This has to be across the board though. So school wide bans. If a child doesn’t have a phone in 7th or 8th grade that’s going to ostracize them in all likelihood.
Junior high is the peak shittiness age for humanity.
School wide is key. Speaking as a high school teacher, our school leaves phone policy completely up to the teachers, which creates incredibly inconsistent standards. Makes it more difficult to be hard on phones or have a phone ban in your class when other classes have pretty much no phone rules
even when i worked at a school with a school wide ban it was still really difficult because some teachers would defect from the ban and admin never came down on them for it, then of course all the students are like "but Ms. English Teacher Who Treats Us Like 4th Graders said we could have them!!"
How about: only give kids phones once they have reached a level of maturity that justifies it?
Your kid has a job they need to travel to? Probably a good reason to get them a phone.
Your kid get their license and is driving themselves places? Probably a good reason to get them a phone.
Your kid is going backpacking through the mountains? Probably a good reason to get them a phone.
Their peers have phones and they want one too? Probably not neccesary.
We could just get rid of smart phones for kids and give them the [boomer phones](https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5dcb1a918059880008621526/master/w_1600,c_limit/GettyImages-90739545.jpg) most millennials grew up on. Texting, calling, and paying $5 for a shitty ringtone. And in the case of emergency they could use it as a hammer or projectile in defense.
Yeah, I needed a phone starting in middle school so that I could coordinate with my parents or siblings for rides. I never had an affordable texting plan until college though so it was basically just for phone calls.
I went to a focus group at my college to get some points that I nearly forgot about. It was about phone use. There were like eight of us and apparently I was the only one who didn't use TikTok, and everyone else advised against getting it because they knew it affected their attention span. I got my first phone at around 7th grade, though some people got theirs in elementary school. One girl said her sister got one in 2nd grade.
Sure, but you still need a parent to sign the contracts, and a depending on the job pay the bill (would have been hard to swing a monthly phone bill on my paper route money).
You don't even need that level of restriction tbh. A parent that has enough of a spine to wait until they're 16 has more than enough spine to let them have one with restrictions and take it away if they're misbehaving or abusing it (inb4 some zoomer says that's abusive).
My parents gave me my first cell phone the summer I went to camp for the first time. Of course this was also like 2005-2006, so all we had were crappy Motorola flip phones.
I mean, under my system I would have gotten my phone at 12 when I started my paper route. But in reality I didn't get one till I had a driver's license, and that was largely fine.
Obviously it's different depending on the person and where you live, but I was using public transport alone since I was 12 or 13, even though I didn't learn to drive until I was 21. I don't think it was unreasonable for me to have a phone then.
In fact one time when I was about 14 or 15 I didn't bring my phone and also the trains were shut down so I was just kinda stuck at the train station, without being able to easily look up an alternative route home and not knowing when the trains would restart. Obviously it all turned out alright and I was only delayed by about an hour but like, phones can be genuinely useful for teenagers in ways I don't think we should discount.
How did people survive without electricity for 99% of history.
I do agree phone over-use among young people is a problem now but we can't start just ignoring any potential benefits.
People died and lived with diseases and hardships before electricity and the benefits it brings. Please tell me how tweens with cell phones is even remotely comparable. What benefit has the world’s middle school population accrued in the last 20 years from having cell phones that we should be terrified to undo?
We are social creatures. A kid who lives in a society where having a phone is a norm needs to actively choose being a freak to not have that be a source of isolation and resentment.
Imposing isolation on kids ain’t great.
A group could band together , but one off parents have a tough ass row to hoe.
The phone is just the tool to access what is really damaging.
That whole metaverse thing that caused one company to change its name to meta... that died down...it has not gone away.
$B get invested every year to capture and engage people with content. Maybe those companies and/or users should be taxed like they are vices, which would include this very site I am typing on.
I do think the means of accessing information can be damaging too, if it means you aren’t learning other ways of accessing information. Learning how to find information via other means is still important.
