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Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

theguardian.com

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Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#41

Post by Loughla »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #2

We've come full circle. When I was in high school (2013), smartphones had just started to become the default (i had a galaxy s2) and cell phones had been banned in-class since they became common for every teenager to have one (as early as 2007 for me, probably earlier than that for older millennials) I guess at some point teachers gave up trying to enforce the rules. Or the idea of being away from your phone for hour…

>I guess at some point teachers gave up trying to enforce the rules. Or the idea of being away from your phone for hours at a time became strange to everyone. Or maybe teachers thought they could incorporate phones into lesson plans.

I can speak from experience in teaching, and being married to a teacher who both have seem the implementation of smartphones and the consequences thereof.

It's not the students, it's not the teachers, it's the parents. Students are usually salty, but understand if you have a no phone policy. It's the parents. They DEMAND to be able to contact their child at all hours of the day, regardless of whether the child is in class. They EXPECT the school to support them texting and/or calling their kid to discuss trivial nonsense throughout the day.

The ability of people to trust that their kids are safe in schools is gone. The ability of people to understand a message that MUST be sent right now versus one that can wait is gone. The ability of people to deal with any amount of not being connected is gone.

It's, honestly, disturbing. I don't know what it is about it that bothers me so much, but it frightens me.

It's the constant connection, I think. I feel like maybe it's fostering a societal inability to be independent. As an example - people have questioned my parenting because my son goes into the woods by himself (we live in a rural area). They have questioned how much I actually care about him because I don't follow him and/or know everything he's doing all the time. I'm a firm believer in independence fostered safely. School and playtime are two places that this independence needs to be fostered, and parents today have completely forgotten that their kids will have to exist without them some day.

This might come across as a little /get off my lawn/, but it's my experience across decades of working in education.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#42

Post by bgribble »

My kid just graduated from a NYC high school that had a complete ban on phones in school. The kids checked in their phones at the front desk on the way in and got them back when leaving.

It was by no means watertight -- many (most?) kids had a "burner" phone that was dead or broken or whatever that they turned in (because nobody would believe a highschooler who said they didn't have their phone with them lol) and they kept their real phone. But at least the expectation was set that you can absolutely not ever be seen using a phone in class.

Overall I think it was a good policy. I don't think it's workable at large schools.

In NYC at least you simply can't tell families that kids have to leave phones at home -- they are an essential tool for safety and travel, especially for younger kids. My 12 year old can take the subway to school by himself, but ONLY if he has a phone in case he ends up in some wackadoodle situation where his train has gone express or is on another train line and he needs to call his lifeline (me!) to figure out how to work it out. But they do not need to have them in the classroom.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#43

Post by pantalaimon »

spicymapotofu wrote: post #28
xwdv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did just fine in schools before smartphones. Perhaps even better .

Do you mean to imply that education outcomes are unrelated to technology or that advancing technology may make them worse? Do you think there's a defensible abstraction of your claim? We also did "just fine, if not better" in my role at the bank (vaguely) before digitization. I assure you, the efficiency upgrades of advancing technology pay for themselves many times over, even if there are hiccups and new learning to…

No, if you are online it’s much harder to pay attention to your teacher or the task at hand. There are a million distractions, all more interesting than class.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#44

Post by INTPenis »

Beldur wrote: post #8

Not sure about you guys, but I plan to not give my kids a phone until they reach at least the age of 14 (7 and 3 atm) Is this realistic? Any experiences?

I've seen it done. Granted it was in Croatia but he's a very calm and healthy 14 year old who plays D&D and would rather hang out with his gang of friends than come with his parents to family gatherings.

Croatia might be a factor only because prevalence of smartphone use among teenagers there might be lower. Just guessing.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#45

Post by emidln »

jweir wrote: post #36
soligern wrote: post #29

I support this completely. I would go the extra step of not making internet capable phones accessible to under 14 year olds in general.

Smart watches too. Big distraction problem in my son’s grade school and they are used on math tests.

The path my teachers took in school, a few decades ago, was to design math tests that never required a calculator. All problems used basic arithmetic and calculators would actively slow you down. This works for a large portion of elementary, middle school, and high school math. The only downside is the teacher needs to spend a bit more time crafting the problems.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#46

Post by Shawnj2 »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #16
Beldur wrote: post #8

Not sure about you guys, but I plan to not give my kids a phone until they reach at least the age of 14 (7 and 3 atm) Is this realistic? Any experiences?

