8 ms·

New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools

36 points by MobileVet 2y ago

SavageBeast 2y ago
So just yesterday I'm reading here about the Google "Kids Watch" and how its benefit it that kids "don't need a phone anymore". Now I see this and I can't help but think some Google lobbyist authored a bill (this absolutely does happen), handed it to a staffer in New York and now we're getting a bill that says parents have to buy their kid a Google Kids Watch (since you want your kids location but they cant have a "smart phone"). I didn't get why Google would make such a product and why in the world parents would ever trust Google with a kids product.. but seeing this article it all makes sense. I knew it had to be some kind of gambit but I didn't immediately see how. Now I think I do. "Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’" Of course the governor of NY is basically wrapping herself in the American flag, putting her hand on a bible and protecting our children ... Now with this, kiddos are gong to cut their teeth using the Android ecosystem. When it does come time to get them a smart phone, what kind do you think its going to be? Of course the kids watch is going to have some kind of ecosystem the parents will get deeper in with pic storage, calendars, location tracking etc. First, buy a law that says kids cant have iPhones. Second, produce a watch that placates the parents/politicians thats not a smart phone. Third, sleep walk the kids and family into a new ecosystem. Fourth, in a few years as the kid matures you get to sell them Google Phones in the Google Ecosystem. Fifth, cast yourself as a concerned company with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of America's Children. I don't know whether I want to go buy Alphabet shares or go outside and yell at the sky about what a corrupt world we live in. $10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow. Who doesn't want a more fun way to play hide-and-go-seek? Gotta know who your friends are so we can invite them to the game etc.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > $10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow Text: it worked just fine. The only difference is that it didn't have UI and UX stickiness to glue people to screens. Sometimes simpler is better.
- brainwad 2y ago
  This has been a campaign for years and other jurisdictions have already passed similar laws. If anything, Google is reacting to the legislative trend, rather than lobbying for it.
- dangus 2y ago
  I’m confused about where this assumption that there is or will be a bill that mandates the purchase of a Google Watch is coming from. This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario.
  - jjulius 2y ago
    Completely agreed.
  - SavageBeast 2y ago
    The bill wont strictly "mandate buying a Google Kids Watch" but it will stipulate a ban on smart phones (iPhones being the dominant device) in schools. The Google Kiddie Crack watch is $200, the Apple Watch can't compete at that price point. Dumb Phones (flip phone) wont offer location tracking the parents can monitor. What option is a parent to choose I wonder? This product seems suspiciously designed for a very specific set of conditions to emerge. "This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario." You call it a "conclusion jump", I call it a Rational Explanation.
    - jjulius 2y ago
      >What option is a parent to choose I wonder? You do know that there are other alternatives to smartphones besides a "Google Kids Watch", yes? Edit: > If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts... That's every dumb phone out there, and a far cry from Google cornering some kind of market. Plenty of options available from a variety of vendors and price points. Maybe go outside, take a walk and get some fresh air for a sec?
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        Furthermore, if this and similar laws create a new set of requirements for school devices, companies (including Apple!) will create products to meet demand. It seems like the tail wagging the dog to reason back from a dominant device now being excluded to regulation shouldn't happen.
- levocardia 2y ago
  I was just thinking that a kids watch was an odd product choice. But it all makes sense now. Big League Chew, anyone?
ethbr1 2y ago
Phones with SMS and voice call functionality only, for safety purposes. Good! I'm hard pressed to enunciate an argument for why having social media during a school day, at school, is beneficial to early childhood development. >> “I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” [New York governor, Kathy Hochul] said. >> “These addictive algorithms have been used against young people since 2011,” Hochul said. “If [social media companies] were going to self-police and manage this themselves, what has stopped them thus far? Clearly as a government, we need to step in.”
Titan2189 2y ago
It's been implemented recently in New Zealand and has been pretty successful. https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cellphones/ https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cell...
- sam_bristow 2y ago
  I think it's a bit early to call it a success. The rules came in to effect less than a month ago. That's ~18 school days.
  - WheatMillington 2y ago
    That's not exactly accurate. Schools were heavily encouraged to apply the policy from the start of the school year, and most of them did so. The policy was an official requirement from the start of this school term, at which point it had already been school policy at the vast majority of schools.
- kwhitefoot 2y ago
  > pretty successful. Pretty successful at doing what?
dangus 2y ago
