The big problem is smartphones with internet access, not cellphones. I was in high-school when cellphones really took off and while the occasional errant phone ring in class wasn’t uncommon nobody was compelled to be doom scrolling on social media during class, because we didn’t have internet access. A lot of people, especially kids, are not skilled at moderating bad habits.
On a related tangent, my drive to work takes me past multiple middle-school bus-stops and every. single. kid. Has their face glued to their phone every. single. day. It’s depressing.
Phones were banned in my highschool (~10 years ago). You didn't "give up" your phone, you just couldn't take it out. Taking your phone out during class usually resulted in having it put on the teachers desk until the end of class so it wasn't a major punishment but also you couldn't sit there scrolling facebook all day.
Not sure why HN acts like this kind of rule is impossible when its already extremely common in schools.
The whole problem is that phones are disruptive by nature, but teachers having to police students (and it’s more than one, on many days) and it’s a huge chunk and disruption to instruction time.
10 years ago you were messaging/posting; now it’s all video streams with hidden wireless headphones.
I feel like taking a phone until the end of school year might have impact, that used to be a policy when I was kid, but granted kids weren’t walking around with $1000 doodads so different economics.
The 30% who say it’s not a problem just assume the kids on their phones are a lost cause and just write them off.
Guess it depends on how unruly the school is. It never seemed that disruptive for teachers to police from my perspective, but no one argued with it. It wasn’t the end of the world to lose your phone for an hour. Phones have been banned in private schools in Australia for ages, and just recently the government put the same rules in for public schools. So it’s not exactly a radical idea to ban them today.
The problem is people's perceptions have changed markedly.
20+ years ago, you had a cell phone, maybe, for messages during the day, and that's it. Outside of some simple phone games, most had no internet access, and you weren't constantly in a group chat with people in class discussing how boring it was or something else, so how often it took your focus even if you were subverting the rules was much more limited.
Now, I have my phone in my pocket all the time, and a reputation of being difficult to reach because I often have it on silent to not interrupt my life, when apps randomly find new excuses to pop up notifications midday that have no urgency to them, and businesses expect you to not be bothered if they text you at a random time.
But most people are just on them, all the time, child and adult, so applying a new rule to that will prove challenging, because the group perception is that's unreasonable to do, and people will fight back hard on it, both for that reason and because it's an addictive serotonin drip in your pocket that a lot of people have no practice with delaying the gratification of, any more.
(e: This isn't to say we shouldn't do it, to be clear, but that's why, I think, it will be a hard sell, and because people don't immediately see the value of it, they will probably keep doing things like burner phones, and at least in the US, I think explicit cell phone jamming on your campus is a violation of rules, so limiting how much people can get away with having a secret phone for midday online access is also tricky.)
A lot of the students are not thrilled about having to go to school in the first place, and having to do homework, and having to sit in math classes, and having to do tons of stuff.
When did schools start making decisions based on what the students love?
I mean, the fundamental idea behind a school, where fundamental rights of students are taken away (their speech is heavily curtailed, their freedom of movement is heavily curtailed, etc.) is that kids under a certain age do not have the maturity and knowledge to make many decisions and that’s what the schools exist to provide them with.
I don't doubt that many are disappointed yet the displeasure of teenagers should not be a deciding factor in any important policy decisions. They are young and it is the adults job to help ensure that they are in the best environment possible for the current well being and future development. Often the children will not like this but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
I personally feel we, as in western society, have put too much emphasis on how they feel and not enough on doing the hard things that are best for them. We have seriously failed our children I fear.
I’m inclined towards just banning cellphones in schools. For 70% of the students this will be enough to ensure they don’t use one (number made up based on experience of recalcitrant kids in my classes)
> For 70% of the students this will be enough to ensure they don’t use one
Lots of schools ban cellphone use, but students find lots of ways to abuse this rule.
Indeed, when you start to collect phones at the start of class, you find a pretty big share now have burner phones to turn in, so they can still sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom.
Sure, the students I work with don't openly defy (though I hear a lot about this from public school colleagues). They turn in burner phones and then are super sneaky to try and use their real phone during class.
