My position on this is really weird because I’m in support of laptops being in classrooms for educational uses. However, I’m against cell phones being in classroom.
That being said, as someone who grew up in a school system that didn’t allow the parent to communicate with their child or a teenager, meaning that they couldn’t call the school to have them relay a message, I am firmly against a straight ban period on school grounds. I was given a phone because my parents’ work schedule was very fluid and could change within an hour or two. And on more than a handful of occasions, my mom would call the school and be like, hey, you need to relay the message to get on a different bus because there’s no one going to be home, And they just wouldn’t relay it. It also helped if I chose to go to a friends house after school
I’m also disliking how they skewed the results. If you read the actual study, you’ll see that they merged the kind of agree strongly agree and the kind of disagree strongly disagree categories to make it a binary choice, but then chose to omit the six percent of the people who said they didn’t care or had no strong opinion.
they also removed they also removed any results where the person chose the first option or the last option on every question. And I dislike any type of automated data sanitation method like that, because while they did randomize the first and fourth answer, every time, there’s always the possibility that someone legitimately answered everything as either the first or last answer. My own vote could be stated that since I strongly agree that the cell phone shouldn’t be in the classroom, but strongly disagree that it should be straight banned. So if question one and question two had the polarity of question one and question 2 flipped, where one was strongly agree and one was strongly disagree, it’s entirely possible I would have been removed from the survey as a fraudulent result.
edit: removed couple sentences that drifted from topic some
Witch-hunting is a historical example of mass behavior potentially fueled by moral panic. The current trend towards banning phone use in schools is another.
So you’re saying witches were real and there was actual scientific evidence to back up the existence of their powers?
Don’t see why they can’t just have locked down WiFi networks so only staff and school equipment can use it and then have some sort of localized cell phone jamming that automatically turns off if a fire alarm or other alarm is triggered for emergencies.
I’d sorta think this is a good idea but I’m not really down for putting cellphone jammers or anything like that on school property. Freedom comes first.
The solution is to fund schools better for better education programs and more staff who would be able to handle rule infractions better. Harder to use your phone in class when 3 staff members are around engaged with the kids.
Freedom does not come first in all cases. There’s all sorts of rights that get curtailed when you enter a classroom. For example, while Tinker v. Des Moines does protect certain nondisruptive exercises of free speech on school grounds, schools still need to have wide leeway to restrict many kinds of speech that would otherwise be perfectly legal outside school grounds. For example, many kinds of speech that would be perfectly legal outside schools will get you disciplined for bullying. Students may be allowed to wear nondisruptive things like armbands, but if a student insists on holding up a giant protest placard in the middle of their math class, the school can restrict that.
Solutions like “fund schools better” are empty platitudes.
How are they empty?
Have you been in a school? It’s heavily understaffed, talk to any teacher they will say the same thing. Fund schools.
And just because rights become limited because you make an agreement with the school to alleviate some of those rights, doesn’t mean this is a good idea. In the event of a crisis, system failure, a nefarious actor, it opens up so many variables to play with. It’s a dumb idea to establish technology like that on campus when the better solution is to just hire more staff and hire better trained staff and engorge curriculum with more engaging lessons.
On top of that, whatever amount of money to establish and upkeep these I promise will eventually fail as kids will figure out some way to bypass it. They always do. Waste of money.
It’s an empty platitude because it’s a lazy solution. “Just throw money at the problem.” I AM a licensed substitute teacher in my state. I’m familiar with the behavior of kids in educational settings.
The citizens of a school district can only support a tax burden so large. And those resources need to be shepherded carefully. And every dollar spent has an opportunity cost. For example, you could pay to station a paraprofessional in every classroom. They could help out on various tasks and also help police student device use. But they themselves will often have their attention drawn away. There’s just no practical way to keep continuous eyes on every student. Instead of the kids pulling out their phones when the teacher isn’t looking, they’ll wait until the paraprofessional is helping one student out and the teacher is writing something on the board. And then you also have to consider opportunity cost. Instead of having classrooms with 30 students with 1 teacher and a paraprofessional, you could could have classrooms with just 20 students.
My solution to this is to build school buildings with Faraday cages built into the walls. It would be expensive to retrofit existing schools this way, but it would be very cheap to do during construction. Schools tend to be renovated every several decades or so, so do it when the opportunity arises. You can line the walls and ceiling with grounded metal grids behind the drywall. Once installed, there is zero ongoing operating cost. You simply make it so cell phones don’t work in the building at all. You can still have electronic devices; but the only way to connect will be through a heavily locked down wifi network.