I think the focus on age is perhaps outsized especially in that child protection act described in the article. Forcing social media companies to collect a bunch of personal info for age verification is bad for privacy and doesn’t solve the problem of companies being legally allowed to build dopamine casinos. I like smartphone bans for school, though.
rpcope1 2y ago
Good, I don't see any good reason for kids to have smartphones in school. If someone needs to get a hold of the kid, the old fashioned way of just calling the school still works just fine.
- strawhatdev 2y ago
  Medical devices, e.g. (some) insulin pumps like the Tandem Mobi, are managed via smartphone apps only. It's an unfortunate fact of life that life supporting technology can increasingly only be interfaced via smartphones. From my perspective, that's an unfortunate but ultimately good reason for some kids to have smartphones.
  - beanjuiceII 2y ago
    my kid's phone is used for managing and monitoring t1d, and they will always have their smart phone at hand i don't care what law people think they are putting in place
    - strawhatdev 2y ago
      Same. The ADA act is our friend.
    - jkaplowitz 2y ago
      Valid, yes. But the law could still require that the medical monitoring device have other functions disabled or (depending on what the legislators consider easy enough) not in use while in class except for the t1d monitor + SMS + voice, right? And they could still apply discipline if the student's phone has other functions enabled or (depending on the legislative wording) in use while in class? The law could also use indirect leverage to gradually separate students' medical monitoring from the smartphone over the medium to long term. For example, they could begin a multi-year transition period after which NY-regulated health insurance plans would have to cover a non-smartphone version of these monitoring devices with at least equivalent functionality to any smartphone version they cover, at no greater out-of-pocket cost to the patient, unless no comparable non-smartphone product is on the market from any manufacturer. Then they could eventually require the non-smartphone version in class once it exists, with a fully insurance-paid (no cost-sharing) transition available at that time to children who use the existing smartphone monitoring system. To avoid a gap in insurance coverage, NY could continue to mandate that some version of these devices be covered, so nobody would go without affordable medical monitoring. But as soon as one company decides to make a non-smartphone version, their competitors would have to do the same or else lose market share in NY, so they all would. (Why would that first company take the leap? They'd get a lot of insurance-paid device purchases for the transition for children's existing devices.) And then teachers would have an ADA-compliant way to remove the distractions of smartphones in class even for kids with medical monitoring needs, without causing harm to anyone.
tootie 2y ago
This just feels like more social panic pandering from Hochul. I sincerely doubt this will have any appreciable affect on kids well-being. My older kid's high school just leans way in. They use phones in class for tasks. They watch videos, do research, use calculator aops, Google Classroom. The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn. Is that relevant to the cellphones-in-school bit?
  - tootie 2y ago
    Technophobia. Kids use phones to communicate with teachers and that includes during the school day.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      It's a valuable lesson to learn that the person in authority gets to set rules, even if they're arbitrary. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a teacher to say "I don't like interacting via email. If you need something from me, tell me."
      - tootie 2y ago
        I honestly think it is unreasonable. I don't think the real-world lesson should be to blindly submit to authority. Obviously you have to be realistic, but kids are already very aware of which teachers are being difficult for no good reason. Most teachers now are requiring assignments be turned in via digital channel because it makes it impossible to question when they were due, when they were turned in or for a paper to be misplaced. It's unequivocally superior to paper assignments. Even for hand-made work, they will take a photo on their phone to upload. One teacher in particular still requires hand-written papers to be turned in and recently gave my kid a 0 on an assignment because he lost it. She had to go to his class afterschool and find it.
larvaetron 2y ago
I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Same when my kids were in school.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Parents.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    And the PTA + Administrators not willing to back teachers when they needed to be backed.
  - itake 2y ago
    On Sept 11, 2001, I remember parents freaking out and pulling kids out of school. After that, parents were giving kids phones earlier for safety reasons.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      As a parent, I recognize safety impulses. But I also recognize the usefulness of my being a first responder, even with some training, is negligible to negative.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  This was my experience. My guess some combination of teachers losing control and being under pressure from helicopter parents led to either policy change or their looking the other way.
- kube-system 2y ago
  They might not have been allowed before. This is a law that prohibits them. Many schools prohibit phones as a matter of policy.
