What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian::Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them
Crazy how people otherwise firm supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of tech suddenly change their minds when the person involved is under 18.
Are you unfamiliar with the principal that things which are appropriate for adults are often not appropriate for children?
I’m familiar with the sad fact that many people believe that. Knowledge should never be age restricted. If a kid doesn’t want to learn about, for example, sex, and finds it gross, that’s one thing. An entire society conspiring to keep them from knowing about it till they’re about 11 is quite another.
Yes, that’s why I’m completely fine with my kids watching online videos of ISIS prisoners being burnt to death in a dog cage.
Can I ask if you have kids?
How about restricting children from driving cars?
A phone is a tool, not knowledge. Kids can find all the knowledge they want without having phones on them at all times.
According to the United States, it’s appropriate to imprison children for delinquency that is things that are criminal for children that are not criminal for adults.
So no, I have little faith regarding what my society decides is right for kids.
I have no idea who you got from what I said to what you said, and I don’t want to.
I watched the first generation that got personal unrestricted mobile phones for themselves. Somehow I thought it was a good idea at the time. It fucked them up mentally, and then Covid-19 came and doubled the effect.
Now I think that a parent who gets their under 12 year old kid a smart phone should be treated roughly in the same way as if the parent gave the kid cocaine.
We got an iPhone for my niece who is 8. It’s locked down so all she can do is text, call, and take pictures/video and she can’t contact anyone not in her contacts list. She has some games but can’t use them for more than an hour per day and they won’t open during school hours.
A big issue is parents not bothering to learn how to use and set up parental controls.
Controls like these don’t work if the kid is smart, determined or the parents are too tired or uninvolved. There’s more to the cellphone issue than the actual cellphone.
It doesn’t matter if the kid is smart and determined, parental controls can’t be circumvented.
Unless the parent is stupid enough to leave their phones unlocked or lax enough to unblock the phone every time the kid asks for it.
It depends on how heavy handed the approach is. A kid could learn about using a vpn or proxy service to bypass dns or dpi based content filtering but if you properly configure the parental controls on iOS or android there is pretty much nothing they are going to be able to do. If they are that determined, I think you need to have a conversation about making good choices themselves and trusting them not to consume harmful content.
I was able to bypass the content filters on the PCs when I was in high school because it was a shitty content filter that could be bypassed by killing the process in an unelevated task manager. My kids are going to have to be more resourceful than that
I lent my 8yo my old phone, heavily restricted and with Family Link installed; She’s only allowed 2 hours a day and isn’t allowed on stuff like YouTube. There are ways to do it responsibly.
There are a few things to consider.
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She’s just 8, so you have an easier time controlling what she does (I say this with the experience of rising 2 children to adulthood)
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She might not be susceptible to these things
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You just might be a better parent for any arbitrary reason
So as an anecdote your situation is valuable, but as a guideline to how the whole society should handle this problem possibly not so much.
For enclosed schools, it surprises me they don’t just faraday cage all the rooms, and then run school-controlled wifi.
But in my day, teachers freaked out about electronic calculators and word processors. I’d think the appropriate thing to do is integrate smart-phone use into curricula. If your kids are texting, then your teaching model sucks.
But here in the states, we already know our teaching model sucks, because the state doesn’t take it seriously and gives zero fucks about kids until they can be loaded with debt and can serve as a laborer or soldier for billionaire vanity projects.
I sure you arent being serious, but farday caging the rooms would likely be highly illegal, blocking emergency cell calls and other emergency signals (like radio and gps) is a big ol no no.
Faraday cages are fine. It’s just never worth the expense.
It’s frequency jammers and active blockers which break the law in a massive way.
The reason being you can control the area a Faraday cage encapsulates. A signal jammer that has any decent effect has to also affect outside the area. Big no
Plenty of buildings are accidentally faraday cages for certain frequencies.
Emergency services have training for buildings with poor signals and it’s as simple as putting repeaters down as you progress from outside to inside.
Jammers are much less simple to work around.
Anyone and everyone can benefit from putting away their smartphone, not just students.
Off topic, but when were the photos of these students taken? Their clothing and hair looks like they came straight out of the 90s. Even some of the photos themselves looks “film-like”.
Having lived my whole life in the Information Age, I am 100% in support of this.
Problem with the digital world is it’s all fake, it’s all bullshit. It’s only anything at all because we’re here. But like everything, it comes with a cost.
During the brain formation years, the brain should get opportunity to form both with and without it, so the maximum number of possible capabilities are preserved for future access.