And with this, there is no way past it. This isn’t a filter or a jammer (which would itself be illegal.) There’s no bypassing the laws of physics. The kids can bring their phones all they want. They simply won’t receive a signal inside the school building. If they need to call their parents for a ride at the end of the day, they can walk outside and make the call there.
In the US this isn’t legal. Signal jammers are outlawed period, you can’t even use one in your own private residence. The FCC is super clear on it’s legality. Any form of signal jamming period that can disrupt a communications signal such as a cellphone or wifi signal on US soil is a felony. They have even gone as far as fining companies who sold devices that could potentially have been used to signal jam over the restriction. In the US the only time you can use any device that has the capability to block signals is by a federal agency on a case by case basis
They actually
havehad (its been replaced with a much shorter excerpt that only mentions classrooms in a passerby) a FAQ about signal jammers where they explicitly mention it’s use in the school environment.I am a principal or school teacher and would like to use a jammer to limit cell phone calls and texting during school hours. May I do so? No. It is a violation of federal law to operate a jamming device within the U.S. Cell phone jammers do not distinguish between social or other cell phone conversations and an emergency call to a family member or a 9-1-1 emergency responder. In an emergency, use of a cell jammer can pose a threat to both students and staff by preventing communications with police or emergency services. In other words, jammers, even if carefully targeted, create risks of interference outside their intended zone of operations and can thereby disrupt critical communications by public safety providers, as well as the legitimate communications of passersby.Yeah, this is a problem that needs to be addressed when the school is being built. It flabbergasts me that it already isn’t standard practice to construct classrooms and schools as big Faraday cages.
That’s the real way to address that. You can still have a locked down wifi network for educational purposes. But you make it so the kid’s phones simply do not work inside the building at all.
Ignoring whether or not that would be considered against the intent of the law as well, I personally think cost, zoning and safety requirements are going to be killer on any type of plan like that and is likely why no districts that I know of have attempted it.
I wonder what the results would have looked like if they added questions to see the difference in acceptance between banning smartphones vs banning dumb phones.
A third of the country still thinks Trump is doing a good job. They probably don’t even know the difference
I can’t imagine sending my kids to an American school where phones are banned. I’d be terrified with all the school shootings.
And the schools themselves are just doing it because they’re scared to death someone will record something in the school get they’ll end up in legal trouble.
Illinois just banned phones in school. Idk if that’s leave in lockers or out of class.
Leave in lockers. The law says teachers can confiscate them for class if out and then give them back at the end of class.
Bring back dumb phones
You would need to make them dumber/more controlled. A dumb phone with unlimited texting is still going to be a distraction.
Maybe spamming children should be illegal
I’m talking about kids texting each other.
Landlines
let the mobileks get dumber so the content creators can get smarter
I agree. Leave them at home. The safety argument is bullshit.
Nope. As a dad I want to be able to reach my kid when need to and I want her to be able to do the same
Call the school
I know I’d just bring it in my bag with it turned off and not take it out until class is over.
That’s been possible since way before cell phones were invented. Call the school and have them give your kid a message. School children on their phones all day long is why your kids can’t read, do math, or pay attention to anything longer than 5 minutes. Also, cyber bullying and negative social media influences are brutal and are contributing to rising suicidal ideation and attempts.
Is my kid on her phone more than I’d like? Yes. But she’s a straight A student. Doesn’t change the fact I want us to be able to contact each other should an emergency arise
You can. You call the school. That’s what people did before schools started allowing phones everywhere.
If there is an emergency, you’ll need to call them anyway. No school is just gonna let your kid leave because the kid says it’s okay.
Sincerely, a fellow dad
There are “no internet” phones that are just talk and geolocation and nothing else.
as a parent, I would say what matters is geo-location and text to coordinate pick-up or plans. there is no need for younger kids to have a full fledged phone if one could be developed that serves those functions. I’m thinking 90s flip phones with GPS. It really sounds like a gold mine for some company to supply these limited devices given the market for them.
I just talk to my kids and it works just fine
Talk? Like, vocally? Eww, so old school.
No kid wants that.
Ban the phones and make the kids do as we always did. Hide it and use it strategically when the teacher couldn’t see.
thats fair, but of course its not the kids who are buying them.
Flip side is that kids are resourceful - given a dumbed down device that is only supposed to be able to do texting, it wouldn’t be a month before every one of them was running custom firmware to connect to fully encrypted peer to peer social networks run by kids with audio alerts set at a frequency that adults can’t hear and multiplayer games LOL.
There are options for that. Like Gabb phones and such. No Internet or social media mostly just talk, text, and geolocation.
