I think this is a tough one to weigh in on depending where you come from. If I lived somewhere where the news talked about school shootings a lot, I might want my child to have a phone.
Go after the companies making addictive applications instead.
When I was a kid in school, you had to go to the office to use the phone.
My school at least still had a payphone near the cafeteria we only got rid of in 2011.
How would it help for children to have phones during a school shooting? Everyone on the staff already has one.
For real. What are they gonna do if their kid specifically calls them directly? Go all Rambo on the shooter?
Just make them leave it off. Anyone caught using a phone gets it taken away the rest of the day.
That's what we did with anything that was distracting when I was growing up. You can have it on you, but if they see you using it. It goes into the principal's office until EOD.
Go after the companies
Sir this is a Merica.
As a mom of two in a country where school shootings do happen far more frequently than anywhere else in the world, the US, I fully support completely banning phones from schools. The benefit to my kids education overall far outweighs the minuscule chance something would happen where they need their phones or a shooting took place. I say this also as a former American student who’s school did go on lock down a few times for active shooters in the area, like the time a local bank got robbed or when they found a “kill list” some kid made. It just doesn’t make sense to me to degrade education across the board in the very very off chance my kid, or even myself, was at the location of a school shooting.
It's not that hard. You keep it in your backpack, and never take it out the whole day while school is in session.
I teach middle school in a state with a cell phone ban. We had our first year with the phone ban last year, and I thought it was an improvement.
Phones can be very detrimental to the school experience. For one, it is very difficult to teach kids who are already unwilling or resistant to learning while they have a piece of technology they are literally addicted to in their hand. Secondly, phones and social media contribute to a lot to the bullying, violence, and general misbehavior that occurs at schools.
My school district also provides all students with an iPad, so they have their own school-provided tech. In my experience, this comes with their own problems though. I often feel like I am playing "whack-a-mole" keeping kids off their iPads (playing games, etc.) during instruction. It's nice to be able to incorporate technology into lessons, and it definitely is more convenient for teaching, but I don't think the trade off is worth it. For example, the cheating with A.I. was off the charts for me last year.
This coming school year, I am looking to incorporate more paper and pencil assignments into my teaching. A lot of my students seem to favor assignments where they aren't using their iPads. I think most agree that these kids' eyeballs need a break from the screens.
Also, to people with concerns about the phone ban, students are allowed to bring their phone to school. My state's law states that the phone must be turned off and in the student's backpack during instructional hours. Students may be on their phone at school before and after classes start. In the event of an emergency, no one is going to care if the students get their phone out their bag to call their adult. So, kids will retain access to their phone. In fact, most of the students carry their phones around in the pocket and none of the teachers generally care as long as the student isn't blatantly using their phone during class time. If a kid is caught using their phone during class time, they have to turn it in to the main office for the remainder of the day will escalating consequences for repeat offenses.
Also, I'm sure it varies from teacher to teacher, but I am very understanding when a kid needs to contact a parent/guardian. I will always allow my students to use the phone in my classroom, call a parent from the main office, or use their cell phone in the hall as long as the kid asks permission and explains the situation.
Was this never a thing in the US previously?
I distinctly remember from my school days (Western EU) mobile phones were to remain off and in backpacks.
And those were still the days we you just had this relatively dumb flipphone that could litterally only call and text and if you were lucky had a potato camera as it's main novelty.
There was no access to internet, much less AI's that can do your entire homework for you and they were already annoying to deal with for a teacher. Can't imagine how that is now.
Yeah, when I was a kid growing up in the US, no cell phones during class was the standard. If you took it out (or if it wasn't on silent and rang during class) you got a warning, then next time it would be taken away and given back at the end of class or end of the school day with escalating consequences for repeated violations.
In the late 70s / 80s we didn't have cell phones, we had pocket electronic games - and that was just obvious: lunch / recess time only stuff, duh. Cell phones have that nasty "safety communication lifeline" hook that single purpose electronic games don't have, but in reality they're just 10,000x more addictive entertainment widgets than those old pocket games ever were.
