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
Don’t all schools ban phones? They were banned when I was in highschool maybe ten years ago. And smartphones were already very much a thing by that point. Everyone still used them because enforcement was basically impossible.
The only teacher I ever saw who had an effective strategy was my math teacher. He told kids to put their phones on their desk at the beginning of class so that they were out in the open. If he found out you had come to class with a phone and didn’t put it on the desk, you’d lose it, even if you weren’t using it. And then he said you could use them for a few seconds to check them, but you had to keep them out in the open. No hiding the phone by your legs.
“Back in my day” (when phones were not that smart but already had color screens and crappy cameras) the teacher would seize your phone if you dared to take it out of your pocket or if it even did as much as vibrate. Not sure why kids would need to check their phone during class nowadays.
I think we’re from the same day. I’m pretty goddamn glad, honestly. I’ve seen how much the phone has invaded my life, and I’m on the lowest scale of intrusion. I typically find myself out with a group of people all on their phones. It feels weird and gross. I could see how that constant attachment could be such a problem for teachers today, even if they were banned. It’s almost automatic, when someone gets bored or distracted, their hand is already in their pocket pulling out the phone.
We had texting, but the smart phone was invented the year I graduated high school. So really even my college years weren’t really tainted by constant phone use. We were really lucky for that reason, I hink.
That’s how most teachers in my school operated, and it meant people were constantly screwing around on their phones and not paying attention, because it was an unenforceable policy. Like I said, the only teacher I ever had who effectively prevented people from screwing around on their phones excessively was that math teacher.
Was very enforceable at our school. Teachers had eagle eyes, they simply took your phone and if you were lucky they gave it back to you after class, but most of the time you had to come pick it up after school, and if you were a multi-time offender, your parents had to come get it.
my kid once stuck his phone in his underwear and told them to go for it.
i was on his side for that one, he was not being disruptive, it was outside of class i believe.
That’s when the kid gets sent to the principal, if they had any functioning sense of discipline in that room.
alas, i did not get the opportunity to laugh in the principals face.
whomever stopped him clearly had a sense of sanity… that its just a phone and its just a kid and its just a school and people prolly shouldnt gets so worked up over nothing.
And then he had his victory: a phone that smells like ass. 🤢
plus i get to laugh in the administrators face when they tell me
damn i love that kid
Hell I nearly got my fancy color screen calculator taken from me
Granted, I was playing doom, but still
Because the way we detect and curb abusive teachers is the same way we do abusive police officers, by recording their actions and posting them online.
Back in my day abusive teachers just did their damage, and left my generation with scars. Without publicly-accessible evidence of these events, and consequential pressure on the state, the process just continues.
And then your society teams with intergenerational mental illness, such as what I’m diagnosed with.
When I was in school, just pulling out a phone meant confiscation.
Even ringing meant a call for the parents to get it back.My local school has a simple system. Every student is required to place their phones in a clear plastic similar to this - []https://www.amazon.com/Gorilla-Grip-Breathable-Organizer-Accessories/dp/B09MJH9V2V/ref=sr_1_6?crid=1X4FP5L6YX60T&keywords=hanging%2Bshoe%2Bcaddy&sprefix=hanging%2Bshoe%2Bcaddy%2Caps%2C239&sr=8-6&th=1 - hanging right next to the door. The pockets are transparent so the teacher can quickly see if everyone has done so and they are cheap.
Terrible. Imagine how many poo and cum particles live on that nasty-ass thing.
Schools are a disease factory and kids are dirty disease carrying little monsters. A little more isn’t a real problem. The janitorial staff does clean them though. But a school as a rule is very good place to go if you ever want to catch some nasty disease.
So clean it out every week…
Ewwwww dude imagine how many phones are in there every day of the week.
Trust me, NOBODY would wanna touch my phone. And I’m pretty clean.
Now multiply that by… a lot. And also it’s teens. They don’t tend to have the best hand-washing-after-touching-gross-things record. I only did because I had parents in the medical community. My friends were disgusting. They still are. I love them anyway. I don’t want my phone touching stranger poocum
Baby wipes. Use them on your ass and your phone
I’ve got a bidet for my ass and my phone is just for me
Definitely depends on the school and where you live, but in my experience the rules have become really loose. Every kid has a phone and mobile data. They’re banned in class but kids always try to open their phones to check them and hide them quickly anyways. Many kids spend breaks on their phone. Banning kids from coming into school with phones in their first place is what the article means.
Today my computer science teacher asked a friend of mine to show his screentime statistics as a joke. Bro literally spent an average of +11h A DAY on his phone…
Smartphones and apps are scientifically designed to be addictive. The same techniques that make people spend hours at slot machines goes into modern games.