I’m completely ignorant of “Gabb” phones. I’ll have to investigate. Also, I should probably add that while I’m a parent my kids are now grown so my opinions on this are dated. They all have full fledged smartphones at this point… and jobs… and lives. LOL
Someone is downvoting everything but I agree. I try and keep my helicopter parent impulses under control, but it is nice to know exactly where my kids are. My son (12) has a locked down old iPhone and Apple makes it pretty easy to make it practically a dumb phone. We literally have it set up so that he has to ask for permission before using any apps, with the exception of calling and messaging. (Even messaging is iffy; we want to be able to text him but it opens up texting with friends.) He doesn’t need it at school so he doesn’t bring it, but as he gets older, I’m sure it’ll start to go with him and I’m not upset about it. If he wants to go somewhere with a friend right after school instead of going straight home, it’s fine with me as long as I know about it. Without a phone, it’d be hard for him to make such plans on the fly, and let’s just say that planning ahead isn’t my ADHD-kid’s strong suit (yet—we’re working on it). As long as the expectation is set that he doesn’t use it during school, I think that’s okay; it can just live in his backpack until school is over.
What’s wrong with a 12 year old texting their friends? I had unfettered internet access by then and I turned out fine.
Good question, if you’ve turned out already you did not grow up with the intense constant social media environment. I haven’t seen anyone mention kids filming each other in school with the associated prank culture and social judgements. Remove that from the learning environment.
Texting is not the problem, it’s addictive apps and the fact that they are filming and posting each others childhoods. I’m too old to understand how that can be made right.
I actually have hope gen z and gen alpha will have constructive ideas how to moderate these forces while retaining what is beneficial, like connection to friends (texting).
Oh, nothing inherently wrong, but we’ve already had a couple of incidents of bad behavior. My kid got mad about something and sent some angry messages to a group chat that included racial slurs. It was a big learning experience to say the least (for all of us). Since then they’ve learned to unsend their messages, it seems, so while I can say my kiddo learned something, I have to hope that he also learned the things I needed him to learn. Being a parent is so much fun!
Kids used to go outside and shout racial slurs at the park, damn kids just texting them these days
Someone is downvoting everything
Indeed - three top level posts got downvotes from the same two accounts (with the second likely being an alt) within a minute.
I think this is a tough one to weigh in on depending where you come from. If I lived somewhere where the news talked about school shootings a lot, I might want my child to have a phone.
Go after the companies making addictive applications instead.
Go after the companies
Sir this is a Merica.
It’s not that hard. You keep it in your backpack, and never take it out the whole day while school is in session.
Just make them leave it off. Anyone caught using a phone gets it taken away the rest of the day.
That’s what we did with anything that was distracting when I was growing up. You can have it on you, but if they see you using it. It goes into the principal’s office until EOD.
Yeah the issue with this is that it becomes a major pain to enforce.
Tones of schools have no phone policies but no one enforces it.
Students won’t give them up and parents get upset because they can’t contact little Timmy or because his 1500 iPhone is in someone’s desk.
You don’t necessarily need to take it away, there are other avenues of punishment. Detention, Saturday school, no extra-curricular participation, suspension, etc. I was in high school right as dumb cell phones started to become a thing and those were our punishments if we were caught with phones out. We were allowed to have them, but they had to be either off or on silent, and in our bags (same as CD/MP3 players.) We were allowed to have them out to check them only during lunch and before and after school, or if we had to make a call, in the main office. I completely agree that kids shouldn’t be using phones AT ALL during class time, but there’s ways to allow them to exist and punish inappropriate usage that doesn’t require teachers taking them. Teachers shouldn’t be taking phones, that’s a liability risk and not worth the effort.
Every school in America is currently trying this approach, and it is failing miserably. It’s not as easy to enforce as you imagine.
Are you suggesting a phone would stop the shooting?
I was thinking about a shooting that happened in Norway. Some of the children called their parents. It didn’t stop anything horrible from happening, but they left the world knowing they were loved.
As a mom of two in a country where school shootings do happen far more frequently than anywhere else in the world, the US, I fully support completely banning phones from schools. The benefit to my kids education overall far outweighs the minuscule chance something would happen where they need their phones or a shooting took place. I say this also as a former American student who’s school did go on lock down a few times for active shooters in the area, like the time a local bank got robbed or when they found a “kill list” some kid made. It just doesn’t make sense to me to degrade education across the board in the very very off chance my kid, or even myself, was at the location of a school shooting.
How would it help for children to have phones during a school shooting? Everyone on the staff already has one.
For real. What are they gonna do if their kid specifically calls them directly? Go all Rambo on the shooter?