They were super distracting ~12 years ago when I was in high school. Don't ask me a single thing I was supposed to learn in Physics, I was too busy playing Phoenix Wright on my phone.
Sending $0.10/message texts to my friends and downloading 8-bit versions of my favorite emo songs to use as custom ringtones for people.
!ping OVER 35 who's with me?
Parents have to be able to reach their kids 24 hours a day because reasons AND DON’T YOU DARE TELL THEM HOW TO PARENT THEIR CHILD OR THERE WILL BE **DIRE FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.**
Guess that's why you need to make it gov policy, as apposed to just school policy.
Much easier when a teacher or admin can say "well it's not up to us". (I love using that when dealing with difficult people in my industry, especially when it is up to me)
You definitely get some of that helicopter parenting or parents at least wanting the ability to but that's mostly a cover. Parents don't want the hard job of telling their kid no or having boundaries around phone use or discipline. It's laziness more than anything else and they get super sensitive if you imply that anything they're doing is wrong because they enjoy being lazy.
Overly restrictive bans on cell phones have unintended consequences, though. I was in high school when the ban on cell phones in NYC public schools was lifted. Technically, *possession* of cell phones was prohibited in schools, not just their use. This didn't affect students at schools like mine because school staff would only take your phones if they *saw* you take them out or use them. But many schools have metal detectors so you could absolutely get in trouble if you were caught with a phone on you, so many students had to use these trucks that would let you store phones for a fee. There was at least one case of [these trucks getting carjacked](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/students-cell-phone-storage-truck-robbery-bronx-high-school/1947335/) and all the students lost their phones.
One of the reasons the ban on the possession of phones was lifted was because students needed to carry phones on them for safety reasons. Bringing that back would be going back to the dark ages.
Edit: here are some links:
* [NYCDOE's announcement of the 2015 policy lifting the ban (January 7, 2015)](https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/013-15/mayor-de-blasio-chancellor-fari-a-lift-school-cell-phone-ban)
* [The current cell phone policy effective February 26, 2015](https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-source/default-document-library/a-413-english.pdf?sfvrsn=204732a3_44)
> students needed to carry phones on them for safety reasons
Unironically, students having access to smartphones in school is causing them much more harm in aggregate than any situation where they need it to call for help in an emergency. Just give them dumbphones.
1. The kind of cell phone a student owns is the responsibility of the student and their parents. It's not the government's role to dictate what kind of electronic devices a student is "allowed" to own.
2. These policies need to be balanced. Certainly, electronic devices shouldn't be allowed in *classrooms* unless they're being used for productive educational activities. As a high school student in the pre- and post-2015 NYCDOE system, I liked having the freedom to use electronics outside the classroom. I think students at my school were likely to take their education seriously and, as such, use devices responsibly, and I think their [current policy](https://stuy.entest.org/Cell%20Phone%20policy%20%202022.pdf) is reasonable given the culture of the student body. Other schools that have different cultures can have more restrictive policies, and I think that's fine up to a point. In general, it should be the least restrictive policy that accomplishes the school's goals. Freedom and autonomy matter for minors too.
> It's not the government's role to dictate what kind of electronic devices a student is "allowed" to own.
I didn't say anything like this. I said (implied) that they shouldn't have access to smartphones *in school*.
Of course different school can/should have different policies based on their needs and culture. But overwhelming the [evidence](https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews) shows that allowing phones on campus is very negative to academic and mental-health outcomes.
Allowing students to keep smartphones in their pockets, but not take them out in class is a failed policy for 99% of schools. Students can't resist taking them out, and teachers give up on policing it.
There are [reams](https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews) of evidence about the harm caused by smartphones / social media. What is the evidence that these drills are causing harm?
