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Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

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Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#81

Post by asveikau »

flatline wrote: post #46
asveikau wrote: post #10

I don't understand the legislative pushes for some of these things. Schools can already say "no phones during instructional hours". Many of them do. I guess legislating it can mandate the policy across a school district, state, country etc., so perhaps that makes sense. But others call for outright bans for kids, all the time. Parents can also restrict usage or set rules for appropriate use. Many do.

I don't understand how people fail to understand how public policy works. You can tell people to do something and they may or may not ignore you depending on how you say it, and what incentives and penalties you provide. Being a parent or a teacher puts you in a position of fighting multi-billion dollar corporate interests that are trying to capture your kids' attention. It's also fighting their very successful adver…

> It's also fighting their very successful advertising campaigns

If you want to talk about successful advertising campaigns, things like age verification laws are actually being lobbied by Meta. In other words, Meta wants to do this and is spending money to make it happen. That should make you suspicious.

> Being a parent

I am a parent. I really hate it when people pull out this "parents say this ..." crap as if it's a shortcut to winning an argument. They don't want to have a discussion on the merits. A lot of the people pulling out that line seem to be childless, if it matters.

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#82

Post by cyberax »

hydrolox wrote: post #74
cyberax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersections are safer. Except that 3 doesn't actually happen... Bike lanes stay empty and kill businesses. In Seattle and Portland the businesses within 1 block of new bike lanes declined faster after 2019.

What are your sources? From 2013: > Leading up to the construction and just afterwards NE 65th St performed very similar to both controls, however two quarters after the project was finished NE 65th St experienced a 350% increase in sales index, followed by another jump to 400% sales index the following quarter.[1] From 2020 [2]: > "Both the trend analysis and DID analysis show that the protected bike lane on Second…

My own research. I'll compile and publish it.

And yes, I'm _very_ aware of these papers. I used the same methodology as they did :) Note the timestamp on them, they are from the time when Seattle was booming.

And I even specifically looked at the Fourth Avenue that they used as a control because it also got a protected bike lane.

I have _not_ yet checked this hypothesis thoroughly, but from a cursory look at the data, the increase in business can be explained by highly-paid professionals moving into dense housing nearby (we can see that by looking at real estate prices and historical apartment rent data) and by tourists from cruise ships. It's further corroborated by the fact that the percentage of bike commutes did not increase significantly enough.

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#83

Post by oblio »

ck2 wrote: post #13
oblio wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of repetitive comment[1] is a bit like the bike lanes discussion: 1.City introduces bike lanes on street. 2. Residents complain about parking spaces going away, businesses complain about future bankruptcies due to fewer customers, general uproar is huge. 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersecti…

and completely seriously: 7. right-wing gains power and bans bike lanes anyway, labeling them "leftist" city after city in various states/countries but back to phones the real problem is they can't rule that parents must be responsible for their children I find the moral panic about kids with phones/internet access fascinating because of course it's a problem, but it's not the root cause of the problem ps. I am so ol…

> the real problem is they can't rule that parents must be responsible for their children

It's impossible for the average parent to police their child's smartphone. They just don't have, and never will have, the technical skills.

> I find the moral panic about kids with phones/internet access fascinating

And for those parents, which are quite rare, that do have the technical skills AND the involvement to ban smartphone usage at young ages, guess what. When Joey and Mickey and Sarah all have smartphones and are doom scrolling TikTok, even those parents lose. If all socializing moves to smartphones, the weirdo kids that don't have them or access to the "cool stuff" are automatically excluded. It's extremely alienating and nothing like not having calculators or PCs.

Back in your day (or mine), huge corporations more akin to drug dealers employing tens of psychologists weren't trying to get kids addicted to calculators.

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#84

Post by oblio »

cyberax wrote: post #41
oblio wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of repetitive comment[1] is a bit like the bike lanes discussion: 1.City introduces bike lanes on street. 2. Residents complain about parking spaces going away, businesses complain about future bankruptcies due to fewer customers, general uproar is huge. 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersecti…

> 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersections are safer. Except that 3 doesn't actually happen... Bike lanes stay empty and kill businesses. In Seattle and Portland the businesses within 1 block of new bike lanes declined faster after 2019.

