10 ms·

It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber

70 points by jseliger 3y ago

jseliger 3y ago
Consistent with my teaching experiences and observations: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise/ https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract...
- wharvle 3y ago
  I know a lot of teachers, who’ve been teaching for quite a while. “Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Hell, my sister isn't able to watch TV without fiddling with her phone.
    - tnecniv 3y ago
      I can’t either. That dates back to me being a kid before the dawn of the smartphone. It doesn’t need to be a phone — I’ll play guitar while watching TV or work on a hobby coding project. I just need something to do with my hands. I learned as an adult I have ADHD. I’m high functioning so I never got tested as a kid, but it’s 100% a condition I always had. It made a lot of aspects of my life since childhood make sense.
  - tiberious726 3y ago
    Eh, teachers said the same thing back when I was school, well before the smartphone
  - tennisflyi 3y ago
    It is not the phone. It’s the obfuscation/“automagical” of everything
    - Izkata 3y ago
      I think you're thinking of a different thing, which is specifically in the context of that technology reaching a simple "it just works" state. People no longer need to fiddle with it, and from that, never learn how it works. First time I heard of it was 2013 [0], and have been experiencing it with some of our recent hires over the past few years. [0] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
bostonwalker 3y ago
https://archive.ph/8d1yV https://archive.ph/8d1yV
rand1239 3y ago
> Test scores have been falling for years Does low test score means students became dumber or they care less about tests?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- daft_pink 3y ago
  I don't think students care about group achievement tests. These aren't college entrance exams. I went to a top 1% school system and literally the only people who cared about those tests were the teachers and administrators, but we still scored very high on them.
- evanjrowley 3y ago
  Is there a strong argument that both of these are not equivalent? In many important aspects of life, failure to produce results takes precedence over such a distinction.
  - rand1239 3y ago
    Do you think low test scores are because of changes in societal conditioning or changes in DNA?
Qem 3y ago
Sometimes, while using chatting apps like WhatsApp, I get annoyed by people that despite knowing perfectly how to read and write, seem incapable of doing so over the cellphone. They just keep using annoying audio messages. This gets me pondering if cellphones + AI tools like converting text in pictures to audio will eventually cause illiteracy to be fashionable again. Perhaps people will just stop bothering learn how to read and write, if their gadgets can act as the equivalent to personal scribes in antiquity.
- johnkpaul 3y ago
  I've had this same thought and even direct comment to friends. The answer I've gotten basically every time has been that they send audios because they're driving while they're responding.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Um, most phones will do speech-to-text... So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
    - coev 3y ago
      And most phones, even after 12+ years of this feature, badly mangle spoken text when transcribing and require editing, while the audio stays intact when sent.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Fair. And the editing is hard to do while you're driving...
- bowsamic 3y ago
  I do it with my Buddhist priest bc it helps to feel more connected
- pasquinelli 3y ago
pierat 3y ago
So, are there any schools measured who already did ban smartphones? Did they fare better? Where's the control group? I can accept the assertions about smartphones, being massive attention grabbing devices. I know before I neuter all the "engagements", it chimes every minute. However, we're also seeing massive inflation for quite some time. Food costs are up, stability of living has been down for some time. How much of other variables are also contributing or overriding smartphone usage? (And blocking cell signals is a quick meeting with the FCC, if using active methods.)
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Smartphone usage was banned in almost all schools until around 2013.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Thanks for that 'fact', but that is nearly a generation old. I guess it could be used as a longitudinal study... But the speed of technology is speeding up (technology is accelerating technology). I can't see this being that useful. Again, where's the current schools that ban smartphones? That would be much more useful than something 11 years ago. (Yeah, 11 years...)
    - thehoff 3y ago
      I'm not sure if the 2013 comment is true or not but I think it's in relation to this (from the article): >For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement.
      - candiodari 3y ago
doix 3y ago
For what it's worth, my father is a civil engineering professor and has been complaining that students have been getting dumber for 30ish years at this point. That predates smartphones and laptops weren't a common occurrence in lecture halls yet. The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
- DrOctagon 3y ago
  I blame the move to lead free fuel.
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  And it has probably been true for 30 years. I’ve been increasingly dismayed at the stark loss of competence from what I already considered the low baseline of my peer group. In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  I think there is a multi-generational trend. 150 years ago graduating highschool used to really mean something, now it's almost impossible not to. And that's not because everybody got smarter. Even the abject idiots with awful attendance get handed diplomas. There are now school districts in America where none of the students are proficient with basic math and writing, but they're still graduating most if not all of their students.
- class3shock 3y ago
  See my comment above above the article graph, not showing absolute values is giving a biased view of the change.
  - doix 3y ago
    Sigh, I can't believe I fell for that old trick. Thanks for pointing it out.
api 3y ago
I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity. * There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform. * They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process. * It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos. * They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way. * They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention. * They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation. * They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model. * The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing. * Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy. The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit. All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system. If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- RyanHamilton 3y ago
  They are being made into consumers, for profit. Big companies don't want you producing mspaint artwork, writing little games yourself. They want you consuming generically bland content that they can place advertising beside to make you go buy stuff. There's a slightly similar story with food and why many kids eat sugar. Oh sure you have a choice but when everone has a phone, everyone has a TV, every store has a chocolate aisle at the counter and you've seen 1000 adverts by age 2. Is it really a choice.