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
This is wonderful. Make it National. Then collective elderly Us can rest assured the generation that's running the country received a "proper" education closer to what many of us experienced since we were in school before smartphones were everywhere.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  But where will we get the funding to build uphills both ways on the walk to school?
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    I have faith that Project Penrose will soon bear results.
- tootie 2y ago
  Lol, this kind of thing will have minimal, if any, effect on anything. The older generation have had their minds destroyed by cable news and AM radio.
leetharris 2y ago
This needs to happen on a country-wide scale. Our children are getting destroyed by the attention economy. I tried to setup a mobile game the other day and I immediately deleted it because every single popup was a psychologist-optimized addiction machine designed to suck every bit of dopamine from undeveloped children. This is the #1 issue plaguing children in my opinion and it will only get worse without regulation.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I'm not sure how much this will help, given how many parents I see allowing their children to be glued to screens outside of school, from incredibly early ages.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Public school has long succeeded, to the extent that it has, in spite of whatever happens at home. Which IMHO, is what publicly-funded school should be: an island of normalcy regardless of whatever else is going on in a child's life.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
As the father of a middle school student, I whole-heartedly support this. Hopefully other states will follow suit.
WheatMillington 2y ago
Our central government banned all phones in schools here in New Zealand at the start of this school year. It's early days yet, but so far so good.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
or maybe the thing ruining kids is 1) That their freerange land has been wiped out and replaced with narrow strips of moving vehicles. Kids have ~no alternatives to being cooped up in adult-filled buildings. 2) False stranger danger alarms have wiped out peer time and 20k years of adultfree self-sufficiency training. 3) Wiping out multi-generational households and walkable communities. Kids used to have many parenting adults but have two. Or one. Or none. 4) Besides needing the wisdom of 100, parents now need to parent 24/7, every day of every week of every year. It's massively more time than the last x0000 years. Maybe what is ruining kids are adults who've eliminated kids' natural growth builders and now are hell bent on sabotaging their last peer connector.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I mean, multiple things can be the cause of these issues - it's more difficult to legislate away parental fears.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  Or maybe this is about school performance / group behavior and none of what you're bloviating about. Smartphone use and plummeting grades has been a global phenomenon.
zer00eyz 2y ago
They ripped out home economics, Wood, metal and auto shop. They ripped out the computer labs (hey, many of you HAD vocational training and didn't know it). Gym, Art, Music... all persist. Schools in the US have become some sort of retrograde distopian bubble of a time that never existed. Now you're going to remove the one check that kids had vs this system? Cause we haven't seen videos of teachers being awful, stupid or misinformed, we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot? If you think that cell phones harm kids, or social media harms kids, this bill does fuck all to change that. IT does remove the one context where an internet connection and camera might be useful to how the kids deal with the world going forward. Fund schools year round, with smaller classes, better teacher pay and 8 hour fucking days with meals provided to kids. These are the things that will change outcomes, not cell phones bans.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot Reasoning from exceptionalism isn't reasonable. The majority of kids aren't using their phones to complete extra Khan Academy lessons in their free time...
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Not to mention, the internet is full of its own bullshit.
kwhitefoot 2y ago
If schools had the resources and personell necessary to engage the students then there would be no need to ban mobiles because the students would be more interested in the work at hand. Banning them will not magically make the lessons more engaging or more relevant.
analognoise 2y ago
So wait, I’m supposed to just let my kids go to school, where there are how many shootings a year, with no way to contact them? Not an icebergs chance in hell I’d let that happen.
- eaurouge 2y ago
  I don’t believe that’s the case. In any case, you can always move to a different state. Or you could take your case to the courts.
  - analognoise 2y ago
    Parents I know have just started buying Apple watches because they still allow for communication and watches aren't banned.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > where there are how many shootings a year There are multiple shootings a year at your kids school? Do you live at the worst school in the country?
  - analognoise 2y ago
    Actually there was a school shooting near me and my neighbors kid was there. It turns out you only need one school shooting in your network to decide never to leave your kids without a communication device, ever.