> declined faster after 2019

Is your study discovering the effects of... COVID-19? I guess you've just discovered your own analogy of https://xkcd.com/1138/

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#85

Post by [deleted] »

georgeburdell wrote: post #54
Cider9986 wrote: post #3

Actually effective way to protect kids without massive societal consequences and it also improves learning.

Stanford researchers studied the second assertion and found no change https://ed.stanford.edu/news/national-study-school-cell-phon...

[deleted]

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#86

Post by cyberax »

oblio wrote: post #84
cyberax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersections are safer. Except that 3 doesn't actually happen... Bike lanes stay empty and kill businesses. In Seattle and Portland the businesses within 1 block of new bike lanes declined faster after 2019.

> declined faster after 2019 Is your study discovering the effects of... COVID-19? I guess you've just discovered your own analogy of https://xkcd.com/1138/

Quite possibly yes. But remember that argument when people tell you about the benefits of bike lanes and cite studies about them.

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#87

Post by cyberax »

themaninthedark wrote: post #65
Jtsummers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Seattle and Portland the businesses within 1 block of new bike lanes declined faster after 2019. I wonder if there was some event that generally killed businesses relying on foot traffic some time after 2019 that could help explain that outcome. Perhaps once that event is identified, we can consider what businesses did survive and compare them to the foot traffic heavy businesses and see if there's some other qu…

I would appreciate sources from the GP but the claim was that businesses within 1 block of bike lanes declined faster then those without. The business community as a whole would be serving as the control for other external factors.

To be fair, I don't consider my research all that great. This is not a good methodology because it can be affected by hyperlocal effects. I just used the same approach as in papers that looked at the _benefits_ of bike lanes.

There is very little good-quality research on wider impact of bike lanes on business in the US. One pre-COVID study found little effect in either direction when a large LA neighborhood added bike lanes.

The only definitive result for the US is that bike lanes have very little impact on the absolute percentage of bike commutes (it stays around 2-3%).

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#88

Post by Markoff »

perelin wrote: post #78

German here. Have a kid in elementary school and one in middle school. No phones allowed whatsoever. But to be fair: every school in Germany can decide that for themselves. But when we were choosing schools, all schools had similar rulesets. Some event prohibited smart watches.

Czechia had per school rules as well (my kids school bans them in school premises, which leads to groups of kids starting at phones in front of the school, sad sight), but as discussed yesterday by minister of education it's clearly not effective and still huge part of kids use them during school breaks despite more than 90% school officially banning them.

Czechia was one of the, if not the last country in EU without nationwide smartphone regulation

Btw I can't imagine putting my kids in education system in country where you don't have home schooling alternative to state indoctrination in case you need it. And German 2015 immigration crisis and green deal clearly show us your leaders can't be trusted at all.

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#89

Post by Markoff »

HtmlProgrammer wrote: post #20

We were told no phones in schools. I used my phone. They confiscated it for 2 weeks. I was like yeah fair enough. I don’t understand why this isn’t done now?

that would be illegal right now, kid/parents can call police you stole their phone and you would be in trouble with police, any school rule isn't above the law, which is why there must be confiscation option clearly mentioned in the smartphone ban law

Re: Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

#90

Post by Markoff »

Aerroon wrote: post #22

Do we have any actual evidence that this significantly improves things? For example, can we expect Czech PISA scores to go up by 50 points from this change? Or is this one of those "it feels like it should be good, therefore it's good"? Or maybe "we asked a bunch of people whether they think it's good and they said yes"? You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms, so they need to pr…

I think it's more a mental health or social interaction thing rather than expecting improved school results, some studies even show no short term increase in results.

But you don't need study to know kids staring at phones instead of talking and playing together is improvement.

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