We didnt have any kind of phone when we were in school
I had pagers.
Stupid. Kids are more informed and hooked into current events than ever before, specifically because of phones and the Internet. Hell, half of most peoples’ jobs are looking up reference material online. You want kids to succeed, hand them a big list of the best places to look for the answers and let them use their phones on the test.
Kids have no clue how the internet works for actual research. They just endlessly scroll and gobble up all of the Nazi bullshit that’s spread around. The internet is dead. Smartphones are highly efficient propaganda gadgets.
Even though it’s easier to find information than like 30 years before, kids nowadays do NOT look for news or some other “sensible” information. They watch stupid TikTok videos and things like that (yes yes, there’s always some exceptions). Smartphones has become a big problem in schools. You would know that if you followed the news.
A good reason for banning smartphones is social media addiction. Not internet searching. Its currently normal for 12 year olds to be on their phone 6-12 hours a day. And because of peer pressure parents can’t do anything about it. A kid without a phone is isolated because everything happens in chat and social media.
There are more thorough solutions like age gating social media but a blanket school ban is a good start. If you still don’t believe me you should really read up on what smartphones do to a kid. Addiction, lack of self control, no attention span, nearsightedness, the list goes on. Based on leaked research by TikTok itself btw.
In China they don’t destroy their own kids because they already know the effects. TikTok shows different stuff (educational content and propaganda), and kids are limited to 40m(!!!) per day. Everyone is going to deal with scores of fucked up kids while they don’t.
They also use their phones a lot to harass each other, they can film, and take pictures of any other kid at school and post it online to harass them. Bullying has been really increasing thanks to phones in schools.
China limits social media because they repress free speech and political association. TikTok and other social media was a huge part of why there was such an outcry over the invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. They doubly limit what kids can see because students are often hugely influential in political activism - especially in China, where students were an integral part of both the revolution(s) and Tiananmen Square. China’s gov is pants-shittingly terrified of another student-led revolution/crisis/etc and keep a very close watch on what the kids are saying and seeing.
Make school fun and not a prison and then kids don’t need phones like their office worker parents do.
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Doesn’t matter if the teacher is an absolute gem and knows how to captivate kids who want to learn. Most kids prefer the dopamine hit from social media and other phone usage compared to actually learning. It just ruins it for kids who actually want to learn.
I can’t believe it wasn’t like that since the beginning.
How is it not one of the many distracting things they would ban immediately?Some definitely tried. I got suspended in middle school because I forgot to turn my phone on silent and it went off in class. They had a “zero tolerance” policy, so it didn’t matter that it was an accident
I think it has to do with the Columbine school shootings.
The cover image for this piece smells AI generated
I suppose it is possible the submitter used AI uncredited, but I doubt it. For one thing, there are other images of the same models in the artist’s page. Second, the state of AI image generation when this was submitted (June 2023) was pretty terrible for things like this.
More likely is that the image “looks like AI” to you because most image generation models were trained on Common Crawl, which includes at least tens of thousands of curated (royalty-free) images. In other words, AI models generate images that look like stock photos because that is what they know how to generate.
Eh, checking out the source (Drazen Zigic via Getty Images), he seems legit.
That’s a good way to keep children from documenting and reporting abuse.
Maybe normalize bringing a camera then? Photography is not banned.
The phone is a camera and more.
Seriously admit the problem is teachers can’t control the class not ban the only lifeline kids with only one parent who works has.
Get real bro. Phones are a massive distraction in the classroom.
Two things can be true
Surveillance for me not for thee.
Maybe you should fix the systematic problem instead of doing surface level fixes that impact the freedom and mobility of minors.
This is solving a systematic problem. The problem of social media companies having free reign to make kids addicted. This will give french kids more freedom to think and do actual things with their life.
Wouldn’t no phomes increase mobility since parents cant trqck their location
What’s funny is all the rich tech elite send their kids to schools that don’t use tech to the same degree as public schools. Wonder why.
Because personal tutors are engaging directly with the student the whole session?
Probably because elite schools have smaller class sizes or teacher/student ratios thereby making it less necessary to have the ability to disseminate information via mass means with technology. Put it all up on a big screen where 30 kids can see it, send the assignments out to 120 kids via google classroom on school issued chromebooks (because there are plenty of kids from families that cannot afford computers), and do all the grading and review digitally. I’d be willing to bet those expensive private schools use plenty of tech, maybe kids carry Macbook Airs instead, but there’s no escape from tech in schools.
Brazil did it a while ago. Nobody died [yet]
Some kids have medical issues and need a phone to monitor their health or text family for advice and help since they may be young. It’s also nice to track the kids with their phone when they’re walking too and from school.
Right. Kids used to die like flies back in the day when there were no smartphones.
Jesus Christ exaggerating what I said like talking to a trump voter
Some minority of kids can be exempted. You’re the one exaggerating
We did not even have dumb phones … somehow we still survived …
Yea but now we do. And not every one did survive
That you know of
We’ve had a similar ban in the Netherlands for a year or two now. Mobile phones were already not allowed in classes. Kids seem to have survived.
See everyone, It’s not just us Americans! The French are doing stupid things too!
It’s a joke, don’t write in.
I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.
It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐
I’m still not convinced that this is the answer to helping kids concentrate & learn more in school.
I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.
I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.
I think it is fine but we also need lessons to properly interact with the technology. Scams, fraud, disinformation and checking sources were handled very abstractly at best and archaic at worst.
Gen alpha is significantly worse than prior generations on tech. Them having their phones on them doesn’t teach them, they consume on the lowest level. They don’t learn the actual Internet skills prior generations had to to survive.
there is no “the” answer but it can be part of an answer.
It is. Phones are the #1 distractor in school
Boring lessons are pretty big distractors. I seen kids fall asleep and daydream long before smartphones were even a thing. Make learning fun and the kids will engage. Confiscating their possessions is a hostile move that never goes down well.
It’s not enough that they need to work all year and deal with angry parents over every F. Now they need to be infotainment competing for attention with anything a kid can find on their cell phone.
day-dreaming isn’t intrinsically bad. People do need time to think about stuff, and have their mind drift from topic to topic. Some modern teaching practices advocate deliberate “brain breaks” for students.
The issue with phones isn’t so much that students are sometimes off task, but rather that the phone consumes their attention entirely. It uses up the students’ useful concentration as well as their ‘rest’ time.
It’s necessary. Phones are far worse than prior to phones, and I’ve seen both sides of it.
Boring lessons is a fact of life. People need to realize that not all education can be interesting. Sometimes you gotta suck it up, sit down, and learn. And I say this as someone with crippling adhd
My classrooms banned phones so I played games on my graphing calculator or did the old fashioned drawing.
Smart. Anything to avoid learning!
This is not about socialization lmfao. different topic.
So schools would suddenly become rehab treatment centers ? What a freaking timeline.
Good on you France!
I hope more countries start realizing how important this is. We have more than enough evidence demonstrating the damage that comes from being permanently connected, or even online for more than a couple hours per day, and minors are taking the worst of it because they are developing under those conditions.