36 points by MobileVet 2y ago

So just yesterday I'm reading here about the Google "Kids Watch" and how its benefit it that kids "don't need a phone anymore". Now I see this and I can't help but think some Google lobbyist authored a bill (this absolutely does happen), handed it to a staffer in New York and now we're getting a bill that says parents have to buy their kid a Google Kids Watch (since you want your kids location but they cant have a "smart phone"). I didn't get why Google would make such a product and why in the world parents would ever trust Google with a kids product.. but seeing this article it all makes sense. I knew it had to be some kind of gambit but I didn't immediately see how. Now I think I do. "Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’" Of course the governor of NY is basically wrapping herself in the American flag, putting her hand on a bible and protecting our children ... Now with this, kiddos are gong to cut their teeth using the Android ecosystem. When it does come time to get them a smart phone, what kind do you think its going to be? Of course the kids watch is going to have some kind of ecosystem the parents will get deeper in with pic storage, calendars, location tracking etc. First, buy a law that says kids cant have iPhones. Second, produce a watch that placates the parents/politicians thats not a smart phone. Third, sleep walk the kids and family into a new ecosystem. Fourth, in a few years as the kid matures you get to sell them Google Phones in the Google Ecosystem. Fifth, cast yourself as a concerned company with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of America's Children. I don't know whether I want to go buy Alphabet shares or go outside and yell at the sky about what a corrupt world we live in. $10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow. Who doesn't want a more fun way to play hide-and-go-seek? Gotta know who your friends are so we can invite them to the game etc.

ethbr1 2y ago
> $10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow Text: it worked just fine. The only difference is that it didn't have UI and UX stickiness to glue people to screens. Sometimes simpler is better.
brainwad 2y ago
This has been a campaign for years and other jurisdictions have already passed similar laws. If anything, Google is reacting to the legislative trend, rather than lobbying for it.
dangus 2y ago
I’m confused about where this assumption that there is or will be a bill that mandates the purchase of a Google Watch is coming from. This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario.
- jjulius 2y ago
  Completely agreed.
- SavageBeast 2y ago
  The bill wont strictly "mandate buying a Google Kids Watch" but it will stipulate a ban on smart phones (iPhones being the dominant device) in schools. The Google Kiddie Crack watch is $200, the Apple Watch can't compete at that price point. Dumb Phones (flip phone) wont offer location tracking the parents can monitor. What option is a parent to choose I wonder? This product seems suspiciously designed for a very specific set of conditions to emerge. "This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario." You call it a "conclusion jump", I call it a Rational Explanation.
  - jjulius 2y ago
    >What option is a parent to choose I wonder? You do know that there are other alternatives to smartphones besides a "Google Kids Watch", yes? Edit: > If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts... That's every dumb phone out there, and a far cry from Google cornering some kind of market. Plenty of options available from a variety of vendors and price points. Maybe go outside, take a walk and get some fresh air for a sec?
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Furthermore, if this and similar laws create a new set of requirements for school devices, companies (including Apple!) will create products to meet demand. It seems like the tail wagging the dog to reason back from a dominant device now being excluded to regulation shouldn't happen.
levocardia 2y ago
I was just thinking that a kids watch was an odd product choice. But it all makes sense now. Big League Chew, anyone?

ethbr1 2y ago

Phones with SMS and voice call functionality only, for safety purposes. Good! I'm hard pressed to enunciate an argument for why having social media during a school day, at school, is beneficial to early childhood development. >> “I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” [New York governor, Kathy Hochul] said. >> “These addictive algorithms have been used against young people since 2011,” Hochul said. “If [social media companies] were going to self-police and manage this themselves, what has stopped them thus far? Clearly as a government, we need to step in.”