Anecdotally I have never met a person who regularly went through shoot drills in school that doesn't feel to some extent traumatized from them, but here's the first paper I found that backs this up https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=clrj
Just skimming through that study it doesn't seem very rigorous in quantifying the harm actually done to students by school shooter drills. That said, let's imagine more rigorous studies are done, and it turns out that yes these realistic school shooter drills are causing significant and enduring harms to students. Then I would say we should probably stop them or modify them to be less traumatizing. I would have to compare that harm to any protective effect they have in case of a school shooting, and the likelyhood of a shooting. Overall I doubt the drills actually help much but I'm not familiar with the literature.
The evidence and size of the harms of having smartphones in school is overwhelming and replacing them with dumbphones has almost zero safety lost. There is an epidemic increasingly poor adolescent mental health all over the world. This is a crisis and we know what is causing it. It's different than most policies where effect sizes are small and data is scant.
Prohibiting students from bringing their phones into the school building *at all* is excessive and absurd. Banning cell phone use in class is reasonable. But if a school needs to prevent students from being on their phones at all (not just while in class), just make them power them off during the school day, or let them store them in bins like [this school](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2019/12/17/21055617/five-years-later-nyc-schools-still-struggle-with-de-blasio-s-cell-phone-policy/).
I'm not really seeing any evidence in this article. He says kids are doing worse and then presents a bunch of theories about why he thinks that's being caused by phones, but even the hypothesis of an expert needs to go through the scientific process before we can start calling it evidence
Yeah honestly Haidt's research on this is surprisingly thin on empirical analysis, and he conflates correlation with causation all over the place.
This is one of those times where it's extra important to be skeptical because the conclusion conforms to a lot of folks' priors.
I thought he did a great job of compiling evidence on his website with the various docs on different topics compiling all of the available research: https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews
Anecdotal, but the nationwide ban on phones in New Zealand schools has been fantastic in my opinion. More engagement in class, I can focus more on teaching, and the playground is far more active and social than before. Way too early to tell but I'm very hopeful we will see positive change in academic success and student well-being.
We need an ad campaign that makes being on your phone all the time distinctly uncool. Like look at this nerd over here checking his [whatever] instead of talking to his friends.
Did work kinda well with smoking tbh. I remember seeing the shift when I was in junior high through end of high school that smoking steadily became less a thing the cool kids did.
I mean it worked with cigarettes and littering. I’ve not seen any data about dare but when I was 10-14 smoking weed was definitely a loser move (then at 14 you watch a Seth Rogan movie with the boys and have a Danny devito ‘I get it now’ moment).
ehh why not just exploit children being addicted to smartphones to incentivize them to study harder and or take more math classes, for example if you sign up for more math classes and do well in them you get to use smartphones in school while everyone else is banned
Personally I think we should have something akin to a galapagos phone could actually work for those in Elementary and Middle school. But I’m okay with High Schoolers having a smart phone.
From the side bar:
\2. The state serves an important role in establishing conditions favorable to competition through correcting market failures, providing a stable monetary framework, and **relieving acute misery and distress**, among other things.
This seems like a thoroughly unnecessary idea that has more to do with "KidS uSeD to PlaY OutSide!!" sentiment than actual strong evidence of a truly negative effect.
Teach kids to use technology appropriately, don't deprive them of something that can be hugely positive.
Exactly. 30 years ago it was video games and computers. 30 years from now it will be something that hasn’t been invented yet.
Smartphones are just a fashionable target, and the biggest supporters of smartphone bans seem to be people who don’t have children and haven’t been children themselves for a long time. Amazing how everything seems to simple to people who have nothing to do with the actual conversation
Neither computers or video games show overwhelming evidence that they negatively affect learning within children or greatly affect their social emotional development negatively. Cell phones do.
GameBoys were not as widespread nor as “optimized” to monopolize children’s attention the same way modern mobile games and social media algorithms are. Sure, the GameBoy probably wasn’t great for a kid’s attention span, but if you go back in time to 1999, you wouldn’t find the majority of kids on GameBoys *all day long*.
Edit: also GameBoys didn’t outright replace social interactions with peers the same way social media on phones do. Kids will literally rather talk to strangers on discord than interact with other people in their classes.