Are you saying the app I’m using to browse Lemmy is scientifically designed to be addictive?
I used to work in public health. One of the things they teach is that only the addict can decide if they are addicted. No one improves until they admit that they are powerless to stop on their own.
Jesus. I’m at just above two hours for my weekly average. It used to be 8-10 hours daily when I had a job where I had to leave my house, go into an office, and not do any work. Now that I do the same thing but from home, I don’t need to use my phone as much.
I was curious so I looked at mine, it isn’t accurate, it says 10 hours 22 minutes average, but it says 7 of that is gaming, there’s no way i spend 7 hours of gaming, maybe an hour max a day because the only game I play is ants fallen kingdom which doesn’t require much active tike, just enough time to do dailies so 45 mins? , I’m on social media a hell of a lot more then gaming but my social is only at roughly 2 hours. I don’t think you can rely on it lol
Uh huh…
I went to school right at the time where Smartphones become popular and at the beginning most either had no phone or a basic featurephone and in the end almost everyone had a smartphone. And I think the impact was very minimal. School sucked regardless. People were bullied regardless. Some had really short attention spans regardless.
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?
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.
The notion that some things may be inappropriate for kids is easly misused when it’s turned into a principle and as such we end up where the US is now, withholding civil rights from children and using child safety to push identity politics.
I do hope you are not a parent.
I wish we have restrictions based on mental capacity rather than age. Fucking dimwits aged 40+ can’t think better than elementary schoolers
Jefferson thought as much, thinking the common public was too daft to effectively vote.
Here’s the problem: We have no good way to decide who is savvy enough for civic engagement and who isn’t, and because of that ambiguity (and maybe without it) such a test would absolutely get corrupted for political purposes.
Part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is to develop an army of MAGA-minded clerical workers to replace all the bureaucrats that run the deep state since they’re not willing to follow illegal orders. Every power-seeking authoritarian movement seeks to weed out all those who disagree with them.
I hope you aren’t either. You probably try to make everything into a political diatribe.
Actually, I hope you don’t have kids, because you are clearly not a parent, regardless of whether you’ve been able to spawn.
I’m not a parent, a point that has informed my relationship with my stepdaughters and grandson. When we lived in the same household, they still had their respective dads, for better or worse, and I couldn’t replace them. As a friendly adult, my role was to affirm to my wife’s kids that their feelings are valid even when they couldn’t express them with the sturm und drang they warranted.
Of what I’ve seen of parents, including my own, their jobs commonly leave them far to exhausted to actually parent (or run a household, or relax, or engage in their civic responsibilities). Industry has long driven society to intergenerational mental illness, and kids are often having to confront adult situations early.
But yes, events and policy in Florida and Texas have shown us that it is en vogue in places to withhold information from children, not so much to protect them, but to keep them from questioning the values of their parents, teachers, ministers and officers who direct them. Efforts to obstruct access to porn turn quickly into efforts to obstruct access to health information, to LGBT+ content, to the darker chapters of US and western history, to alternatives to capitalism, to even the beatitudes.
To be fair, Moms For Liberty and the adults making scenes at PTSA (PTA?) meetings don’t represent all parents, and I actually kinda hope they aren’t parents (or as you noted, progenitors) themselves. But we naked apes don’t typically choose to breed for the benefit of our spawn, but because we want the cute thing, not thinking about the outraged, frustrated teen they will grow into, or the struggling, beleaguered adult struggling to fit into a society that wants to use and discard them like an expendable mechanical part.
Kids don’t know the difference between ignorance and innocence. That is a projection placed onto them by society, and I think kids should have the same access to information on the clitoris or plantation economics or communism or Sappho of Lesbos as they do Alexander Hamilton, the steam engine, Christopher Columbus and Washington Irving.
I never said anything about restricting access to information. We’re talking about banning phones from classrooms, which I see as no different from not letting kids drive cars.
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.
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.
I think a lot of comments are thinking about this as a binary, or that it’s actually about if children should have phones or not.
As an adult, there are plenty of places I’m not allowed to take my phone, or at least must completely power it off. Concerts, court rooms, libraries, hospitals…
These rules are there only because it disturbs others if my phone rings or I’m talking.
That applies to schools, too, but even moreso. It also opens the door even wider to cheating in various ways.
While it is important to try to teach kids to regulate themselves, the fact is that there are still frequent phones going off at concerts and annoying people talking loudly in libraries. Schools are much more serious in nature - it can affect test scores, for example.
