite expensive, and lose function as soon as you open it for airflow.
They do make RF blocking paint, but it’s very expensive and I have no idea if it would be enough to fully block microwave signals.
Yeah, not being able to communicate during a school shooting is a deal breaker for me.
The first ever argument for allowing cellphones in classrooms that even remotely has some merit and of course its for a uniquely disturbing and America only problem.