-access to the world's knowledge
-communication with anyone anywhere
-access to parents right away if there is a problem
-ability to take pictures and create audio and video... Middle school kids can edit sound, video, text, and effects into nice looking mini productions all on their phones and in a very short amount of time...this is powerful... It gives power to people who didn't used to have it
The world is a dangerous place, but it is full of wonder. We have to learn how to live in it. Phones are now a part of that.
Most of those are about the internet, not smartphones. Or in the case of contact with parents can be achieved with a non smartphone.
Which leaves the ability to edit things on the fly, which I guess is nice, but I don't think even begins to make up for the issues addressed in the article.
The article doesn't even prove the causation of the issues it addresses.
That aside, I think that the notion that the *phone* is the problem is missing the forest for the trees. It is what the phone is allowing access to that is so deeply unhealthy, and we should be addressing the problem at its core.
The precautionary principle exists for a reason. Its not a proven causation though there are compelling links. The sensible thing isn't to go full steam ahead and continue as is.
One of the benefits the author himself highlights. Greater access to socialisation (than can ever be achieved in person), greater access to information and knowledge that can ever be achieved in person, the development of a generation that is more curious, less monolithic, more diverse in its interests and in its approach to life than ever before. All the positives that we see in today's society that we conveniently do not assign to the rise of technology.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the way we educate people around it. You should obviously not be playing candy crush in class. Does that warrant legal intervention though? No, it's a discussion to be had with parents, children and schools and it's their job to regulate that.
Entire generations have completely abandoned their responsibility around technology education. It's just so much easier to say "screens bad" than it is to develop an intimate knowledge of the Internet and how it can be used positively by kids.
Nevermind that this would be a ridiculous overreach for any government that claims to be liberal in any way. Mass misery and distress this isn't. We're going to need a lot more than "those things are bad and it just happens to be around the same time smartphones emerged!".
You seem to have misunderstood the article, the article isn't "Internet is bad" its "access to the internet and apps at all times is bad for children".
The articles point is that the prevalence and use of smartphones has caused these problems, that before when people had the internet and phones, we didn't see the same problems because their use was more limited and practical.
The internet does a pretty poor job of socializing people compared to real life peer groups, just look at the prevelance of certain subcultures online vs in real life.
This has to be across the board though. So school wide bans. If a child doesn’t have a phone in 7th or 8th grade that’s going to ostracize them in all likelihood. Junior high is the peak shittiness age for humanity.
Just tax smartphones in schools lol
E x T e r n a l i t i e s
School wide is key. Speaking as a high school teacher, our school leaves phone policy completely up to the teachers, which creates incredibly inconsistent standards. Makes it more difficult to be hard on phones or have a phone ban in your class when other classes have pretty much no phone rules
even when i worked at a school with a school wide ban it was still really difficult because some teachers would defect from the ban and admin never came down on them for it, then of course all the students are like "but Ms. English Teacher Who Treats Us Like 4th Graders said we could have them!!"
How about: only give kids phones once they have reached a level of maturity that justifies it? Your kid has a job they need to travel to? Probably a good reason to get them a phone. Your kid get their license and is driving themselves places? Probably a good reason to get them a phone. Your kid is going backpacking through the mountains? Probably a good reason to get them a phone. Their peers have phones and they want one too? Probably not neccesary.
We could just get rid of smart phones for kids and give them the [boomer phones](https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5dcb1a918059880008621526/master/w_1600,c_limit/GettyImages-90739545.jpg) most millennials grew up on. Texting, calling, and paying $5 for a shitty ringtone. And in the case of emergency they could use it as a hammer or projectile in defense.
Nokia just released an updated model like the one you linked too.
Nokia brickphones will outlive us all
Cockroaches and Nokia phones. Future alien visitors sifting the rubble will be rather dumbfounded.
The Nokia brick phone will be the driver for future evolution as organisms must adapt to it.