It’s also naive to think that all students / schools can just be taught to make responsible decisions. Many schools, especially inner city ones, are complete disaster areas. It’s hard enough as it is to get the kids to even stop talking, or sit down, or stop assaulting others.
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?
lol if you think you can stop that
That’s a strange comment. There’s obviously a difference between a 16 year old and a 4 year old (I have both). Are you saying because my 16 year old is curious and gets sent shit by her friends, I shouldn’t try to filter what my 4 year old doing?
once you no longer have eyes on them outside your home it is pretty much over
4 year old is fine, by 5 or 6 good luck unless you are home school helicopter parenting them
Given how responsibility for much of the violence in the world falls at the feet of the society that is deciding how to censor information from our kids, I find it quite appropriate that they have access to terrorist executions and cat killing videos.
The US gives few fucks that such videos exist, or that our society was built on massacres and slavery. We just don’t want our kids to know the grim legacy that they’ve been given.
Considering kids today are going to be middle aged when the climate crisis catches up to us, it raises questions of ethics what people were doing having kids in the first place.
They’re probably 15
You actually hit it right in the nail. What actually works is talking to them like thinking, rational human beings, explain the situation and then be a mature adult and understand that they will have to make their own choices and there is nothing you can do about it.
Ideally we should be teaching self-control instead of submission and evasion. A lot of what’s going on in the world stems from this tendency.
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.
This is 100% false
It’s a bad idea for the reasons you mentioned, but it’s not illegal in the slightest
The Cliff House in San Francisco is a Faraday cage. Phones in the restaurant get no signal. They’re completely legal in the United States.
It’s not that easy to make a faraday cage that works against modern phones as the scale of a building. You have to make sure it’s perfect, any imperfection in the implementation and signal can get in.
Personally I went to school before smartphones were a thing and it was still miserable lmao
I was at the right age to see the transition happen. When I started high school it was all flip phones and some kids didn’t have a phone, but by the time I graduated basically everyone had a smartphone and the school added wifi. I remember feeling like the school had a less social feel in my senior year and everyone was just on their phones in the cafeteria
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 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
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.
I think you’re being a little naive…
Circumventing parental controls that “couldn’t be circumvented” is what I did as a child that led to me being a computer programmer
We’re not talking about the dumb parental controls from the 90’s or 2000’s and run on Windows, we’re talking about smartphone OSes (iOS and Android) that are locked down to start with.
Security is really hard, and these operating systems are built with new features and release dates as the primary concerns
If you’re trying to follow proper security practices as of today, ensure the device is up to date and rebooted daily
Use the parental control features as one part of parenting, but don’t expect them to be infallible
No, they literally can’t be bypassed unless they figure out the passcode. Parental controls on iOS are part of the OS, not like the easily bypassed software you would install on a computer.
Sure they are buddy. Perfect security. Why would anyone think otherwise?
Apple screen time parental Controls were created because third party software was using MDM which Apple didn’t like. If Apple can lock down a phone with mdm for companies to give to their employees why exactly do you think software built into the OS is easy to get around like net nanny?
Googling found an article about getting around it.
Nothing on there an 8 year old would do and there’s directions on how to prevent any of it. You can lock down changing system settings or even stop them from editing their contacts.
One of the ways I got around my parent’s settings after getting caught by simply resetting their password was by using alternate operating systems on livecds
Saying they literally can’t be bypassed is why I’m saying it’s naive to trust them implicitly
So… are you going to link the live cd that works on iPhones or just going to continue talking about the net nanny days? iOS is locked down. Nothing is bulletproof but a child isn’t going to find a way around it.
oh no…anyway…
12? Those kids get phones at 8-9 around here as far as I saw.
Yeah, I haven’t gotten to that point with my kids but he’s getting a flip phone first if I can find one. I see other kids on his bus (elementary level) with smartphones and I think it’s insane.
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.
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Official government recommendation for Dutch school is to ban smartphones in class. For now it’s just an advice, but it may become law in the future.
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”.
The 90s are in rn. All my friends kids have nirvana shirts and such.
I don’t think the Nirvana shirts have ever really gone away.
That may just me bias based on my exposure. I have lots of exposure to kids my kids’ ages and that group is moving into the Nirvana phase.
I see way more Nirvana shirts today than I saw back when they were actually playing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.
As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake).
The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps.
When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health.
Providing dumb phones could be part of the way forward, Nina Marks admits, but she wonders if funds at already strapped public schools could be put to better use.
While Hollier says that Light Phones are intentionally small and slow, so that people use them less, students report that they also break easily and the batteries die quickly, which wasn’t in the plan.
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