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What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation
- teeray 3y agoMaybe I'm out of the loop... smartphones are allowed in the first place? When did that happen? In my high school, cell phones and ipods (at the time) were to be in lockers and turned off during the day. It was an insta-detention if you were seen using one.
- forinti 3y agoYou wouldn't believe what an issue this can turn into. Some parents will fight for their kid's right to use cellphones.
- Firmwarrior 3y agoPretty wild.. what's the point in even making them go to school if you're just going to let them goof off on their phone all day? Just let them sit around at home watching TikTok until they turn 18 and have to get a minimum wage job
- jupp0r 3y agoSchools could teach kids to do something useful with their phones so they can use tech to their advantage later in life? How ho you think kids that never learned to responsibly use tech will do in college when they are on their own?
- Almondsetat 3y agoKids can't even mutiply two numbers and they are supposed to learn the most complex device ever made from school? lol
- wharvle 3y agoThis right here. Parents ultimately run schools, and a surprising proportion of them get really pissy if their kids can't have phones in class. Schools aren't letting kids have phones because they want to. My wife used to teach and had multiple parents, over a handful of years, who'd semi-frequently call their kids while they were in class. Just to, like, chat. A lot more would text with them, again, usually just to shoot the shit. Lots of parents are... let's be kind I guess and go with really fucking weird.
- shadowgovt 3y agoParents now are the generation that grew up with ubiquitous communication connectivity. For them, not being in touch is going to feel weird.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoWhat's worse, in states with voucher systems, parents can remove not just their kid from the school, but their tax dollars too--so the teachers have to tolerate the phones or funding will dry up for the other students who are trying to pay attention. I think coupling where your kids go to school with where your tax dollars are going severely misunderstands the point of having there be tax dollars for schools in the first place. Having kids shouldn't give you special powers re: how your taxes are used.
- cwalv 3y ago> I think coupling where your kids go to school with where your tax dollars are going severely misunderstands the point of having there be tax dollars for schools in the first place. It makes some sense considering the people with kids probably care much more about the details in how those dollars are spent. Not that there are not people without kids who are equally interested (esp. those who work in education), but on avg parents will have much more interest and much more visibility into how it's spent. What's weird to me is thinking that parents shouldn't get some "special powers". It's like saying the people who live in a particular police precinct shouldn't get any special consideration about how that precinct is run.
- jonlucc 3y agoAt my work, there are certain areas that we are not allowed to have any cameras, and that includes all personal cell phones. I have a colleague whose daughter was at school during an active shooter incident, and she was able to use her phone but he was not able to receive her calls or texts. She was not killed, but I am glad she had a cell phone that day, and I wish he had his too.
- pge 3y agopolicy shouldn't be defined by extreme outlier cases
- wharvle 3y agoI've run the numbers on "average likelihood of a given student being present during any kind of shooting on school grounds—the overwhelming majority of which aren't the kind of shooting one thinks of when one sees the term 'school shooting', anyway—at any point during 13 years of k-12 school, in the US" and it helped me conclude it's not a thing worth worrying about, even a little. (I do have kids in school)
- pokerface_86 3y ago[dead]
- mingus88 3y agoThe light phone mentioned in this article can still make calls and send texts This seems to be more of a ban on social media apps in school, which I 100% support and honestly wouldn’t mind it being nationwide.
- tempest_ 3y agoThose light phones are interesting products and I thought about trying one at one point but seen some mixed reviews.
- Podgajski 3y agoWhy can’t someone just make a phone. I don’t need a phone that plays music or can listen to podcast. I just need a phone that can make calls and make texts. I think their problem is they wanted this phone to still be like a smart phone.
- gambiting 3y agoYou can still buy a super basic Nokia phone that pretty much only does that, and it lasts like a month of battery - I own one, it's great to carry around in places where you might not want to risk your super expensive smartphone. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nokia-1-77-Inch-Feature-Phone-Single-Black/dp/B081DDS4HK/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1J3WYTSPPU1DT&keywords=nokia+phone&qid=1705507109&sprefix=nokia%2Caps%2C88&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nokia-1-77-Inch-Feature-Phone-Singl... I'd happily give this to my own child so they can reach me in emergencies, but there is no risk of them going on TikTok or anything else. It's "just" a phone.
- Podgajski 3y agoThen, why didn’t that school Just give them those Nokia phones? Because this is an advertising puff piece for the light phone. I’m going to guarantee you that someone in that company has connections to that school.