> sneak peaks at their phone or take it to the restroom
on that note why the shit are students permitted to leave the testing area during critical exams (midterms, finals) , ostensibly to use the restroom.
but with phone in pocket, obviously more than a few are googling test answers as well? I've personally witnessed this multiple times over past few years and it makes no sense.
People have, for the past thousand centuries or so, somehow managed to eliminate their waste without carrying an internet-connected pocket supercomputer.
Okay… I’m just saying that restricting access to a lavatory sounds cruel and unusual.
If you meant to say that we can prevent phones from also entering said restroom, then that sounds great. I have my doubts that it’s possible, but I’m fine with that solution in general.
Unless you want prison rules or to counteract decades long policy of not academically punishing protected classes of students you cannot effectively ban Phones in the Public School System.
You often can't seize the device. If the student says no you risk physical escalation. Students are VERY protective of their phone due to the personal content on devices.
You often can't suspend or academically punish the student. There are VERY strong incentives in public school systems not to further bury an underperforming student, minority students, and similar criteria. The student may WANT to be suspended.
Students can easily hide the device, like in their underwear, purse, whatever. Again unless you want prison-level strip searches there really isn't a way around this.
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Honestly I think we'd need state/regulatory/infrastructure level tools to enact a ban policy. Think signal-jammers, vpns on legitimate devices, etc. It would be a massive IT cost to enact. IMO it would be worth it, but I don't think society would bare the cost because too few care about education beyond its function as childcare - we have a entire political party that wants to disband the Department of Education.
That's why owning and operating smart phones should sinply be illegal for children. Where the age limit should be is debatable, but letting as young as 12-year olds have one is an absurd failure for a society.
A ban on cell phones would make doing homework a lot more difficult. It's far easier to have textbooks on your phone than carrying them around all day. Almost impossible to write any kind of paper without the internet.
No the resources you used would have degraded since you were in uni. Since people use the internet, less people are using the library so the library gets less funding, professors aren't checking if the library has enough copies of books, etc. But just culturally unless you've been primarily using non-electronic methods of education; then you are just always worse at doing so.
If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.
Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .
It's actually quite convenient, school desks are quite small so trying to fit a textbook and your homework notebook is quite cramped. You can just put your phone directly next to the HW problem.
High schoolers and college students still have good eyes lol.
This survey suffers from the nothing at stake problem of assessing severity. You can't just ask it in a vacuum because it doesn't actually reveal any preference. I would bet my hat that if you asked teachers to rank the problems in their field cellphones would be consistently near the bottom. And "I would rather you fix these 18 things first" is not what anyone would call major.
Forty years ago I bet you could get "passing notes distraction" is a major problem. There was a whole generation that could text one handed in their pockets and they turned out fine. They're adults with real jobs now.
re: but smartphones are different, in this essay...
I don't have any deep insight into the American education system. So I'm making a bit of a guess and assuming that, like other capitalist-oriented western democracies, the current state is the result of decades of underfunding, overzealous application of standardised testing, industry and other lobbying, poor working conditions, etc.
With that out of the way...
Carrot or stick. School is already all stick all the time.
Right now, some students feel that some of their time is better spent on their phones than paying attention to the teacher.
Why that is doesn't seem to be a significant part of the conversation.
Properly fund public, free for everyone education. Pay teachers more.
Make school good for kids instead of trying to force kids to be good for school.
> some students feel that some of their time is better spent on their phones than paying attention to the teacher
And kids feel that eating donuts is better than vegetables.
Or that drinking soda is better than water.
The fact that students feel something easy (not just easy, but something that is designed by tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world to be addictive) is more attractive than something hard says almost nothing that isn't a tautology.
I graduated HS in 1999. If I were a teacher, I'd require the students turn off their phones and put them in a clear bag with their name on it on a box on my desk. Then they get their phones back at the end of class.
On a related tangent, my drive to work takes me past multiple middle-school bus-stops and every. single. kid. Has their face glued to their phone every. single. day. It’s depressing.