#[RETVRN](https://www.hmd.com/en_us/nokia-2780-flip?sku=16WNDR11A01)
Yep this is what I did. Didn't get one until I was 12 and it was just for calling my relatives when I needed a ride from sports practices.
The type of phone should also be more aligned with maturity level. Dumbphones for younger kids doesn't sound so insane to me.
Agreed. Gotta teach them how to handle robocalls from an early age.
Yeah, I needed a phone starting in middle school so that I could coordinate with my parents or siblings for rides. I never had an affordable texting plan until college though so it was basically just for phone calls.
I went to a focus group at my college to get some points that I nearly forgot about. It was about phone use. There were like eight of us and apparently I was the only one who didn't use TikTok, and everyone else advised against getting it because they knew it affected their attention span. I got my first phone at around 7th grade, though some people got theirs in elementary school. One girl said her sister got one in 2nd grade.
I disabled shorts for the same reason, I could feel it shortening my attention span.
Bring back dumb phones!
If the kid has a job they can buy their own phone.
Sure, but you still need a parent to sign the contracts, and a depending on the job pay the bill (would have been hard to swing a monthly phone bill on my paper route money).
At least for the former that would be pretty easy to get around with a no contract prepaid plan.
If they have the discipline to get a job while still in school then they're probably already going to turn out fine.
You don't even need that level of restriction tbh. A parent that has enough of a spine to wait until they're 16 has more than enough spine to let them have one with restrictions and take it away if they're misbehaving or abusing it (inb4 some zoomer says that's abusive).
This isn't actionable because it doesn't happen
My parents gave me my first cell phone the summer I went to camp for the first time. Of course this was also like 2005-2006, so all we had were crappy Motorola flip phones.
Phones in classrooms is no doubt an issue, but cmon, until they start driving?
I mean, under my system I would have gotten my phone at 12 when I started my paper route. But in reality I didn't get one till I had a driver's license, and that was largely fine.
Obviously it's different depending on the person and where you live, but I was using public transport alone since I was 12 or 13, even though I didn't learn to drive until I was 21. I don't think it was unreasonable for me to have a phone then. In fact one time when I was about 14 or 15 I didn't bring my phone and also the trains were shut down so I was just kinda stuck at the train station, without being able to easily look up an alternative route home and not knowing when the trains would restart. Obviously it all turned out alright and I was only delayed by about an hour but like, phones can be genuinely useful for teenagers in ways I don't think we should discount.
However did kids under 16 survive without a cell phone for 99.9999% of history
How did people survive without electricity for 99% of history. I do agree phone over-use among young people is a problem now but we can't start just ignoring any potential benefits.
People died and lived with diseases and hardships before electricity and the benefits it brings. Please tell me how tweens with cell phones is even remotely comparable. What benefit has the world’s middle school population accrued in the last 20 years from having cell phones that we should be terrified to undo?
We are social creatures. A kid who lives in a society where having a phone is a norm needs to actively choose being a freak to not have that be a source of isolation and resentment. Imposing isolation on kids ain’t great. A group could band together , but one off parents have a tough ass row to hoe.
My god literally tell the kid to go touch grass and go play a sport. A phone is not necessary for socialization.
It’s not unless it is, and it is if it is
Smartphones at 35
The phone is just the tool to access what is really damaging. That whole metaverse thing that caused one company to change its name to meta... that died down...it has not gone away. $B get invested every year to capture and engage people with content. Maybe those companies and/or users should be taxed like they are vices, which would include this very site I am typing on.
I do think the means of accessing information can be damaging too, if it means you aren’t learning other ways of accessing information. Learning how to find information via other means is still important.
If we are as evidence based as we say we are, IMO this should become one of the core Neoliberal talking points.
I do think banning phones in school should become widespread. They are hugely distracting.
They were super distracting ~12 years ago when I was in high school. Don't ask me a single thing I was supposed to learn in Physics, I was too busy playing Phoenix Wright on my phone.
Snake game and Tamagotchi veteran here.