syntaxing 3y ago
Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. It’s insane.
- arp242 3y ago
  > Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple lolwut? What's the context on this? But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education. That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
  - tfandango 3y ago
    Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.
- antiframe 3y ago
  I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor? For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
- 3y ago
whatamidoingyo 3y ago
Technology for sure made me dumber. I used to always know the date, could perform mental mathematics quite nicely, and remember things pretty easily. Ask me what day of the month it is and I'll have to check my phone. I hate that about myself - I'm too reliant.
- setname 3y ago
  Turns out there are a lot of things we don't need to know the data but it is enough to know how to get it. Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always avaliable when you needed it Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always available when you needed it Maps themselves are a shortcut tool!
  - mathieuh 3y ago
    Sometimes it's nice knowing how to do something simply for its own sake. I know lots of random little facts and calculation tricks which don't really help me in any major way but I enjoy and take pride in knowing them.
lupusreal 3y ago
Why did schools give up on enforcing cellphone bans? > what if there's an emergency?! This excuse didn't fly in the era of flip phones. Classrooms and the front office have phones which can be used in cases of genuine emergencies.
lbriner 3y ago
I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard. How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway. The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving. So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  That, or the curriculum is obsolete. If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Both/and, not either/or. Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video. But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
michaelt 3y ago
Personally, I am extremely bad at resisting distraction. Remote working is tough for me because if I'm in a meeting with some interesting and some boring parts, the moment a boring part starts I'll just quickly check my e-mails, and then I won't notice when the meeting gets interesting again. I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account. I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
- tfandango 3y ago
  On the issue with getting distracted on calls while working from home. I do the same, not because I am easily distracted but because I have a lot of work to do, and you are sitting there in front of your work, so you get back to it. On some calls, I think this is ok. For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
williamcotton 3y ago
The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment. I call bullshit. The kids are alright. You know who can’t handle the epistemic crisis of this global many-to-many information system? Anyone over the age of 50. Teenagers might have a new way to distract themselves from schooling but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does.
- dagw 3y ago
  but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does. Do you have teenage kids? Mine is falling for a new health/beauty/wellness 'spin' on a near weekly basis.
mercurialsolo 3y ago
One practical example when I was interviewing a candidate a few years back - I don't need to recall or remember anything, I can just google it up at the moment and learn it. Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect? Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  I don't have hard scientific evidence, but memory absolutely plays a role as far as I can tell. Even for simple deductions we rely constantly on toy examples or similar scenarios to that we're currently thinking, which can then guide our thinking further. For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
  - broscillator 3y ago
    This is interesting. Does that make you smarter? Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut? And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead? I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks. Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
    - willsoon 3y ago
      I also know a man who was born without a left hand. He said he never needed it anyway and wondered how people found that annoying thing useful.
nojvek 3y ago
What if tests are becoming harder and pointless? Do we have evidence that the set of questions asked on exams revolve around the same theme of questions? I remember doing my high school chemistry exams and one of the teachers intentionally set very obscure questions on topics we didn’t cover. We all did poorly and she used to say “students are getting dumber”. That was a decade ago. Turns out when the teacher got replaced and the new one asked questions from material we studied, “students are getting smarter”. ChatGPT and future models are training on entire corpus of available human knowledge including the various high school and college level exam set. So much of exams is pattern matching on existing questions asked from previous exams.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
I’d argue access to YouTube is probably one of the only things keeping the smart kids grades up at all.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Maybe it's not the phones per se, but the fact that most of the software on them is written by people whose business model is primarily about distracting people from whatever they set out to do and getting them to do something else instead. Learning requires a modicum of dopamine hygiene, and dopamine hygiene is bad for business.
class3shock 3y ago
This article commits the ever present sin of not showing the absolute values in a graph thus presenting an image that is biased in support of its supposition. I will mention, to not completely throw the author under the bus, that I suspect they chose this format because OECD does this themselves! See Page 9. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations.pdf https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Int... So if you just glance at it you can see science scores have dropped by 12 points between 2006 and 2022! That's terrible! Oh wait, but they dropped from 503 to 491... or less than 3%. For math scores the decline is 22 points! But it is from 502 to 480... or less than 5%. I should also point out that part of the article discussed survey results that showed more screen time was correlated to having lower scores but on Page 13 of the above OECD doc they have a graph showing higher math scores were correlated with school buildings being closed... How were those students learning if not remotely, on screens, all day? That being said, I think it's hard not to look at the statistic of 45% of students feeling anxious if they don't have their phone on them and not be worried about the mental health of the younger folks among us.
RGamma 3y ago
Not just students... And with A(G)I the stage for Idiocracy shall finally be set in its entirety.
onewheeltom 3y ago
Phones are making everyone dumber. At least more distracted.
rstuart4133 3y ago
The teachers think phones are detrimental, or at least Australian teachers do. I think my state was the last to implement a ban of them in schools: https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/mobile-phones-smartwatches-to-be-banned-in-qld-schools/282807 Personally I wouldn't know, but I'm happy to take the teachers word for it. On this point they seem to be pretty much of one mind.