Titan2189 2y ago

It's been implemented recently in New Zealand and has been pretty successful. https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cellphones/ https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cell...

sam_bristow 2y ago
I think it's a bit early to call it a success. The rules came in to effect less than a month ago. That's ~18 school days.
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  That's not exactly accurate. Schools were heavily encouraged to apply the policy from the start of the school year, and most of them did so. The policy was an official requirement from the start of this school term, at which point it had already been school policy at the vast majority of schools.
kwhitefoot 2y ago
> pretty successful. Pretty successful at doing what?

dangus 2y ago

I think the focus on age is perhaps outsized especially in that child protection act described in the article. Forcing social media companies to collect a bunch of personal info for age verification is bad for privacy and doesn’t solve the problem of companies being legally allowed to build dopamine casinos. I like smartphone bans for school, though.

rpcope1 2y ago

Good, I don't see any good reason for kids to have smartphones in school. If someone needs to get a hold of the kid, the old fashioned way of just calling the school still works just fine.

strawhatdev 2y ago
Medical devices, e.g. (some) insulin pumps like the Tandem Mobi, are managed via smartphone apps only. It's an unfortunate fact of life that life supporting technology can increasingly only be interfaced via smartphones. From my perspective, that's an unfortunate but ultimately good reason for some kids to have smartphones.
- beanjuiceII 2y ago
  my kid's phone is used for managing and monitoring t1d, and they will always have their smart phone at hand i don't care what law people think they are putting in place
  - strawhatdev 2y ago
    Same. The ADA act is our friend.
  - jkaplowitz 2y ago
    Valid, yes. But the law could still require that the medical monitoring device have other functions disabled or (depending on what the legislators consider easy enough) not in use while in class except for the t1d monitor + SMS + voice, right? And they could still apply discipline if the student's phone has other functions enabled or (depending on the legislative wording) in use while in class? The law could also use indirect leverage to gradually separate students' medical monitoring from the smartphone over the medium to long term. For example, they could begin a multi-year transition period after which NY-regulated health insurance plans would have to cover a non-smartphone version of these monitoring devices with at least equivalent functionality to any smartphone version they cover, at no greater out-of-pocket cost to the patient, unless no comparable non-smartphone product is on the market from any manufacturer. Then they could eventually require the non-smartphone version in class once it exists, with a fully insurance-paid (no cost-sharing) transition available at that time to children who use the existing smartphone monitoring system. To avoid a gap in insurance coverage, NY could continue to mandate that some version of these devices be covered, so nobody would go without affordable medical monitoring. But as soon as one company decides to make a non-smartphone version, their competitors would have to do the same or else lose market share in NY, so they all would. (Why would that first company take the leap? They'd get a lot of insurance-paid device purchases for the transition for children's existing devices.) And then teachers would have an ADA-compliant way to remove the distractions of smartphones in class even for kids with medical monitoring needs, without causing harm to anyone.

tootie 2y ago

This just feels like more social panic pandering from Hochul. I sincerely doubt this will have any appreciable affect on kids well-being. My older kid's high school just leans way in. They use phones in class for tasks. They watch videos, do research, use calculator aops, Google Classroom. The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
> The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn. Is that relevant to the cellphones-in-school bit?
- tootie 2y ago
  Technophobia. Kids use phones to communicate with teachers and that includes during the school day.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    It's a valuable lesson to learn that the person in authority gets to set rules, even if they're arbitrary. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a teacher to say "I don't like interacting via email. If you need something from me, tell me."
    - tootie 2y ago
      I honestly think it is unreasonable. I don't think the real-world lesson should be to blindly submit to authority. Obviously you have to be realistic, but kids are already very aware of which teachers are being difficult for no good reason. Most teachers now are requiring assignments be turned in via digital channel because it makes it impossible to question when they were due, when they were turned in or for a paper to be misplaced. It's unequivocally superior to paper assignments. Even for hand-made work, they will take a photo on their phone to upload. One teacher in particular still requires hand-written papers to be turned in and recently gave my kid a 0 on an assignment because he lost it. She had to go to his class afterschool and find it.

larvaetron 2y ago

I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Same when my kids were in school.
ethbr1 2y ago
Parents.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  And the PTA + Administrators not willing to back teachers when they needed to be backed.
- itake 2y ago
  On Sept 11, 2001, I remember parents freaking out and pulling kids out of school. After that, parents were giving kids phones earlier for safety reasons.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    As a parent, I recognize safety impulses. But I also recognize the usefulness of my being a first responder, even with some training, is negligible to negative.
slothtrop 2y ago
This was my experience. My guess some combination of teachers losing control and being under pressure from helicopter parents led to either policy change or their looking the other way.
kube-system 2y ago
They might not have been allowed before. This is a law that prohibits them. Many schools prohibit phones as a matter of policy.

