France to ban mobile phones in primary, junior and middle schools

A long time ago in a galaxy very close there once was a people who managed to get through their lives without having access to mobile telecommunications. In contrast to what many of you readers might guess they actually did very well without, they did not stumble from one emergency into the next and their stress levels were generally lower than those of mobile-carrying people in our own galaxy.

I was born in that galaxy, I vividly remember it. If my train was late I made my way to a rectangular box on the platform and used the archaic device attached to one of its walls - it was called a payphone, think of an iPhone with a handset but without touchscreen and a physical coin slot to make you pay for whatever you did with it instead of the digital coin slot in the iPhone - to tell whomever I was travelling to that I would be late. At school there was someone ready to answer the telephone for all those emergencies which people keep on expecting nowadays. It might have been that things in that galaxy were more benign than they are in ours but for some reason those emergencies were few and far in between, leaving that person free to do other things.

>The minister said the ban was also a “public health message to families”, adding: “It’s good that children are not too often, or even at all, in front of a screen before the age of seven.”

I remember being a little kid and wanting to learn about space and submarines and sharks, and not being able to. I'd read my local library's books on those subjects, but I lived in a little town with a puny library so quickly exhausted my supply of information. I'd have given my front teeth to have access to a tablet with wikipedia access - even just one geocities article on Great Hammerheads would've made me jump for joy.

Information diving on subjects you're interested in is one of the greatest boons of the modern age, and I think it's a terrible thing to deny a curious child. Yes a kid can spend all day every day on facebook or twitter or watching youtube videos, but to say all kids shouldn't have access because some might turn into little zombies is foolish. Assuming usage is properly curated by parents or other authority figures, smart devices can be some of the most powerful tools for educating children this side of a Greek tutor.

Also this is a hobby horse as old as time. "New Techology is evil, and it's corrupting our youth like never before!" It wasn't true with TV, or radio, or codexes, or writing itself, and I see no reason this time in particular should be exceptional.

>“This new announcement from the [education] ministry leaves us dubious because we’re having trouble understanding what is the real issue here. In general, we’re used to them being logical and pragmatic about things, and here, we can’t find the logic or the pragmatism in the announcements,” said Philippe Vincent, the union’s deputy general secretary.

Ah. So it's a meaningless publicity stunt that will never go anywhere, and the original promise was a cynical election ploy to win the votes of luddities. Due credit to Macron’s administration though, at least they're making token efforts to stick to their campaign promises.

>“In ministerial meetings, we leave our phones in lockers before going in. It seems to me that this as doable for any human group, including a class,” Blanquer said in September.

Do you seriously see no difference between between a handful of elderly government officials leaving their phones in individual lockers guarded by armed men while they discuss affairs of state for hours on end, and hundreds of 8 year olds putting their iPhone 65s in unguarded communal bins while they run around for 15 minutes and then have to retrieve them again?

This is great. Actually, school that my kids goes to forbid smartphones this year. It's been all positive.

I think this is a bad move.

When I was in school, I didn't want to carry heavy books all the time.

I downloaded Shakespeare and other eBooks, and wrote my own script to convert the text into 1000-character iPod Notes.

When someone forgot their book to class, I could share mine with them.

Will other portable electronics be banned, or only communication devices? What about the Ti-84 calculator, which is still required for exams?

> School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as reading books, and nailing reliance on phones into children is not something we want to be doing in schools.

School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as being outside, and nailing reliance on books into children is not something we want to be doing in schools.

Slightly paraphrased, same content. Care to elaborate what it is that makes phones more undesirable than books? At the moment this reads like an "in my times .." rant.