I think a lot of U.S. schools got lazy about enforcing "phone off and put away" in class - to the point that kids feel like it's a right. Same thing actually has crept all the way up into the armed forces even on deployment. If anybody were to ask me where we need to start drawing the line, I'd say right there: if you're forward deployed at sea, you do NOT get unfettered access to a personal communication device that would have been the wet dream of every spy of the last century. Hell, if you're enlisted at all you should have an armed forces standard issue phone for all your communication needs, complete with a pre-enlistment acknowledgement that all those communications ARE recorded and you WILL be held accountable for EVERYTHING you communicate through them. Personal phones should be locked down and even less accessible than firearms, because they ARE more dangerous to the missions.
Can we just ban them in general? We used to be a proper society and had our phones on the kitchen walls with 25ft cords.
We used to be a proper society
When was that?
I live and teach in a state that implemented a ban. Results after year one were marginal improvement. Many just did the "hiding" trick more than before. A number didn't think we'd notice them hunched over whispering to their watches. It was rather comical when they would do that.
I propose we build all new school buildings as giant Faraday cages.
My kid is not going to the murder factory without a phone. I'd be happy to scream at someone in a room over it. Guarantee my kid's safety or they're bringing a phone.
Not to be a jackass but what will their phone help with in this supposed murder factory? If ur so worried about a shooter or something, it's not like the phone puts them in an invincibility bubble or something.
IDK man how could having 300 portable, accessible ways to call 911 in a shooter emergency possibly help in that moment?
C'mon guys help me figure out this MENSA-level brain-twister.
You do realize there are wall phones in every classroom, and each teacher can carry their own cell phone, do you not? You're talking about dozens of people who have the ability to call 911. Past a certain point all you're doing is saturating the 911 line and preventing ambulances and fire trucks from getting to other unrelated emergencies.
Having students alert 911 in that situation is insane. Their priority should be either running away or hiding, neither of which is helped by getting on a phone call. If that's the point hire someone whose job is 100% just doing that and make everyone safer for it.
Exactly. In these situations, the exact last thing schools want is a bunch of parents showing up to try and get their kids out. It sucks for the parents, but it's one of those situations where by trying to help their kid, they're putting a lot of other children in danger. If a bunch of parents run into a building with a shooter and escort their kids out, now you have the nightmare scenario of trying to track down scores of kids that have gone who knows where. Plus now there are more people running around the building who the police may mistake for the shooter. Oh, and a good number of these parents would want to show up with guns of their own. Now you have multiple random armed people running around the school.
You do not want parents running into the scene of an active school shooting.
He can call me and I can come help. It's not much, but it's something that gives me peace of mind a little bit.
Not the be that prick, but how? If there's an active shooter, you're not bulletproof just because you're a parent. Or are you storming in and going to start shooting yourself? Really curious what your plan is.
My position on this is really weird because I'm in support of laptops being in classrooms for educational uses. However, I'm against cell phones being in classroom.
That being said, as someone who grew up in a school system that didn't allow the parent to communicate with their child or a teenager, meaning that they couldn't call the school to have them relay a message, I am firmly against a straight ban period on school grounds. I was given a phone because my parents' work schedule was very fluid and could change within an hour or two. And on more than a handful of occasions, my mom would call the school and be like, hey, you need to relay the message to get on a different bus because there's no one going to be home, And they just wouldn't relay it. It also helped if I chose to go to a friends house after school
I'm also disliking how they skewed the results. If you read the actual study, you'll see that they merged the kind of agree strongly agree and the kind of disagree strongly disagree categories to make it a binary choice, but then chose to omit the six percent of the people who said they didn't care or had no strong opinion.
they also removed any results where the person chose the first option or the last option on every question. And I dislike any type of automated data sanitation method like that, because while they did randomize the first and fourth answer, every time, there's always the possibility that someone legitimately answered everything as either the first or last answer. My own vote could be stated that since I strongly agree that the cell phone shouldn't be in the classroom, but strongly disagree that it should be straight banned. So if question one and question two had the polarity of question one and question 2 flipped, where one was strongly agree and one was strongly disagree, it's entirely possible I would have been removed from the survey as a fraudulent result.
edit: removed couple sentences that drifted from topic some and fixed a repeated line
as a parent, I would say what matters is geo-location and text to coordinate pick-up or plans. there is no need for younger kids to have a full fledged phone if one could be developed that serves those functions. I'm thinking 90s flip phones with GPS. It really sounds like a gold mine for some company to supply these limited devices given the market for them.