I have had coworkers who wanted to stick with a dumb phone. It sounds great to give junior a dumb phone until they're "old enough", but not much communication happens via sms. It's all done in other apps. Your kids will be excluded from a lot of conversations and events. They will feel ostricized socially and will inevitably be frustrated at you because of it. Having no phone versus a dumb phone would make the resent…

Honestly that’s not something I had really ever thought about, how smartphones are mandatory for children in 2023. I got my first phone in 2014 when I was in 8th grade, a used iPhone 4S without a data plan, and because maybe about 50-75% of kids had a phone or smartphone of some sort and the school had WiFi I don’t ever remember it being necessary for anything, although teachers did say “you can look X up on your phone” a few times and I know some of the girls in my classes used Instagram (although I didn’t start using it until a few years later). I think having a smartphone as a teenager started to become more mandatory around 2016-17, by which point I got a new iPhone 6 with a data plan.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#47

Post by MisterTea »

xwdv wrote: post #20
mapierce2 wrote: post #11

I don't see a more elegant solution than this, but it's a bummer. Smartphones are so useful; the world's information AND a computer in your pocket! The ideal would be to give students and parents an avenue to remove/combat the addictive elements of their smartphones, but most students (and parents) don't see those elements as a problem, but a feature.

We did just fine in schools before smartphones. Perhaps even better .

Another thing to think about is how these things obliterate creativity - In school If I was bored I would doodle in the back of my notebooks during class. Drawings of things, places, trying to do nature scenes. But mostly drawings of machinery, robots and electronics nonsense. Towards senor year when I learned some programming it was code. Those little ephemera works feel important - exercises of the mind, creativity.

Contrast that to mindless consumption of corporate controlled media channels which is what smart phones inevitably lead to.

Think about how these mega companies are making billions of dollars by robbing your children's attention thus their education right in front of you. 100% ban the phones.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#48

Post by whycome »

Beldur wrote: post #8

Not sure about you guys, but I plan to not give my kids a phone until they reach at least the age of 14 (7 and 3 atm) Is this realistic? Any experiences?

Depends on location and peer group. They can find themselves pushed out and away because they have "no voice" to speak with others in their desired spaces.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#49

Post by mapierce2 »

horeszko wrote: post #31
mapierce2 wrote: post #11

I don't see a more elegant solution than this, but it's a bummer. Smartphones are so useful; the world's information AND a computer in your pocket! The ideal would be to give students and parents an avenue to remove/combat the addictive elements of their smartphones, but most students (and parents) don't see those elements as a problem, but a feature.

I view smart phones as two dimensional. On one dimension they are a tool (like a Sheika Slate in Zelda). On the other dimension they are a toy. The problem for schools is that the tool and the toy are packaged together. A further problem is that smartphones are consumer electronic devices, so businesses will strive to make them as addictive as possible and are unlikely to support creating some kind of separation betw…

> A ban with legal backing so schools can focus on education and not combating distraction.

Teaching how to combat distraction should maybe be a part of modern education.

But yeah you're quite right. Optimistically I'm hoping non-toy smartphones (like Light Phone, BoringPhone, WisePhone, etc) gain some market share.

Re: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

#50

Post by dotnet00 »

Going against HN's usual anti-smartphone thing, I think this is incredibly dumb. Luckily no one really cares much about what UNESCO calls for.

Outright bans on smartphones in schools are no different from the video game, TV screen time, "kids will only play games on computers" and other related superstitions that were in vogue back in the early 2000s. All they did was make parents feel validated (without having to put in the work to understand their child) and make life difficult for most kids while building resentment.

As with most things, the decision of smartphone access for kids should come down to having parents actually understand their child, his/her needs and ability to handle the associated responsibility.

Especially as a teenager, pursuing my interests in computers was nothing but constant arguing with my parents because they were constantly being supported by outsiders (who had never seen what I was doing) on their anti-computer superstitions of the time (due to which they wholesale refused to understand that I wasn't gaming the vast majority of the time).

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