17 ms·

It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negati

• HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  > I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
  • SR2Z 11mo ago
    Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones. The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
    • HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
      • tuckerman 11mo ago
        I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
      • LtWorf 11mo ago
        I think USA does everything later than in other countries. So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.
    • squigz 11mo ago
      It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the world.
      • SR2Z 11mo ago
        I've had plenty of friends I've only known through the internet and a chat room. It's not the same as being in-person - I don't see a way to reliably turn out healthy adults unless kids talk to each other.
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
  • psunavy03 11mo ago
    Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
  • justonceokay 11mo ago
    Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
    • throwaway150 11mo ago
      That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine. Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
      • HollowVoice 11mo ago
        [flagged]
    • squigz 11mo ago
      Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.
      • LtWorf 11mo ago
        Also, bullying in school has no consequences, but outside it might have some.
        • squigz 11mo ago
          Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
          • ironSkillet 11mo ago
  • virgil_disgr4ce 11mo ago
    Avoidance: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems
  • woodpanel 11mo ago
    The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous. I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
    • LtWorf 11mo ago
      I don't think they're reframing. They weren't bullied or were the bullies themselves.
      • koolba 11mo ago
        Or there simply weren’t any bullies. Not everybody’s childhood played out like Lord of the Flies.
  • TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on. The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing. But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers. That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least. It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
    • SchemaLoad 11mo ago
      What seems likely is addiction mechanisms and social media will end up banned for kids. Loot boxes and daily login rewards banned from games, etc. Proof of age will be required for social media.
  • supportengineer 11mo ago
    PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
  • serf 11mo ago
    >What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy. a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
  • badc0ffee 11mo ago
    I always hear this from Americans. My experience in Canada is that the bullying and shaming was limited to junior high (grade 7-9 in my province). Maybe my high school was just too large for any of that nonsense? Or maybe the culture is different - I couldn't have told you who was on the football team, and there was no prom. All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
    • fyrn_ 11mo ago
      I think age cohortand school makes a difference. Personally I had a perfectly fine time in highschool, most people just got along. Same problems as other posters though, it's just anecdote, and a heavily biased sampling (pretty decent chunk of CS people with poor social skills)
    • hitarpetar 11mo ago
      I had a terrible time in Canadian jr high and great time in American high school. I think it really just depends on the school
  • JuniperMesos 11mo ago
    The social lessons people learn from their high school experience vary wildly. I have read many accounts of people who had bad experiences like this when they were in high school, and also many accounts of people who didn't have experiences like this. When I think about how the people I know have described their high school experiences, I can also think of a wide range of things. It's certainly not what my high school social experience was like - there were things I disliked about it, but mostly related to highly-idiosyncratic details of my personality. Describing it as a brutal rite of passage with some kind of global social hierarchy involving who got to sit at which lunch table rings very false to me.
    • pixl97 11mo ago
      Heh, we were at a family reunion with my grandparents in-laws talking about school. The topic of bullies was brought up and grandma said "Oh there were no problems with bullies" and I replied "thats because you were the bully. Grandpa laughed heartily, as I may have hit a bullseye
• SchemaLoad 11mo ago
  I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back. I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
  • echelon 11mo ago
    > But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. Next let's ban kids from social media. Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing. They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself. > I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could. Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time. iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
    • iknowstuff 11mo ago
      ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.
      • Dusseldorf 11mo ago
        It absolutely did not. ChatGPT is free to use and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it. When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
        • bdangubic 11mo ago
• davnicwil 11mo ago
  I think the operative word here is 'let'. The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end. The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found. With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned. It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set. Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
  • zdragnar 11mo ago
    > With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned. Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them. I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period. Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
• catlover76 11mo ago
  [dead]
• mensetmanusman 11mo ago
  Everyone went all in on tech during Covid. NYC schools were one of the slowest to recover and are still dealing with the knock on effects.
• bogwog 11mo ago
  I wonder how long until they do the same to AI in schools?
  • fn-mote 11mo ago
    How in the world would you keep AI out of schools? Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones. I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives. On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
    • dingnuts 11mo ago
      most instruction can and should be done without computers. and ban cell phones.
      • falkensmaize 11mo ago
        This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.
• mjbale116 11mo ago
  Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban: 1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best." 2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn." 3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes." All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
  • ForgetItJake 11mo ago
    > All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought. I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
    • mjbale116 11mo ago
      > I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought? Indeed you don't; let me help you out then: Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith. If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed. If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
      • matthewmacleod 11mo ago
        Indeed you don't It seems that they do indeed see what you’re saying…
        • 11mo ago
• 1659447091 11mo ago
  > I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves. I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls. We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc. I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting. First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female) Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_fighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_fighting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football
  • kj4211cash 11mo ago
    This looks a lot like my childhood. I would guess most of us were popular-group rejects, latch key kids. Pencil fighting, paper football, exploring nearby creeks, (poorly) playing guitar for one another, gossiping in each other's basements, etc. Great times!
• bongodongobob 11mo ago
  It's fear mongering bullshit. "WHAT UF THERE EMERGENCY". Every room has a phone and a teacher with a phone. Absolute bullshit post Columbine 9/11 fear based nonsense.
• vkou 11mo ago
  > I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"?? Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
• khannn 11mo ago
  WHOA! Classroom learning is fundamental. As a public school survivor, I learned more on my own than in any classroom.
• Fnoord 11mo ago
  90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school. Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth. FTA: > The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it. Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes). > Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.” Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days. Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
• conductr 11mo ago
  They had to know. My middle schooling coincided during wave of beepers (early 90s) and then high school was mobile phones (late 90s) then college in early 2000s (iPods but not iPhones). During all that time, devices were practically unacceptable at school. It was a zero tolerance, teacher would confiscate your device, your parent would have to come to school to get it back. It likely was accompanied by some detention or more punitive measure. College was a more adult approach to same, professor would yell or just tell you to leave the class if your device came out and you appeared distracted at all. If it rang, and everyone was distracted, they’d often be livid. Then, it seems only a couple years after my schooling was complete, smart phones came out and they just let them exist, everywhere. It has never made sense to me how that shift happened so suddenly but best theories I’ve heard are 1) parents insisting kids be reachable and 2) educators just gave up the fight against it. But yeah, it’s sad to me to think a whole generation had lost core social experience and socialization of such a pivotal age in life. When I hear stats about how kids/teens don’t; drive, party, date, sex, etc yet are lonely, anxious, depressed, etc I’m always like “no shit”
• DANmode 11mo ago
  Yes, but were there any academically peer-reviewed studies to prove it with data? How could they have ever known? /s
• aidenn0 11mo ago
  A lot of teachers (particularly, but not exclusively, younger teachers) are uncomfortable being strict with students, and especially teenagers. The local High Schools recently banned having phones during class (each room had a pigeon-hole style place for each student to put their phone), but enforcement is poor. At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).