Technology

Seems to be a combination of students too distracted playing on their phones and difficulty policing behavior on social media bleeding into school time. They give an example of students filming a student being bullied on school grounds and the video being uploaded and shared on social media. I'm not sure banning smart phones during school hours is the right solution, but it's certainly a tricky problem to deal with.

The article is about how smartphones have made people lazy. So incredibly lazy that some people aren't even reading short articles from reputable sources, but are instead using smartphones to write comments on the internet begging strangers to summarize things for them.

I'm not advocating for allowing phones in schools during lectures or anything, but it's pretty clear to me that an outright ban is an outdated solution that will only hide the issues instead of solving them.

While I don't disagree, social media is the problem and what are schools going to do about that, except for banning phones? You also can't compare getting distracted by a pen or piece of paper, to a phone with bright colours and notifications, specifically designed to be as addicting as possible

May I gently ask if you have children in the phone age range?

I have never seen anything with such a hold over teenagers.

The smartphone is a different beast. Hardware and software companies spent millions of dollars of R&D to create the most psychologically addicting and attention demanding device as possible.

hide the issues instead of solving them.

And thats really all they care about.

Outright bans are because government bodies are scared of nuance. You can also see this in "zero-tolerance" policies that do things like punish the victim because they were "involved" in a fight, or punish a kid who nibbles a chicken nugget into the shape of a gun.

To be fair to schools, nuance is hard. Suppose that the rule is "phones may not interrupt class." Now, what counts as an interruption may vary between classes, between teachers, and based on what's happening in class. A student may use it during a quiet period in the class when they've already completed their work, and that's acceptable. A different student will then use their phone ten minutes later, when they're supposed to be doing something. The second student will get in trouble, but then complain that the first student didn't get in trouble. The parent will hear, "Brayden was using his phone and he didn't get in trouble but the second I used mine, I got in trouble. The teacher has it out for me."

If you've talked to any teachers in the past few decades, a common theme is parents siding with their kids against all logic, reason, and evidence. They'll assume that teachers are petty goblins, just looking for an excuse to pick on their kid. And parents can be outright hostile and unreasonable. When my wife was a teacher, she received more than one actual death threat from parents because she enforced rules that did NOT have any nuance or discretion. Imagine if enforcing the rule was up to the teacher's discretion versus an outright ban.

tl;dr I agree that a ban is silly, but I totally get why schools are doing it.

Some drugs are just stronger than the others.

I think there is a difference.

Yeah, the tamagotchi are games, but they are a game in the singular sense.

All the things you mention as distractions except the food items are contained in one phone multiple times over. Heck, you could probably even find a bubblegum chewing app.

That’s the distraction potential contained in one phone.

Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!

You haven't really spent any time near a school system have you? I don't even refer to them as parental units anymore, they are just banshees. These awful horrible screaming demons that want you to raise their kid but also never discipline them.

Smartphones are incredibly addicting by design

lmao. My phone is literally not addictive.