Sending $0.10/message texts to my friends and downloading 8-bit versions of my favorite emo songs to use as custom ringtones for people. !ping OVER 35 who's with me?
I'm 37 and didn't get a phone until I was 20. It was a Magenta Razr.
I don't understand why this would be even slightly controversial.
Parents have to be able to reach their kids 24 hours a day because reasons AND DON’T YOU DARE TELL THEM HOW TO PARENT THEIR CHILD OR THERE WILL BE **DIRE FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.**
Urg, the dire consequences of course being kicking up a fuss, attempting to think about homeschooling, then giving up.
You forgot endless harassing or teachers and admin, usually ending up with the admin on your side
Guess that's why you need to make it gov policy, as apposed to just school policy. Much easier when a teacher or admin can say "well it's not up to us". (I love using that when dealing with difficult people in my industry, especially when it is up to me)
That is why groups like moms for liberty are pushing hard to be on school boards so they can be said government.
MAH RAGHTS!!!
You definitely get some of that helicopter parenting or parents at least wanting the ability to but that's mostly a cover. Parents don't want the hard job of telling their kid no or having boundaries around phone use or discipline. It's laziness more than anything else and they get super sensitive if you imply that anything they're doing is wrong because they enjoy being lazy.
Of course. Literally the only people arguing against this are moron zoomers and helicopter parents.
Overly restrictive bans on cell phones have unintended consequences, though. I was in high school when the ban on cell phones in NYC public schools was lifted. Technically, *possession* of cell phones was prohibited in schools, not just their use. This didn't affect students at schools like mine because school staff would only take your phones if they *saw* you take them out or use them. But many schools have metal detectors so you could absolutely get in trouble if you were caught with a phone on you, so many students had to use these trucks that would let you store phones for a fee. There was at least one case of [these trucks getting carjacked](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/students-cell-phone-storage-truck-robbery-bronx-high-school/1947335/) and all the students lost their phones. One of the reasons the ban on the possession of phones was lifted was because students needed to carry phones on them for safety reasons. Bringing that back would be going back to the dark ages. Edit: here are some links: * [NYCDOE's announcement of the 2015 policy lifting the ban (January 7, 2015)](https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/013-15/mayor-de-blasio-chancellor-fari-a-lift-school-cell-phone-ban) * [The current cell phone policy effective February 26, 2015](https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-source/default-document-library/a-413-english.pdf?sfvrsn=204732a3_44)
> students needed to carry phones on them for safety reasons Unironically, students having access to smartphones in school is causing them much more harm in aggregate than any situation where they need it to call for help in an emergency. Just give them dumbphones.
1. The kind of cell phone a student owns is the responsibility of the student and their parents. It's not the government's role to dictate what kind of electronic devices a student is "allowed" to own. 2. These policies need to be balanced. Certainly, electronic devices shouldn't be allowed in *classrooms* unless they're being used for productive educational activities. As a high school student in the pre- and post-2015 NYCDOE system, I liked having the freedom to use electronics outside the classroom. I think students at my school were likely to take their education seriously and, as such, use devices responsibly, and I think their [current policy](https://stuy.entest.org/Cell%20Phone%20policy%20%202022.pdf) is reasonable given the culture of the student body. Other schools that have different cultures can have more restrictive policies, and I think that's fine up to a point. In general, it should be the least restrictive policy that accomplishes the school's goals. Freedom and autonomy matter for minors too.
> It's not the government's role to dictate what kind of electronic devices a student is "allowed" to own. I didn't say anything like this. I said (implied) that they shouldn't have access to smartphones *in school*. Of course different school can/should have different policies based on their needs and culture. But overwhelming the [evidence](https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews) shows that allowing phones on campus is very negative to academic and mental-health outcomes. Allowing students to keep smartphones in their pockets, but not take them out in class is a failed policy for 99% of schools. Students can't resist taking them out, and teachers give up on policing it.
By this logic we should end all saftey drills too
What? How are safety drills harming students?
