16 ms·

I think this is a mainly positive move. Mobile phones are massive distractions to children, especially in a school context. When it comes to young children, I a

• sgift 9y ago
  > School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as reading books, and nailing reliance on phones into children is not something we want to be doing in schools. School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as being outside, and nailing reliance on books into children is not something we want to be doing in schools. Slightly paraphrased, same content. Care to elaborate what it is that makes phones more undesirable than books? At the moment this reads like an "in my times .." rant.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    Phones tend to be distraction machines, books much less so.
    • rejschaap 9y ago
      Books are distraction machines on a different level. When I become immersed in books I tend to deprive myself of sleep, neglect my daily chores and procrastinate my work. I do feel much better about periods where I read a lot, otherwise I tend to incessantly grab my phone to check blogs, news sites and stock/crypto prices.
      • adrianN 9y ago
        Books don't exploit every psychological trick there is to try to cram as many ads in your face as possible
        • sgift 9y ago
          I'm not sure when the last time was I saw an ad on my phone. The only example I can think of would be the Kindle app telling me of comparable books, which seems no different from all the tech books I have which have book recommendations on the last pages.
          • pixl97 9y ago
            >I'm not sure when the last time was I saw an ad on my phone. Are you running a flip phone? Because most smart phones I see these days have no less than 10 apps that can present ads or notifications at almost any given time.
            • s73ver_ 9y ago
              No, they're just trying to smugly suggest that they're superior to everyone else because they've rooted their phone to run an ad blocker.
              • sgift 9y ago
                My phone is not rooted (and it is a smart phone). Better luck next time.
      • nicolas_t 9y ago
        I would say that as someone who is very addicted to books and will tend to escape reality through novels that, yes, for a certain kind of people, books can be much worse than mobile phones. I've had days where I didn't eat because I was immersed in a story, I will skip sleep, neglect my work, not shower when I'm inside a good novel. And, that behavior will continue until I've finished reading the entire series.
      • aaimnr 9y ago
        Books are not distraction machines in the sense phones are. Book may be a distraction from something else, but when you are already reading a book, you are concentrated, attention is stable and all cognitive faculties are being trained in positive direction (keeping the whole story in mind, imagining the plot etc.). Phones, on the other hand, are distracting you while you are interacting with them. Attention is switching constantly between apps, even within a single app you may be constantly swiping through content in order to get gratification. In this mode you're UNLEARNING the stability of attention, that books help develop. There may be specific apps and games that cultivate concentration as well, but the way the average kid uses their phone is definitively detrimental to their mental capabilities.
    • posterboy 9y ago
      I used to read comic books in class, though that might be a stretch of the term "book".
  • saurik 9y ago
    You can't rely on books as you can't carry enough of them with you for them to replace having to know things, and a phone is a fundamentally different thing from even an infinite number of books anyway, as it is a tool that let's you communicate--in private--with people around the world. It is totally legitimate for someone to have an issue with one of these objects and not the other entirely different object.
    • sgift 9y ago
      Well, maybe I use my phone very different from others. For me the "read things on it" aspect is the most important part. Before I had a smartphone (I got my first two years ago) I tended to carry five or six books around all the time. Now I don't need to anymore and can still read whenever I want.
      • hycaria 9y ago
        Good for you, but maybe consider we're talking about children there, who probably didn't even pick up the habit of reading yet ? (read about the catastrophic reading proficiency in children nowadays if you have any doubts about this kind of claim).
      • yoz-y 9y ago
        Compared to phones, books offer delayed gratification. Although it is possible to come to a library and only look at the first and last page of a hundred books, not many people do so. Stuff one can get on phones are however massive dopamine inducing machines.
  • isfield 9y ago
    In the event of long term catastrophic power failure. Books don't stop working ;) slightly tongue in cheek (I'm no Luddite) also slightly not...
• exDM69 9y ago
  Cyberbullying is another big motivator for banning mobile phones. Perhaps even bigger than the distraction aspect. It's also frustrating for teachers when bullying is happening online, outside of school hours but it still takes place between students in the classroom. It should not be the teacher's business but it obviously impacts schoolwork in the classroom. I think this is a smart move unless someone can show a study that's showing positive impact from using smartphones in schools.
  • zxd1098 9y ago
    Right, protect kids from the world so they don’t know how to handle bullying as an adult.
    • scott_karana 9y ago
      This ban doesn't protect them from regular in-person bullying. Just crowd-sourced, Internet scale bullying. Ever had your photo released mockingly, and been laughed at by an entire school? Or even millions?
      • clu3l355 9y ago
        How does a phone ban stop this from happening? Not to mention the challenge of actually enforcing it. I suspect the kids who want to take pictures of others and upload them mockingly will still do it.
        • scott_karana 9y ago
          True, but it does make it much harder to do while at school (if enforced passably), which is likely when much of it occurs already.