70 points by jseliger 3y ago

Consistent with my teaching experiences and observations: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise/ https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract...

wharvle 3y ago
I know a lot of teachers, who’ve been teaching for quite a while. “Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Hell, my sister isn't able to watch TV without fiddling with her phone.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    I can’t either. That dates back to me being a kid before the dawn of the smartphone. It doesn’t need to be a phone — I’ll play guitar while watching TV or work on a hobby coding project. I just need something to do with my hands. I learned as an adult I have ADHD. I’m high functioning so I never got tested as a kid, but it’s 100% a condition I always had. It made a lot of aspects of my life since childhood make sense.
- tiberious726 3y ago
  Eh, teachers said the same thing back when I was school, well before the smartphone
- tennisflyi 3y ago
  It is not the phone. It’s the obfuscation/“automagical” of everything
  - Izkata 3y ago
    I think you're thinking of a different thing, which is specifically in the context of that technology reaching a simple "it just works" state. People no longer need to fiddle with it, and from that, never learn how it works. First time I heard of it was 2013 [0], and have been experiencing it with some of our recent hires over the past few years. [0] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

bostonwalker 3y ago

https://archive.ph/8d1yV https://archive.ph/8d1yV

rand1239 3y ago

> Test scores have been falling for years Does low test score means students became dumber or they care less about tests?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
daft_pink 3y ago
I don't think students care about group achievement tests. These aren't college entrance exams. I went to a top 1% school system and literally the only people who cared about those tests were the teachers and administrators, but we still scored very high on them.
evanjrowley 3y ago
Is there a strong argument that both of these are not equivalent? In many important aspects of life, failure to produce results takes precedence over such a distinction.
- rand1239 3y ago
  Do you think low test scores are because of changes in societal conditioning or changes in DNA?

Qem 3y ago

Sometimes, while using chatting apps like WhatsApp, I get annoyed by people that despite knowing perfectly how to read and write, seem incapable of doing so over the cellphone. They just keep using annoying audio messages. This gets me pondering if cellphones + AI tools like converting text in pictures to audio will eventually cause illiteracy to be fashionable again. Perhaps people will just stop bothering learn how to read and write, if their gadgets can act as the equivalent to personal scribes in antiquity.

johnkpaul 3y ago
I've had this same thought and even direct comment to friends. The answer I've gotten basically every time has been that they send audios because they're driving while they're responding.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Um, most phones will do speech-to-text... So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
  - coev 3y ago
    And most phones, even after 12+ years of this feature, badly mangle spoken text when transcribing and require editing, while the audio stays intact when sent.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Fair. And the editing is hard to do while you're driving...
bowsamic 3y ago
I do it with my Buddhist priest bc it helps to feel more connected
pasquinelli 3y ago

pierat 3y ago

So, are there any schools measured who already did ban smartphones? Did they fare better? Where's the control group? I can accept the assertions about smartphones, being massive attention grabbing devices. I know before I neuter all the "engagements", it chimes every minute. However, we're also seeing massive inflation for quite some time. Food costs are up, stability of living has been down for some time. How much of other variables are also contributing or overriding smartphone usage? (And blocking cell signals is a quick meeting with the FCC, if using active methods.)