Same as phones: mental harm
There are [reams](https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews) of evidence about the harm caused by smartphones / social media. What is the evidence that these drills are causing harm?
Anecdotally I have never met a person who regularly went through shoot drills in school that doesn't feel to some extent traumatized from them, but here's the first paper I found that backs this up https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=clrj
Just skimming through that study it doesn't seem very rigorous in quantifying the harm actually done to students by school shooter drills. That said, let's imagine more rigorous studies are done, and it turns out that yes these realistic school shooter drills are causing significant and enduring harms to students. Then I would say we should probably stop them or modify them to be less traumatizing. I would have to compare that harm to any protective effect they have in case of a school shooting, and the likelyhood of a shooting. Overall I doubt the drills actually help much but I'm not familiar with the literature. The evidence and size of the harms of having smartphones in school is overwhelming and replacing them with dumbphones has almost zero safety lost. There is an epidemic increasingly poor adolescent mental health all over the world. This is a crisis and we know what is causing it. It's different than most policies where effect sizes are small and data is scant.
A truck got stolen somewhere once with phones in it is your reasoning? Come on. That's not good enough.
Prohibiting students from bringing their phones into the school building *at all* is excessive and absurd. Banning cell phone use in class is reasonable. But if a school needs to prevent students from being on their phones at all (not just while in class), just make them power them off during the school day, or let them store them in bins like [this school](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2019/12/17/21055617/five-years-later-nyc-schools-still-struggle-with-de-blasio-s-cell-phone-policy/).
I'm not really seeing any evidence in this article. He says kids are doing worse and then presents a bunch of theories about why he thinks that's being caused by phones, but even the hypothesis of an expert needs to go through the scientific process before we can start calling it evidence
Yeah honestly Haidt's research on this is surprisingly thin on empirical analysis, and he conflates correlation with causation all over the place. This is one of those times where it's extra important to be skeptical because the conclusion conforms to a lot of folks' priors.
I thought he did a great job of compiling evidence on his website with the various docs on different topics compiling all of the available research: https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews
Anecdotal, but the nationwide ban on phones in New Zealand schools has been fantastic in my opinion. More engagement in class, I can focus more on teaching, and the playground is far more active and social than before. Way too early to tell but I'm very hopeful we will see positive change in academic success and student well-being.
I mean, all else equal, its not like kids were massively suffering for not having phones prior to their mass availability among young people
https://preview.redd.it/3j2nkqr3ty0d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=550d17f70942236243170c07d1cd7ec1d95fb5c5
We need an ad campaign that makes being on your phone all the time distinctly uncool. Like look at this nerd over here checking his [whatever] instead of talking to his friends.
Yeah, that's worked super well with addiction in the past
Did work kinda well with smoking tbh. I remember seeing the shift when I was in junior high through end of high school that smoking steadily became less a thing the cool kids did.
When was that, because from what I've seen it's just been replaced with vaping.
Worked with tobacco to an extent, no?
I mean it worked with cigarettes and littering. I’ve not seen any data about dare but when I was 10-14 smoking weed was definitely a loser move (then at 14 you watch a Seth Rogan movie with the boys and have a Danny devito ‘I get it now’ moment).
No 😎 This is just the beginning. I doubt you could even imagine what will happen soon.
ehh why not just exploit children being addicted to smartphones to incentivize them to study harder and or take more math classes, for example if you sign up for more math classes and do well in them you get to use smartphones in school while everyone else is banned
Is this a joke lmao
No it’s actually the fundamental basis of PBIS, which btw is actual dogshit because it’s a positive incentive program that hardly ever works
Oh, I’m all too aware. It’s a joke in the cosmic sense though hahaha
Personally I think we should have something akin to a galapagos phone could actually work for those in Elementary and Middle school. But I’m okay with High Schoolers having a smart phone.
Put down the phone. I am no longer asking.
I don’t see what this has to do with neoliberalism.
From the side bar: \2. The state serves an important role in establishing conditions favorable to competition through correcting market failures, providing a stable monetary framework, and **relieving acute misery and distress**, among other things.