kylehotchkiss 2y ago

This is wonderful. Make it National. Then collective elderly Us can rest assured the generation that's running the country received a "proper" education closer to what many of us experienced since we were in school before smartphones were everywhere.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
But where will we get the funding to build uphills both ways on the walk to school?
- ethbr1 2y ago
  I have faith that Project Penrose will soon bear results.
tootie 2y ago
Lol, this kind of thing will have minimal, if any, effect on anything. The older generation have had their minds destroyed by cable news and AM radio.

leetharris 2y ago

This needs to happen on a country-wide scale. Our children are getting destroyed by the attention economy. I tried to setup a mobile game the other day and I immediately deleted it because every single popup was a psychologist-optimized addiction machine designed to suck every bit of dopamine from undeveloped children. This is the #1 issue plaguing children in my opinion and it will only get worse without regulation.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I'm not sure how much this will help, given how many parents I see allowing their children to be glued to screens outside of school, from incredibly early ages.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Public school has long succeeded, to the extent that it has, in spite of whatever happens at home. Which IMHO, is what publicly-funded school should be: an island of normalcy regardless of whatever else is going on in a child's life.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

As the father of a middle school student, I whole-heartedly support this. Hopefully other states will follow suit.

WheatMillington 2y ago

Our central government banned all phones in schools here in New Zealand at the start of this school year. It's early days yet, but so far so good.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

or maybe the thing ruining kids is 1) That their freerange land has been wiped out and replaced with narrow strips of moving vehicles. Kids have ~no alternatives to being cooped up in adult-filled buildings. 2) False stranger danger alarms have wiped out peer time and 20k years of adultfree self-sufficiency training. 3) Wiping out multi-generational households and walkable communities. Kids used to have many parenting adults but have two. Or one. Or none. 4) Besides needing the wisdom of 100, parents now need to parent 24/7, every day of every week of every year. It's massively more time than the last x0000 years. Maybe what is ruining kids are adults who've eliminated kids' natural growth builders and now are hell bent on sabotaging their last peer connector.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I mean, multiple things can be the cause of these issues - it's more difficult to legislate away parental fears.
slothtrop 2y ago
Or maybe this is about school performance / group behavior and none of what you're bloviating about. Smartphone use and plummeting grades has been a global phenomenon.

zer00eyz 2y ago

They ripped out home economics, Wood, metal and auto shop. They ripped out the computer labs (hey, many of you HAD vocational training and didn't know it). Gym, Art, Music... all persist. Schools in the US have become some sort of retrograde distopian bubble of a time that never existed. Now you're going to remove the one check that kids had vs this system? Cause we haven't seen videos of teachers being awful, stupid or misinformed, we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot? If you think that cell phones harm kids, or social media harms kids, this bill does fuck all to change that. IT does remove the one context where an internet connection and camera might be useful to how the kids deal with the world going forward. Fund schools year round, with smaller classes, better teacher pay and 8 hour fucking days with meals provided to kids. These are the things that will change outcomes, not cell phones bans.

ethbr1 2y ago
> we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot Reasoning from exceptionalism isn't reasonable. The majority of kids aren't using their phones to complete extra Khan Academy lessons in their free time...
- kube-system 2y ago
  Not to mention, the internet is full of its own bullshit.

kwhitefoot 2y ago

If schools had the resources and personell necessary to engage the students then there would be no need to ban mobiles because the students would be more interested in the work at hand. Banning them will not magically make the lessons more engaging or more relevant.

analognoise 2y ago

So wait, I’m supposed to just let my kids go to school, where there are how many shootings a year, with no way to contact them? Not an icebergs chance in hell I’d let that happen.

eaurouge 2y ago
I don’t believe that’s the case. In any case, you can always move to a different state. Or you could take your case to the courts.
- analognoise 2y ago
  Parents I know have just started buying Apple watches because they still allow for communication and watches aren't banned.
Jensson 2y ago
> where there are how many shootings a year There are multiple shootings a year at your kids school? Do you live at the worst school in the country?
- analognoise 2y ago
  Actually there was a school shooting near me and my neighbors kid was there. It turns out you only need one school shooting in your network to decide never to leave your kids without a communication device, ever.