- gambiting 3y agoI don't know. And maybe you're right - but I'd bet it's the attempt by the school the quell all kinds of complaints from parents like "what if my kid gets suddenly lost on the way home? what then????" by giving them a phone that has some mapping capability, it's just crap - but I guess it will do in an emergency.
- shannifin 3y agoAround here, unfortunately yes. The general argument I've heard is that kids need to be able to contact parents in an emergency, or something.
- boeingUH60 3y agoThere should be a public phone (manned by an administrator or teacher) that parents can call and get connected to their child or vice versa. Allowing smartphones for everyone is an unbelievable distraction.
- vwcx 3y agoMost schools have maintained this for the past 40+ years.
- gremlinsinc 3y agoWith the rise in school shootings (I graduated in 98, Columbine was for me the first, and one of the deadliest obviously, but ever since it's just escalated).. I've got two boys 4 and 6, they don't have cellphones now, but I freak and feel I need to do damage control/therapy with them everytime they have an active shooter drill. We only ever had to deal with Tornado, and Fire drills. ADHD tangent aside my point is: I can see the need these days, however I like the idea of a dumb phone that just has the basics. Definitely no tiktok, facebook, etc.
- boeingUH60 3y agoTo be honest, I think your fear is overblown, but I understand how it is having kids you love. But let's assume a rare mass shooting actually happens (I forbid this thought)...will there be any point calling your kids? A phone will be more of a liability than an asset at that point..
- wharvle 3y agoThe fear of harm from shooter drills that the parent expressed is, sadly, not overblown. That we have so many school shootings is shameful. That we've decided a good reaction to them is to traumatize huge numbers of students (and staff! My former-teacher wife has stories...) over something that's, as shameful as the cases of it are, in fact extremely unlikely (specifically, an indiscriminate mass shooting at a primary or secondary school) is also shameful.
- semanticist 3y agoIt's a boarding school, so something a bit different than your standard high school. Imagine if the school rules were no smartphones... at all, except on the school holidays and maybe weekends. Slightly different context.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoMost of my wife's high school students write their papers on their phones.
- rootusrootus 3y agoCan't speak for the rest of the country, but in our district smartphones were allowed for a couple years. I don't know the rationale about allowing them in the first place, but it happened in 2020. It took them two years to decide it was an unmitigated disaster and they promptly re-banned all electronics. No music players, phones, headphones, etc. Get caught and it gets confiscated and your parents have to come retrieve it. Maybe that's draconian. But maybe it's just good sense -- our high school is close to #1 in the state for academic performance, so they are doing something right.
- brayhite 3y agoMy 4 year old son has an iPhone, and we’d sooner homeschool him than keep him enrolled if the only schools we could send afford would confiscate or ban it. I recognize we’re an exception, but he has type 1 diabetes, and his iPhone is essentially a medical device that sends us updates on his glucose levels throughout the day. I’d hope schools at least make exceptions for cases like this.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> I’d hope schools at least make exceptions for cases like this. Of course, they absolutely do. I imagine failure to do so would be an ADA violation, at least.
- wharvle 3y agoWhat's wild to me is that almost all the individual devices a smartphone represents, not even counting the phone itself, would have been confiscated if used in class, for my generation (and I'm a millennial!) Flashlight? LOL, they might not even wait for you to use it, just assume there's no way you're not going to do something dumb with it, and take it. A handheld gaming device? Insta-yoink. Note-passing? Notes confiscated. Basically an ordered-from-a-back-of-magazine-ad spy kit of a miniature camera and voice recorder? GONE. And you might be on the way to the office for a chat, and parents called, if you'd actually been using any of it. A glossy fashion magazine, seen out at any point that's not explicitly totally-free time? In the teacher's desk. (and that's on the tame side of the kind of thing one might be looking at on one's phone...) A portable mini-TV or small radio? Jesus, of course you can't have that in class. But smartphones? Nope, they can have those. Which is the exact same as having all those things above, and way more. It's such a crazily-different direction for policy.
- z500 3y agoHell, at my school you couldn't even listen to a CD at lunch. It boggles the mind.
- balfirevic 3y ago> Hell, at my school you couldn't even listen to a CD at lunch. It boggles the mind. That we accept such authoritarianism in schools? It certainly does.
