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

theguardian.com

241–250 of 358 posts

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

#241
Few things make me feel genuinely old like reading about smartphones in K-12 schools.

When I was in high school, there was a part of the student handbook that specifically forbade "wireless devices" used during school hours, and given that only a few kids even had basic cellular phones at the time, enforcement was not only easy, but barely necessary.

A modern classroom where kids are not only texting each other (something I didn't encounter until college) but sending Snaps, posting on Instagram, and playing Clash of Clans is so far outside anything I can imagine from my time in public school as to be from a completely different culture. I thought being a teacher must be hard based on my experiences then – I can hardly fathom what it's like today.

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

#242

TLDR: As a high school level teacher, this would be less of a problem if teachers had stronger enforcement powers. Since we often don't - I would strongly favor a ban. If students need a computer, we have them available all day, every day. As a high school level teacher, I appreciate the attitude that there are amazing opportunities for learning and skill development with computers. I agree with this wholeheartedly.…

At my kids' school, they encourage appropriate cell phone use in the school. For example, if there is a homework assignment on the board, rather than wait for everybody to copy it down, kids are told to take a picture of the board. They also insist on the kids using some kind of calendar to track everything and most kids use their phone calendar. There's some kind of Twitter-like service that is used for teacher-stud…

My children do not have cell phones (if they want one they can buy it and a data plan themselves - so far that hasn't happened until they are about 18), but teachers assume that every student has a cell phone. The teachers then ask the kids to do things with their cell phones like you are describing. When my kids say they don't have one they are not believed and receive failing grades for the assignment. I've complained to the principal (the school has a policy of no cell phones) but to no avail.

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

#243
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those are true, not in any systemic sense. Some old people love to grouse about how Things Were Better Then, and how Children Used To Respect Authority. It's been that way for millennia. You ever read Heinlein? Back in the 1950s, his "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" complained about how schools were too touchy-feely, intent more on having students feel good than providing a good education.

Was he right? Maybe school in the 50s was much more touchy-feely than in the 40s. After the Great Depression and a couple of World Wars, maybe there was a regression to the mean.

Perhaps. But my argument concerned the cartoon, which compares 1969 schooling to now. Even if your argument were true, it would mean a flip-flop after only a decade.

Remember, the 1950s and 1960s was the era of "Spock babies", that is, children raised by parents following the advice of Benjamin Spock. Quoting the Wikipedia article about his book:

> By the late 1960s, Spock faced widespread criticism for condoning an overly permissive parenting style. Many commentators blamed Spock for helping to create the counterculture of the 1960s. Critics believed the current youth were rebellious and defiant in part because they had been brought up by Baby and Child Care.

I argue that this is another example of why that cartoon doesn't give a good representation of school in 1969.

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if there is a homework assignment on the board, rather than wait for everybody to copy it down, kids are told to take a picture of the board just post the assignment online. Not a reason to allow phones in class.

At work, you’d take a picture of the whiteboard with your phone. It’s a valuable life skill.

Which is a form of data leak, and generally against company policies, even though most people still do it.

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

#245
post #211

TLDR: As a high school level teacher, this would be less of a problem if teachers had stronger enforcement powers. Since we often don't - I would strongly favor a ban. If students need a computer, we have them available all day, every day. As a high school level teacher, I appreciate the attitude that there are amazing opportunities for learning and skill development with computers. I agree with this wholeheartedly.…

Would it not be possible to have a box at the front of the room that everyone has to put their phone in when they come to class, then they can get it back after class is over? If anyone's ever been in a secure facility, they have little mail slots, sometimes locking with a key you can take, to store your phone while you go inside. Seems like we could just put one of these in every classroom. That should take care of…

Then kids would just bring two phones. The real phone and a dummy phone.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* I'm all for moderation but the kids I have come across in my K-12 experience, if they're not paying attention, are generally pretty bored out of their minds with whatever else is going on in the classroom. Which begs the question; whose fault could that possibly be? The child's or the adult in the room?* Well, the kids are supposed to learn things, not to be entertained. Sometimes the two can coincide, and it's gr…

Since when is just being able to hold a student's attention 75% of the time entertainment? It's much more nuanced than my original comment, I understand, but the assumption that simply removing the device (which I agree is the way to go) will suddenly get kids involved in their learning doesn't take into account all the missteps that occur before the child or teacher enter that classroom. Whether it's staffing, fisca…

> the assumption that simply removing the device...

I don't think anyone is suggesting this is the silver bullet, but it's one less distraction towards the goal of getting kids to learn things and also to learn how to learn.

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

#247
post #211

TLDR: As a high school level teacher, this would be less of a problem if teachers had stronger enforcement powers. Since we often don't - I would strongly favor a ban. If students need a computer, we have them available all day, every day. As a high school level teacher, I appreciate the attitude that there are amazing opportunities for learning and skill development with computers. I agree with this wholeheartedly.…

Would it not be possible to have a box at the front of the room that everyone has to put their phone in when they come to class, then they can get it back after class is over? If anyone's ever been in a secure facility, they have little mail slots, sometimes locking with a key you can take, to store your phone while you go inside. Seems like we could just put one of these in every classroom. That should take care of…

We used to call them 'lockers'.

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

#248
Wow, this is amazing. I've seen kids being told off for NOT having a mobile phone on them at school so they could reach their parents in case of urgency.

It's amazing how mindsets can be so different in different places (and I'm saying all this with no tone of judgement).

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

#249

I'd like to be able to call my kid in the event of an emergency. I understand banning general cell phone use during class hours, but it's infringing on civil liberties to force an unrestricted ban

I'd wager that most respondents to this aren't patents with kids in schools. There's overwhelming support to allow parents to contact their kids without having to go through an intermediary at my kid's school, so who are all these people making academic arguments that are irrelevant?

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

#250
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If phones are providing children with a more stimulating experience than school, the schools themselves should improve their product, rather than banning the competition.

So in your view a school's main product is entertainment?

In my view, education is more effective if it is also entertaining. There's no particular reason why pedagogy can't take advantage of nearly ubiquitous computing hardware, other than the textbook and curriculum racket that publishers are running.

The mammalian instinct for play is essentially a learning mechanism. All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the real world. We run around in open gaming worlds collecting tokens for no greater purpose than to make numbers bigger; we can easily adapt that to collecting knowledge for the purpose of getting smarter.

Imagine if the crafting system of an open-world game used actual chemistry and metallurgy. Kids could be trading tips on textiles and steel so that they can make non-anachronistic weapons and uniforms before doing a boss raid on Napoleon's army. Imagine if making a battle rifle with better stats in the game required you to know how real rifles work. Imagine the sort of teamwork that could take place if everyone in the clan/guild were required to be logged on in the same room at a specific time every weekday. The teacher turns into the quest-giver, and the reward is leveling up your brain, and maybe in-game currency that can be used to buy avatar prestige items.

Each state could certainly afford to hire a few developers, to make educational games that poke the very same skinnerbox dopamine buttons that the purely entertainment games poke. Each state could hire some video artists to produce educational content. I may have retained more from professional programs like "Connections" or amateur videos like "History of Japan" than I ever kept from my textbooks.

It has always been a mistake to make school boring. School is boring now because a boring school is cheap (relatively speaking), and it still works just well enough to keep civilization from collapsing. The curriculum/textbook/lecture model was necessary when education was limited by labor, such that every N students require 1 teacher, but now instead of compartmentalizing education into fixed classrooms with one specific teacher and N specific students at a time, we can have 10000 of the best teachers teaching 10 million students at once, such that they can each learn and demonstrate mastery at their own pace. And this move by France is one step away from that.

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