jollyllama 3y ago
Smartphone usage was banned in almost all schools until around 2013.
- pierat 3y ago
  Thanks for that 'fact', but that is nearly a generation old. I guess it could be used as a longitudinal study... But the speed of technology is speeding up (technology is accelerating technology). I can't see this being that useful. Again, where's the current schools that ban smartphones? That would be much more useful than something 11 years ago. (Yeah, 11 years...)
  - thehoff 3y ago
    I'm not sure if the 2013 comment is true or not but I think it's in relation to this (from the article): >For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it’s systematically reducing student achievement.
    - candiodari 3y ago

doix 3y ago

For what it's worth, my father is a civil engineering professor and has been complaining that students have been getting dumber for 30ish years at this point. That predates smartphones and laptops weren't a common occurrence in lecture halls yet. The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.

DrOctagon 3y ago
I blame the move to lead free fuel.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
And it has probably been true for 30 years. I’ve been increasingly dismayed at the stark loss of competence from what I already considered the low baseline of my peer group. In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
lupusreal 3y ago
I think there is a multi-generational trend. 150 years ago graduating highschool used to really mean something, now it's almost impossible not to. And that's not because everybody got smarter. Even the abject idiots with awful attendance get handed diplomas. There are now school districts in America where none of the students are proficient with basic math and writing, but they're still graduating most if not all of their students.
class3shock 3y ago
See my comment above above the article graph, not showing absolute values is giving a biased view of the change.
- doix 3y ago
  Sigh, I can't believe I fell for that old trick. Thanks for pointing it out.

api 3y ago

I’m on the edge of concluding that the iPhone was actually a bad thing and that the mobile revolution is on balance bad for humanity. * There is something addictive about this form factor plus the touch interface, especially when combined with the way apps have designed to maximize the effect. This is by far the worst thing about this platform. * They are “too” easy to use. Before the iPhone and iOS (and a bit later Android) people were becoming “computer literate.” Remember that phrase? They were learning to actually use information technology. Mobile halted that process. * It’s a medium for consumption, not production. Input with them is slow and cumbersome and best suited for short sound bites like tweets or TikTok videos. * They bias media toward short interaction and therefore shallow content. You can't express complex ideas that way. * They constantly interrupt and combined with short form interaction and addiction are destructive to attention. * They were built from the ground up to be walled gardens that crush experimentation and innovation. * They are surveillance machines, and lend themselves to significantly more intrusive surveillance than most other tech except maybe cars… and cars are just trying to ape the mobile surveillance model. * The ecosystem is toxic and built around exploiting the user through addiction, surveillance, and impulsive purchasing. * Since they are so constrained, they supercharged the trend of all compute moving to the cloud where you own nothing and have no privacy. The phrase “cigarettes of the mind” seems to fit. All the useful things my phone does could be done with a much simpler device providing a map, a way to text and read email, and a browser. Most everything else is superfluous and a large amount of it is actively harmful, especially to young people and those not tech savvy enough to avoid the predatory aspects of the system. If you could order Uber or Lyft through a browser I would be tempted to get one of those hipster minimal phones. There’s no technical reason you couldn’t. They just want you to use the app to maximize tracking.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RyanHamilton 3y ago
They are being made into consumers, for profit. Big companies don't want you producing mspaint artwork, writing little games yourself. They want you consuming generically bland content that they can place advertising beside to make you go buy stuff. There's a slightly similar story with food and why many kids eat sugar. Oh sure you have a choice but when everone has a phone, everyone has a TV, every store has a chocolate aisle at the counter and you've seen 1000 adverts by age 2. Is it really a choice.

syntaxing 3y ago

Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. It’s insane.

arp242 3y ago
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple lolwut? What's the context on this? But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education. That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
jjulius 3y ago
>Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
- tfandango 3y ago
  Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.
antiframe 3y ago
I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor? For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
3y ago

whatamidoingyo 3y ago

Technology for sure made me dumber. I used to always know the date, could perform mental mathematics quite nicely, and remember things pretty easily. Ask me what day of the month it is and I'll have to check my phone. I hate that about myself - I'm too reliant.

setname 3y ago
Turns out there are a lot of things we don't need to know the data but it is enough to know how to get it. Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always avaliable when you needed it Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always available when you needed it Maps themselves are a shortcut tool!
- mathieuh 3y ago
  Sometimes it's nice knowing how to do something simply for its own sake. I know lots of random little facts and calculation tricks which don't really help me in any major way but I enjoy and take pride in knowing them.

lupusreal 3y ago

Why did schools give up on enforcing cellphone bans? > what if there's an emergency?! This excuse didn't fly in the era of flip phones. Classrooms and the front office have phones which can be used in cases of genuine emergencies.

lbriner 3y ago

I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard. How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway. The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving. So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.