I’m a man with a very particular set of skills…
A parent is more likely to go rambo and be helpful than cops or teachers, just look at past school shootings where cops didnt do jack sht
The cops definitely need to act quickly. But no one is helped by a bunch of parents wandering around the scene of an active school shooter. Hell, half of them will bring their own guns, now you have multiple people without school credentials wandering around armed on campus. And the police have to chase after them instead of the actual shooter.
This is one of those cases where by trying to help your own kid, you’re actually putting them and a lot of other kids at increased danger.
When I was a kid in school, you had to go to the office to use the phone.
My school at least still had a payphone near the cafeteria we only got rid of in 2011.
Same, and I feel like that should be the only phone available. Us older millennials didn’t have phones, these kids don’t need them either during school. Now I’m not against them used at lunch time or breaks, that’s there time
To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.
I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.
I honestly think it would do a lot if all sorting algorithms were made open source.
We would quite quickly have mapped out how their algorithms work and which companies are the most predatory
The logic is stupid. There are adults that are just as addicted to social media and the Internet as much as any kid would be. What changes once they reach 18?
more ranting
The real issue isn’t being tackled or solved. This is yet another thing where we’re trying to solve the symptom but not the cause. The real issue is that the software or the platforms don’t take into consideration, by design, the well-being of the user.
We’re being forced to do what these stupid corporations like Meta, Google, Reddit, OpenAI et al aren’t doing already but should actually be doing. They don’t give AF because their whole objective is to make sure you are addicted and they can then harvest your data, feed you scams, etc.
This is pretty much like how the big corporations push the blame on the consumer for wasting plastic even though it’s the fucking corps choosing to sell their products that way in the fist place.
If software was designed with a kill-switch that could enforce better habits, this all wouldn’t be necessary. All we’re doing is delaying the inevitable and forcing them to seek alternatives that will be abused in the same manor social media or the Internet would be.
Why the fuck do they still sell cigarettes despite everybody knowing full well that it causes severe health issues?!
Can’t make this shit up!!!
P.S. - If the schools wish to put in place this kind of ban, then they have the authority to do so. Fine. That doesn’t fix the broken education system. Yes, it is broken.
I mean, I would vastly prefer your solution, but it’s much more difficult to step in and police every social media company such that they aren’t working against the user. This is basically a band aid, but a band aid is better than nothing imo
Was this never a thing in the US previously?
I distinctly remember from my school days (Western EU) mobile phones were to remain off and in backpacks.
And those were still the days we you just had this relatively dumb flipphone that could litterally only call and text and had a potato camera as it’s main novelty.
There was no access to internet, much less AI’s that can do your entire homework for you and they were already annoying to deal with for a teacher. Can’t imagine how that is now.
Yeah, when I was a kid growing up in the US, no cell phones during class was the standard. If you took it out (or if it wasn’t on silent and rang during class) you got a warning, then next time it would be taken away and given back at the end of class or end of the school day with escalating consequences for repeated violations.
In the late 70s / 80s we didn’t have cell phones, we had pocket electronic games - and that was just obvious: lunch / recess time only stuff, duh. Cell phones have that nasty “safety communication lifeline” hook that single purpose electronic games don’t have, but in reality they’re just 10,000x more addictive entertainment widgets than those old pocket games ever were.
I think a lot of U.S. schools got lazy about enforcing “phone off and put away” in class - to the point that kids feel like it’s a right. Same thing actually has crept all the way up into the armed forces even on deployment. If anybody were to ask me where we need to start drawing the line, I’d say right there: if you’re forward deployed at sea, you do NOT get unfettered access to a personal communication device that would have been the wet dream of every spy of the last century. Hell, if you’re enlisted at all you should have an armed forces standard issue phone for all your communication needs, complete with a pre-enlistment acknowledgement that all those communications ARE recorded and you WILL be held accountable for EVERYTHING you communicate through them. Personal phones should be locked down and even less accessible than firearms, because they ARE more dangerous to the missions.
Cell Phone bans hold up great until a school shooting happens and no one can call for help… then it’s all: “why didn’t anyone call for help”, “phone bans are dangerous to our kids”, “the trans kids are to blame”, “bitch bitch bitch transphobic bitching etc etc etc”.
And considering it’s America… School shootings are basically the Republican legally required National pastime. – Republicans actually get boners thinking about all the dead kids and they even get extra horny thinking about all the ways they can blame those deaths on LGBTQ+ folk… despite the fact that most school shooters lean towards right wing extremist philosophies… if you can even call pure evil incarnate a philosophy.
