As a school student in a school where phones are banned, I think this is a bad idea. The ban achieves 2 things for me:
-
Making it harder to check a fact or figure quickly.
-
Preventing me from listening to music, playing games or browsing the web uring lunch break.
It DOES NOT stop me from becoming disengaged from the class! If I’m bored, I’ll look out the window, play with a calculator or something similar. And of course the ban hasn’t stopped many students using phones anyway. Maybe phone bans don’t solve the issue of uninteresting classes after all?
Well, you can fact check later right? If nothing else kids will learn to be bored again, which is good.
-
Phone bad!!! But jokes aside phones are not the problem, the students don’t need a phone to distract themselves from studying. Banning them won’t solve a problem it would just be tach illiterate 60 year old padding themselves on the back for „getting those evil phones out of the classroom”.
At least in the UK, enforce it how.
The only way a school can enforce it is by committing theft.
My oldest daughter is disabled so my youngest daughter must have her phone so she can be told about changes to pick up if something unexpected happens which it often does. The school isn’t within walking distance of home so she needs to know what’s happening.
As soon as you threaten to call the police for theft they cave.
Confiscating banned items is not theft. They are fully and unconditionally entitled to remove distractions and your kid absolutely does not and cannot have a right to have a phone in class.
The absolute last thing I want to do these days is to try to remove kids’ ability to call for help in emergencies.
Phones are also important so that kids can receive emergency alerts, like earthquake and tsunami and tornado alerts, depending on where you live. Such emergency alert systems provide only a little bit of warning, but that can make all the difference.
You think it should be disallowed even in cases like the one described, so a parent can tell their kid pickup will be late or to catch a ride with a particular trusted adult or to walk to xyz place to wait, etc?
And they can be used to help academics, too, such as for taking notes, recording lectures (when allowed), looking up an unfamiliar word (especially for kids whose first language isn’t whatever they’re being taught in), taking photos of the whiteboard. And more and more, boosted by LLM tech, they’re becoming helpful for things like live translation and auto-transcription (great for deaf or hard of hearing students especially, but also just for anyone who finds subtitles make audio easier to follow along with, as many people apparently do).
A school can tell kids to mute phones, and not to look at them during class (and that part’s hardly new - even before phones it was games on calculators and books and magazines and passing notes), but taking them or even forcing them to be turned off (except perhaps during tests) is too much imo. Especially when kids will absolutely bring them in anyway, and the whole thing will just create more of an us vs. them dynamic with the teachers and students. And especially now that phones have become such personal devices for so many people, like an external brain filled with your secrets.
Surface level I agreed but thinking more on it I don’t.
Emergencies and early pickups should be the responsibility of the adults i.e. teachers and administrative staff. They are responsible for you while in school so they need to be informed either way.
Late pickups can be discovered when the school day is over and they get their phone back / access to it.
Learning tool for people with disabilities? No they should get real/proper tools and help/assistance. Not just a free pass to use their own smartphone. Not everyone can afford one good enough to be of much help.
Photos of the whiteboard sure but I think that falls on the teacher that they need to have that and being able to hand it out. They could of course take a picture themself and print it/photocopy.
As for laws for if they can take them that is of course needed if they are to be banned properly.
I don’t think it creates and us vs them if it’s not on the teachers to enforce it. Place the task on non-teacher staff and have reasonable punishments for trying to avoid the ban and it will work to ban them.
Emergencies and early pickups should be the responsibility of the adults i.e. teachers and administrative staff. They are responsible for you while in school so they need to be informed either way.
Learning tool for people with disabilities? No they should get real/proper tools and help/assistance.
The real world doesn’t work that way. Horror stories abound of school staff blatantly ignoring students’ special needs.
And that problem is of infinitely higher priority than banning phones in school 100%. Allowing phones is not a solution to that very real problem.
Let’s review the available options here:
- Allow phones in school. This partially mitigates the problem by allowing neglected children to call for help.
- Don’t allow phones in school. This does not at all mitigate the problem; neglected children remain helpless.
There is no third option of solving the problem of children being neglected in schools. That would require people who don’t care to magically start caring, which obviously isn’t going to happen.
Therefore, the greatest harm reduction is achieved through option 1.
I strongly disagree. Option one is just giving up on trying to improve the situation in our schools. You’re not listening here. “Not caring” as you put it either is or should be neglect in terms of performing their job and thus grounds for dismissal. Then you’ll say “but no one wants to teach anyway, there’s a shortage as is” and I’ll say that yeah, that’s another more important issue, that teachers need better working conditions and pay.
That there exists more important issues to fix doesn’t mean that banning phones isn’t a good idea, it just means that there are prerequisites before it would actually work “in the real world” as you put it.
Kids have no need for any of those. There is an adult in charge who is responsible for emergency situations.
Yes, it absolutely should be unconditionally banned in the classroom, with substantial disciplinary action for the first offense. No, the example they gave is not even sort of a justification. Anything that results in the student leaving early goes through the office, and nothing that doesn’t result in them leaving early can possibly require them to have a phone during the day.
No, a phone is absolutely not a tool in the classroom. It is a massive distraction. The idea of using the absolutely disgusting shitshow that is modern LLM tech in an educational setting is even more disgusting and anti-learning. Students that need accommodations should be getting actual accommodations, not a cheap facsimile that make it impossible for a class to function because of the massive distraction.
You should absolutely not be permitted to have a phone on your person in a classroom setting before college, let alone to interact with it.
I use my phone/laptop a lot in class too look things up. Like finding gifs of the stages of a beating heart, and generally, reading about the same topic being covered by the professor, but explained differently. It helps tremendously. That being said, there are certainly other people in any class that are on tiktok or whatever else and those people wouldn’t pay attention with or without their phones. Take their phones away and they’ll just distract themselves with something else. They don’t want to be there and taking their phones away won’t fix that; it will probably just make it worse.
This reminds me of the idea that violent video games causes violence; which they do, but only in people that are pre-disposed to behaving violently; and in those cases they’re violent with or without the video games. It’s the same with smart phones. They’ll only distract people that are already going to be distracted. It’s just a matter of what they’re going to be distracted by.
The onus instead should lie with how the classes are delivered, and tangentially, how the entire system itself is funded.
I’m not convinced. I think a lot more people are susceptible to getting distracted than there are susceptible to extreme acts of violence.
Your stated good use cases can easily be performed after/outside of classes. And I would say in this day and age should be part of assignments/homework/studying in high school level education to guide and educate young people in filtering, identifying and assessing source materials better. But that’s asking a lot from teachers, who are not experts at this, either.
I don’t see how any of this discussion relates to funding though.