• opportune 9y ago
  Digital technology has its place, but in its present form, it's too easy to get distracted. My nephews would probably spend 10x as much time looking up youtube videos and playing pay-to-win apps than they would googling things if they had access to their phones in class. I agree that in general the drive to "put a computer in every classroom" is absolutely moronic; in general, I think teachers don't adequately understand which technology is useful and cost-effective and which is not, and especially for teaching administrators, "technology" is just some nebulous black-box codeword for "expensive equipment." However, there is value in teaching children how to use technology effectively. For example, very few people know how to properly craft a google search, or how to discern a reliable source from a poor one. A lot of people, and especially children, can't even tell the difference between sponsored content and regular content. These are very important to teach children and I think this should be done in a scholastic context, as few parents would even have the skills to teach this. The problem is teaching kids these skills without distracting them - the secondary problem is that they're probably not learning from people who are very knowledgable themselves. I think the ideal solution is some kind of locked-down, school-only (as in, it must physically stay within the school) tablet or laptop. It's probably counter-productive to spend too much time teaching children to write/read from physical media when >95% of a child's exposure to media from now to the foreseeable future will be digital. Ironically maybe our best bet is a "digital typewriter"
  • zxd1098 9y ago
    It seems like you’re hanging onto the old world a bit. Digital typewriter? These kids will be typing every day of their lives as adults. The cost of not using technology is higher than you think, and seems to be based in holding onto the past and protecting kids fro the world.
  • nasredin 9y ago
    Yes. Also IMHO... Critical thinking (it's a real philosophical discipline with textbooks and etc.) should be taught in every school. Recognizing fallacies and bad claims is frankly much more useful to me everyday than almost everything else I learned.
• d13 9y ago
  If phones are providing children with a more stimulating experience than school, the schools themselves should improve their product, rather than banning the competition.
  • a3_nm 9y ago
    I don't think the competition is fair. The requirement to teach useful things to children makes it substantially harder to design experiences that are as stimulating as pointless distractions.
    • d13 9y ago
      I agree, schools have failed on this point.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    The problem / challenge there is that school isn't very stimulating, or, not for everyone - school, especially elementary and secondary school, are based more on discipline and forcing people to learn a basic curriculum, whether they like it or not. If they get distracted by their phones or whatever they'll run behind, score low on their tests, end up in a lower secondary / tertiary education, aaaand have to settle for an okay job. Kids are very easily distracted, and the current school systems are designed to deal with those by removing distractions and forcing a bit of discipline. The alternative would be more personally optimized education, but that's a lot more expensive and harder to scale - and teachers are already an underpaid and overworked demographic. Besides, kids that age use their phone more for social contacts and distractions than learning stuff.
  • crdoconnor 9y ago
    So in your view a school's main product is entertainment?
    • fwn 9y ago
      Not Op, but if it only were entertaining. If I had to guess, probably 80% of my school time was idle time so boring it felt like sensual deprivation. There was little else to do than bullying each other. If phones would've been a thing back then I'd remember rich experiences instead of the destructive time sink I remember now. (Germany, school from 1996 until 2009; currently working on econ PhD)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• virtualized 9y ago
  Cave walls are massive distractions to children, especially in a school context. When it comes to young children, I am sceptic to the use of painting in education in general. School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as listening to stories, and nailing reliance on walls into children is not something we want to be doing in schools. That's what your comment will sound like in 100 years.
  • marchenko 9y ago
    Unless those cave walls could be neatly concealed in a pocket or under a desk and served up a stream of rapidly-changing Skinner-optimised content, accompanied by irregular purposefully distracting notification signals, I don't think this is a good analogy. Why is it so hard to believe that we are getting better at hacking our attention spans? Indeed, the cave wall comparison highlights the difference between stimulation and distraction. Daydreaming while staring at the walls of Lascaux would be a significantly more useful activity than having your attention micro-partitioned by the demands of a Snap streak.
    • chrisdbaldwin 9y ago
      Look at it this way, some people have broke escape velocity and reached orbit. Those that have reached orbit are now laser beaming down the rockets still trying to reach orbit. That's how the US education system works and why it is so shit. We pay orbiters to prevent others from reaching orbit. It's quite crowded and no one wants the competition.
• baldfat 9y ago
  Children given unsupervised access to the internet is ridiculous. People freak out if a predator lives int heir neighborhood but they let their child be accessible to millions of predators via their phone or table. This is why kids initial exposure to porn is 8 in the US and 10 when kids are getting addicted. This is all happening prior to puberty. I still remember working with children and teens and found out, through the police and parents, that a few of the kids 11 to 15 were using their webcams to get people to buy them stuff online. This was in the late 90s. I am a dad of 5 now. I don't own desktop computers and they are in common areas. When my oldest were teens they were their phones but they are in my room after 9 PM. Saved the drama of messaging fights and drama. No phones at dinner, no phones on family events unless it was end of the visit. My job as a parent is to help them become awesome adult selves and learning not to be addicted to anything from drugs, alcohol, laziness or phones is part of being a parent.
  • chrisper 9y ago
    As someone who had unsupervised access to the internet as a child, I turned out to be just fine. But maybe beacause the internet was way different back then. (I am talking dial up era intrent). To me after all these years the "new" internet got a dystopian image. If I had a child, I'd provide them unsupervised access to the internet I remember, but certainly not to the one from today.
    • 0xWilliam 9y ago
      ofc the internet was different back then.
    • nasredin 9y ago
      Actually that's not a bad idea. You can simulate 56k dialup speed on a router and the kids will probably avoid Facebook and other heavy sites and stick to WikiPedia as a Pavlovian response. As a bonus they will have to masturbate to images, just like in the old days. You can also disconnect them when they get out of line thus simulating the complete dialup experience.
    • pishpash 9y ago
• lossolo 9y ago
  It's more than that. It's about socializing too. Now on breaks most kids just look into their phones, they don't teach themselves how to make social relations, how to communicate face to face with other members of society and how to coexist in group. This creates pathology which makes those kids socially handicapped in their future life.