- wharvle 3y agoPart of your job is to keep kids on a schedule. Shit gets messed up and learning is disrupted for many students if you don't. It's also your ass on the line if you don't know where kids are, within reason, all day long. Devices that don't necessarily, but do tend, to make keeping the schedule harder, exist and aren't needed for education. ("What does a CD player at lunch have to do with that?" if enough kids start listening to music at lunch I 100% guarantee you issues getting them to the next class on time increase in frequency a ton, and that's before you consider that every thing you add like that to a school environment increases the rate and severity of, ah, physical disputes) So yeah, of course you ban their use. "You could just only ban them for students for whom they're a problem." Yeah, you could, but now you're dealing with even more angry parents up your ass because "you're not being fair, and you're singling out my kid". And you're burning more time you don't have dealing with these issues ad-hoc. No, it has to be a blanket ban. Schools could be a lot less authoritarian if they didn't have to serve kids (or parents...) who can't handle a looser approach, and if they could simply kick out very disruptive kids, et c. But they can't, so they're a lot worse, in a lot of ways, than they hypothetically could be.
- tennisflyi 3y agoTotally out of the loop
- Podgajski 3y agoI mean, I agree that cell phones can cause interruptions in schools, but doing this at a place like Buxton compared to some of the public schools I’ve taught in, well, that’s a whole different story. “Buxton School is a private, coeducational, college preparatory, boarding and day school for grades 9–12 located in Williamstown, Massachusetts.“ I mean, it’s one thing to take away a kid, cell phone and offer them nothing and then another thing to take away their cell phone and offer them “When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.”
- schnitzelstoat 3y agoYeah, it seems like you'd basically always get good outcomes in a school like this. If the students become disruptive instead of just wasting time on their phone it could have a negative impact in many schools.
- galdosdi 3y agoLook at it the other way -- the fact that even such an elite school was having serious problems when they were allowing smartphones, shows how pernicious their influence is in education. It's like putting a TV with full access cable on every desk in the classroom. It's no wonder literacy is going down instead of up for the first time in decades.
- jt2190 3y ago> Tuition for the 2023-2024 academic year is USD 62 000 for a boarding student and USD 33 000 for a day student. The fee covers room, board, academic study, basic materials for courses, lab fees, field trips, tickets to cultural events, athletics (including ski passes) and programs and activities held on campus.
- axus 3y agoGoogle says enrollment was 78 students nine years ago, let's guess it's around 100 now; 25 kids per grade, managing those cell phones is a tractable problem compared to a school with 1000 kids.
- exhilaration 3y agoSimilar phone ban in Minnesota discussed last year (221 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522142
- tallowen 3y agoIn talking to my teacher friends, one thing that I hadn't understood is how being the parent of a child has changed due to mobile devices since I was a child. Parents obviously worry about their children. Parents exist in a community of other parents that uses phones belonging to children to keep track of their children. It was very hard for me to wrap my head around how strongly parents expect to be able to reach their children at any point in time. Most solutions (e.g. Yonder Pouches) end up shutting down location services not to mention the ability of students to say "yes I'm find". This leads to way more resistance to these policies that I ever would have expected!
- nyc111 3y agoThose phones contain all the knowledge the school pretends to teach the students. Techers are worried because they see telephones as competition. This would be a nice experiment: Divide the students into two groups and let one group come to school without phones and let the other group stay home and learn the same material from their phones. If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students staying at home with their phones will learn the material much faster. The only good thing about the school is that you get to hang out with your peers. The education system is not good for teaching.
- poulpy123 3y agoLMAO
- boeingUH60 3y ago> If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students staying at home with their phones will learn the material much faster. Extremely wrong. Most people don't have the will and motivation to learn complex stuff on their own without external pressure, especially stuff they're not naturally interested in. There's a reason people still go to college despite all the knowledge being available freely online. There's great value in learning in a structured environment alongside peers with whom you can freely exchange knowledge.
- slater 3y agoHmmm... 3,000+ years of education, or some rando on hn. Tough call, folks!
- blackmesaind 3y agoChildren, by and large, are not very good at self control. Give them free reign to learn at their own pace, and you will see some do very well, and many do extremely poorly. The public education system (at least primary/secondary) is not about maximizing a few students' learning potential, but the average education of the collective. Our current system does need major reforms, but to send kids home with phones to learn on their own? Not an effective solution imo.
- galdosdi 3y ago
- cabaalis 3y agoI guess I date myself, but cell phones were banned in my high school because of a strong association at the time with drug dealers. A teacher seeing one was equivalent to seeing contraband.
- dylan604 3y agoin the mid-90s, i was branded a drug dealer because i bought a pager. this was essentially when i finally succumbed to the realization that people are idiots.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated from a few months ago: Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here's What Happened https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/technology/florida-school-cellphone-tiktok-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/technology/florida-school...
- seydor 3y agoI hope this is the beginning of the new anti-smoking campaigns
- 33a 3y agoThis is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw sweeping generalizations here.
