Go back to payphones and pagers and if you need to carry information in your pocket, PDAs where you have useful non-connected apps and download information ahead of time at home and store on the device instead of using a slow, unreliable, garbage tracking device to find what you need.
While on the one hand I can agree there's a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it's so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on 'control them' as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.
I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong?
Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn't a trivial ask, and it shouldn't be undertaken lightly.
But even if you decriminalized drugs (good!) you could still ban drugs in schools (also good!). Schools should be allowed to ban smartphones, which is what this bill would do.
I think I actually agree with this. I'm libertarian and generally believe fewer restrictions are better, but schools should be able to restrict what kids have available to them during class. Kids should be able to bring them to school, but they should be put away while class is in session.
If parents disagree with that policy, they can enroll their kids somewhere else. But schools should absolutely have authority over what's allowed on school property.
Only question I have is is there exceptions? I know a few kids with some medical conditions like diabetes that have monitors that synch to their phone to control medication or send alerts.... Wonder how they are going to address those situations. Otherwise, I could see the benefits on a smart phone ban during school hours. I just wonder how they are going to administer that.
Here we are on lemmy knowing the damage that big tech has done and continues to do. Yet some of us think keeping smartphones out of school children's hands during school hours is controlling their lives?
We truly don't value teachers, we don't understand their contexts or education in general. School, especially public school is where we go to learn just not stuff from a board or a book. It's where we learn to live in a community. Hopefully a place where we can learn empathy by meeting other humans our age from similar and different walks of life. Where grow and develop, gain and also contribute. Where we have to learn to compromise because we share time and space with many human beings as opposed to say home schooling which is primarily driven by conservative religious folks.
While police and law enforcement keep getting more and more funding and support. Public education keeps getting defunded. Not enough teachers, books or supplies. Do more with less has been the norm for decades. Mirroring capitalism and paving the way for charter school factories where teachers and administrators are burned out even at higher rates.
Control over education is control over your future population. The less fully formed, the less humanist, the less critical thinking, the more centered on simply future workers, the more dystopian the future becomes.
I am so impossibly glad I'm no longer a minor and have no plans to ever have any children. Incredible how adults wanting to control young people's lives is a phenomenon that is just not dying out.
Smart phones and computers in general are the reason why kids have no critical thinking skills. I say this as a sysadmin of thirty years. They need to be banned from schools. kids/minors don't get complete control. You have to be kinda childish to think they should.
Keeping cell phones out of middle schoolers hands during school hours when they are meant to be learning, and contributing to a community is controlling their lives? Wow, it is no wonder people don't value teachers or education in America.
Kids need to be able to leave their last words when a school shooter comes. If the government is going to ban phones they should at least allow old school audio recorders. While we are at it might be a good policy to require school IDs to be in shoes at all times so children dead bodies can be identified faster.
What kid these days has a dumb phone? This effectively bans phones and put the burden of corralling student attention in the hands of the parents.
Parents aren’t about to go out replacing their kids phones with dumb phones. Kids aren’t about to stop carrying their phones (I would tell my kids to keep it on them regardless of what the school says)
This is just a thin excuse for boards to put the blame on teachers and parents for the districts poor performance when really what we need is a lower teacher to student ratio, higher wage for teachers, and schools that are properly funded so these kids can be engaged with instead of policed.
My wife is a teacher in Finland and two cousins are teachers in USA.
Smartphones don't help with education either. Two things can be true. I'm not even sure what you mean by "corralling student attention in the hands of the parents".
That said, I was sarcastically replying to the comment above me which sarcastically suggested old school tape recorders.
corralling student attention in the hands of the parents
What does this mean?
Also, I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying ; the people in control of schools across the U.S. should be ashamed of themselves. However it is the responsibility of the parents to not just shove their kids in front of a screen because they're too busy for them.
Teachers have it hard enough as it is, I have nothing to say on that front. I would never have the patience to go through what teachers go through, period.
It would be nice if we could all be afforded the opportunity to record our last words before we die, but that’s not exactly how it works. On 9/11/01, we did not have technological wonders in our pockets for those poor people to use to record their last moments. So what would you have argued for then? What is it that makes you think kids these days are so special that they somehow deserve to be afforded something more?
There is countless senseless death all around us every day. You need to accept that.
Don’t force phones into schools because you can’t accept the grim world in which we live. Hate me all you want for it, but your argument is thin.
as someone whose only escape from real-life horribleness when he was a preteen and early teen was the Internet: how about you stop wanting to control other people's lives and mind your own business and trust others (yes, even young people) to know what's good for them and what's not
As someone who sees the rather devastating effects of mobile phones: I'll stopmdoing that when people get smart enough to know what is really bad for them. Right now it's a tad bit too obvious that they don't. Social media is messing up kids, mobile phones make it much, much worse. I used to see kids talking together doing stuff, now all I see is kids quietly in a group not taking to one another and just staring at their screen. I see kids falling asleep while.listening to tik tok, I see them waking up to toktok.
If you can't play responsibly, we'll take away your toy.
In also a big proponent of limiting unsupervised internet access to kids under 12 at least. I've seen wla weeeee bit too many kids showing off the latest decapitation video to eachother, I've seen kids on pedo telegram channels.... The internet is not a safe playground for kids, never was, never will be.
If you think that a y of the above is fine then I don't know what to tell ya.
Yes even the kids' reactions generally seemed positive, some mentioned there were more conversations and joking going on in between classes, and cyber bullying was less prevalent (although 'old school' bullying seemed to make a comeback somewhat)