HPsquared 3y ago
That, or the curriculum is obsolete. If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Both/and, not either/or. Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video. But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.

michaelt 3y ago

Personally, I am extremely bad at resisting distraction. Remote working is tough for me because if I'm in a meeting with some interesting and some boring parts, the moment a boring part starts I'll just quickly check my e-mails, and then I won't notice when the meeting gets interesting again. I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account. I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.

tfandango 3y ago
On the issue with getting distracted on calls while working from home. I do the same, not because I am easily distracted but because I have a lot of work to do, and you are sitting there in front of your work, so you get back to it. On some calls, I think this is ok. For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.

williamcotton 3y ago

The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment. I call bullshit. The kids are alright. You know who can’t handle the epistemic crisis of this global many-to-many information system? Anyone over the age of 50. Teenagers might have a new way to distract themselves from schooling but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does.

dagw 3y ago
but they do not fall for the spin the way your dad does. Do you have teenage kids? Mine is falling for a new health/beauty/wellness 'spin' on a near weekly basis.

mercurialsolo 3y ago

One practical example when I was interviewing a candidate a few years back - I don't need to recall or remember anything, I can just google it up at the moment and learn it. Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect? Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
I don't have hard scientific evidence, but memory absolutely plays a role as far as I can tell. Even for simple deductions we rely constantly on toy examples or similar scenarios to that we're currently thinking, which can then guide our thinking further. For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
- broscillator 3y ago
  This is interesting. Does that make you smarter? Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut? And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead? I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks. Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
  - willsoon 3y ago
    I also know a man who was born without a left hand. He said he never needed it anyway and wondered how people found that annoying thing useful.

nojvek 3y ago

What if tests are becoming harder and pointless? Do we have evidence that the set of questions asked on exams revolve around the same theme of questions? I remember doing my high school chemistry exams and one of the teachers intentionally set very obscure questions on topics we didn’t cover. We all did poorly and she used to say “students are getting dumber”. That was a decade ago. Turns out when the teacher got replaced and the new one asked questions from material we studied, “students are getting smarter”. ChatGPT and future models are training on entire corpus of available human knowledge including the various high school and college level exam set. So much of exams is pattern matching on existing questions asked from previous exams.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

I’d argue access to YouTube is probably one of the only things keeping the smart kids grades up at all.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Maybe it's not the phones per se, but the fact that most of the software on them is written by people whose business model is primarily about distracting people from whatever they set out to do and getting them to do something else instead. Learning requires a modicum of dopamine hygiene, and dopamine hygiene is bad for business.

class3shock 3y ago

This article commits the ever present sin of not showing the absolute values in a graph thus presenting an image that is biased in support of its supposition. I will mention, to not completely throw the author under the bus, that I suspect they chose this format because OECD does this themselves! See Page 9. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations.pdf https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202022%20Insights%20and%20Int... So if you just glance at it you can see science scores have dropped by 12 points between 2006 and 2022! That's terrible! Oh wait, but they dropped from 503 to 491... or less than 3%. For math scores the decline is 22 points! But it is from 502 to 480... or less than 5%. I should also point out that part of the article discussed survey results that showed more screen time was correlated to having lower scores but on Page 13 of the above OECD doc they have a graph showing higher math scores were correlated with school buildings being closed... How were those students learning if not remotely, on screens, all day? That being said, I think it's hard not to look at the statistic of 45% of students feeling anxious if they don't have their phone on them and not be worried about the mental health of the younger folks among us.

RGamma 3y ago

Not just students... And with A(G)I the stage for Idiocracy shall finally be set in its entirety.

onewheeltom 3y ago

Phones are making everyone dumber. At least more distracted.

rstuart4133 3y ago

The teachers think phones are detrimental, or at least Australian teachers do. I think my state was the last to implement a ban of them in schools: https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/mobile-phones-smartwatches-to-be-banned-in-qld-schools/282807 Personally I wouldn't know, but I'm happy to take the teachers word for it. On this point they seem to be pretty much of one mind.