- rapind 3y agoAgreed, but some of these surveys quoted are troublesome. > A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class. > When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.
- wharvle 3y agoOne observation about private v. public schools: Private schools, perhaps counterintuitively, have greater ability to enforce rules that some parents dislike, than public schools. They can organize around and enforce a general culture in ways that public schools cannot, and this ability increases the more prestigious they are. Families self-select to be generally agreeable to and aligned with the school's culture, and bad fits can simply be sent away. Public schools have to deal with whatever mix of families they happen to serve, period. Private schools are sometimes pointed to as being more-accountable to parents, and that's sort of true, but they also have much greater freedom to tell a loud minority of their "customers" to, frankly, go eff themselves. An observation of trends I've seen with a limited dataset but that I suspect generalizes pretty well: Better-off, if you will, parents, or at least those with a "higher-class" cultural background (Fussell's upper-middle and higher—doctors, lawyers, executives, in short) are giving their kids phones later, restricting use more, and are more-amenable to restrictions on phones imposed by schools, than lower-class (Fussell's middle and lower) parents. These factors tend to significantly reduce student phone use in ritzy private schools, "captive" nigh-private-school public schools, and the tip-top of other upper-tier public schools, compared with practically all the rest of the school landscape. I fully expect this to widen already-large class differences in education.
- yttribium 3y agoWe learned during the COVID school shutdowns that schools would really prefer parents not be aware of what actually goes on during a typical schoolday.
- hunglee2 3y agoFrance banned mobile phone use in Primary and Middle school in 2018 - anyone have data on the impact on educational performance? China followed suit in 2021. I think that is it though for state wide suppression of mobile phone use in the classroom
- orwin 3y agoWorsening Pisa results, but no other data.
- falcolas 3y agoI have one part approval for this (back in my day, off my lawn, etc). But I also think about how many general tools cell phones replace, and the sudden added cost is a concern. Flashlight. Probably not necessary 99% of the time at a school, until it is valuable. Calculator. "Approved" graphing calculator replacements are stupid expensive, in many cases more expensive than the phone they're replacing. Camera. We didn't have a ton of these at schools in the 80's, but they weren't entirely absent either. Useful for documenting (and yes, perpetuating) bullying. Music. Even in the stone ages, we had music and headphones. Great for study hall and general focus. Dictionary/Encyclopedia. Sure, folks can use bound volumes, but that's not a skill they'll use. Searching for things on the internet at large, is absolutely a skill they need. Anyways, mixed thoughts. I'd say I turned out fine, but I had to re-learn a lot of mis-information innocently passed on by my peers and teachers.
- hermanradtke 3y ago> how many general tools cell phones replace The article says the students received phones with some of these tools: > instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps
- rapind 3y agoI don't remember needing a fancy calculator until Engineering in University. Possibly they are now needed in High School, but I haven't heard that before? The article actually addresses the lack of camera as a positive in that it greatly increased interest in photography courses. The Light Phone they are using can have some basic utility features like a music player, calculator, calendar, etc. That being said, I'm cynical this is just an ad for Light Phones lol.
- falcolas 3y agoI remember using graphing calculators to do High School geometry. Loved it, we programmed games on it. > I'm cynical this is just an ad for Light Phones lol. It is definitely a bit over the top on the praise for it.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
- mstudio 3y agoGreat, but this is a private boarding school. I'm more concerned about the (over) use of Chromebooks in public schools. It's trivial for kids to tab over to Youtube or a gaming site in the middle of class. I would've done the same thing if I'd been given a laptop for 6 hours a day in school. When I see my kids trying to write math equations or use a virtual ruler/compass to do math homework, it really pains me. Let's go back to writing things by hand.
- ravenstine 3y agoI don't see why schools really need to provide access to the open internet. Providing computer access is fine, but the network should be internal. Wikipedia PR Britannica can me mirrored, as well as any videos that teachers decide to have cached.
- blackmesaind 3y agoMost schools utilize cloud-based education platforms (Google Classroom, Canvas, etc) that require connectivity. Local hosting requires infra + someone to manage it, not to mention that there aren't very many good self hosted edu software resources.
- ravenstine 3y agoClosed network != local network > there aren't very many good self hosted edu software resources I'm not sure if that's a problem, but that feels like one.
- vb6sp6 3y ago[dead]
- mortallywounded 3y agoCan you not "lock down" a smart phone to emergency calls + whitelist of numbers (mom, dad, etc)? I'd prefer my kids to keep their phone, but only able to contact me during school hours (otherwise the device is as useful as a brick).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]