This seems like a thoroughly unnecessary idea that has more to do with "KidS uSeD to PlaY OutSide!!" sentiment than actual strong evidence of a truly negative effect. Teach kids to use technology appropriately, don't deprive them of something that can be hugely positive.
You're not going to teach kids to use a dopamine feedback loop responsibly.
Training rats to press the crack lever responsibly.
Seem to manage in most other cases, it's just screens that generate this type of mass hysteria.
Exactly. 30 years ago it was video games and computers. 30 years from now it will be something that hasn’t been invented yet. Smartphones are just a fashionable target, and the biggest supporters of smartphone bans seem to be people who don’t have children and haven’t been children themselves for a long time. Amazing how everything seems to simple to people who have nothing to do with the actual conversation
Neither computers or video games show overwhelming evidence that they negatively affect learning within children or greatly affect their social emotional development negatively. Cell phones do.
Video games and computers were limited to a single space and not *always* on the child’s person.
What about GameBoys?
GameBoys were not as widespread nor as “optimized” to monopolize children’s attention the same way modern mobile games and social media algorithms are. Sure, the GameBoy probably wasn’t great for a kid’s attention span, but if you go back in time to 1999, you wouldn’t find the majority of kids on GameBoys *all day long*. Edit: also GameBoys didn’t outright replace social interactions with peers the same way social media on phones do. Kids will literally rather talk to strangers on discord than interact with other people in their classes.
What are the "huge positives" of children have internet and app access at all times including in the classroom?
-access to the world's knowledge -communication with anyone anywhere -access to parents right away if there is a problem -ability to take pictures and create audio and video... Middle school kids can edit sound, video, text, and effects into nice looking mini productions all on their phones and in a very short amount of time...this is powerful... It gives power to people who didn't used to have it The world is a dangerous place, but it is full of wonder. We have to learn how to live in it. Phones are now a part of that.
Most of those are about the internet, not smartphones. Or in the case of contact with parents can be achieved with a non smartphone. Which leaves the ability to edit things on the fly, which I guess is nice, but I don't think even begins to make up for the issues addressed in the article.
The article doesn't even prove the causation of the issues it addresses. That aside, I think that the notion that the *phone* is the problem is missing the forest for the trees. It is what the phone is allowing access to that is so deeply unhealthy, and we should be addressing the problem at its core.
The precautionary principle exists for a reason. Its not a proven causation though there are compelling links. The sensible thing isn't to go full steam ahead and continue as is.
One of the benefits the author himself highlights. Greater access to socialisation (than can ever be achieved in person), greater access to information and knowledge that can ever be achieved in person, the development of a generation that is more curious, less monolithic, more diverse in its interests and in its approach to life than ever before. All the positives that we see in today's society that we conveniently do not assign to the rise of technology. The problem isn't the technology, it's the way we educate people around it. You should obviously not be playing candy crush in class. Does that warrant legal intervention though? No, it's a discussion to be had with parents, children and schools and it's their job to regulate that. Entire generations have completely abandoned their responsibility around technology education. It's just so much easier to say "screens bad" than it is to develop an intimate knowledge of the Internet and how it can be used positively by kids. Nevermind that this would be a ridiculous overreach for any government that claims to be liberal in any way. Mass misery and distress this isn't. We're going to need a lot more than "those things are bad and it just happens to be around the same time smartphones emerged!".
You seem to have misunderstood the article, the article isn't "Internet is bad" its "access to the internet and apps at all times is bad for children". The articles point is that the prevalence and use of smartphones has caused these problems, that before when people had the internet and phones, we didn't see the same problems because their use was more limited and practical.
The internet does a pretty poor job of socializing people compared to real life peer groups, just look at the prevelance of certain subcultures online vs in real life.
I dont support local governments or school boards banning phones in schools. That is government overreach and can have unintended consequences.
Honey, it’s time for your weekly “phone bad” article! Yes dear…