Someone is downvoting everything but I agree. I try and keep my helicopter parent impulses under control, but it is nice to know exactly where my kids are. My son (12) has a locked down old iPhone and Apple makes it pretty easy to make it practically a dumb phone. We literally have it set up so that he has to ask for permission before using any apps, with the exception of calling and messaging. (Even messaging is iffy; we want to be able to text him but it opens up texting with friends.) He doesn’t need it at school so he doesn’t bring it, but as he gets older, I’m sure it’ll start to go with him and I’m not upset about it. If he wants to go somewhere with a friend right after school instead of going straight home, it’s fine with me as long as I know about it. Without a phone, it’d be hard for him to make such plans on the fly, and let’s just say that planning ahead isn’t my ADHD-kid’s strong suit (yet—we’re working on it). As long as the expectation is set that he doesn’t use it during school, I think that’s okay; it can just live in his backpack until school is over.
My disagreements with the policy are twofold, but I was a weird kid. And I am a weird adult.
Firstly, when my social studies teacher or my American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I'm being taught or refut it. And similarly when our chemistry class can only provide a poor, hazy image of what we're doing, I want to be able to go online and get a better one.
We didn't have the internet when I was in school in the eighties, and instead, we had shitty textbooks and a state mandated syllabus. It was evident, even then, that we were being indoctrinated with an agenda, and being denied informed consent.
And as a naïve kid, I believed my schooling and grew up Republican... Eventually, I'd learn how much bullshit was spoon fed to me, and that our school districts, in fact, do not have an agenda to equip students for adult life, rather are instruments of control.
And secondly, the internet provides lifelines online for kids at risk, such as neurodivergents, LGBT+, kids in dysfunctional homes. And they should have access to them. I didn't have those resources, and I believe my outcome is worse for it.
I get it, regarding bullying. Social media harassment is a problem, but by comparison I was cornered and outnumbered three to one by kids twice my size. Kids do not require social media to hurt. Since it was their word against mine school administrators sided with my assailants. Every time. I'd work out later they just hate weakling kids, and believe I should be able to hold my own against such odds.
I can assure you kids will be bullied anyway, just as sex trafficking increased when SESTA / FOSTA cut off internet resources to sex traffickers (and killed personal ads and ended online sex worker support groups.)
But then, I'm neurodivergent and was in that gap in which I was quite bright and interested in learning, but had testing difficulties so I wasn't eligible for gifted programs. The mainstream school district wasn't intended for me. But then there wasn't a place for me at all.
The US state education districts are not being run in good faith, prioritizing obedience over critical thinking skills, ideological doctrine over factual history and enrichment of companies and administrators over paying faculty and budgeting learning materials. Restricting students from their own resources is yet another admission that the US does care what happens to students, and reinforces the notion that schools are not institutions of learning, but detainment centers to lock kids up and keep them out of mischief until they are legally responsible for their actions.
But as I said. I was a weird kid. And my schools assured I would never live it down.
American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I’m being taught or refut it.
In high school we had a mandatory senior year "Americanism vs Communism" (AVC) class, if ever there were an obvious propaganda slot - taught by retired navy no less. In reality, he didn't know much about Communism and had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about it, basically taught freshman Civics all over again.
The problem I have with your position is: you can find anything and everything on the internet, from stone cold facts to complete fiction and everything in-between, and especially with AI assistance in building websites it's becoming harder than ever to differentiate between the two. Now, you get some 9 year old who lives in a 3 generation Faux news viewing household, hears "the facts" from all his family and all their friends every day, armed with a browser full of shortcuts to all the "Best" websites - I, as teacher, absolutely do NOT have time to knock your head off and screw it back on straight, nor would that be a good thing for me to do career wise. FAR FAR easier to get 45 minutes of captive time to say what I want to say - which may or may not be fed to me by the state censor board - and at least give you one perspective instead of having open debate with 30 children and their website "sources" every day, all period long. Having said that, maybe 10% of classroom time should be devoted to intelligent, safe, thoughtful internet research of the topic at hand - but not every time a child thinks they have all the answers.
Our AVC teacher was about 5'4" - MAJOR Napoleon complex - he didn't give a damn about the anti-communist propaganda, his (mostly failed) goal was to instill respect and discipline in our about to graduate teenage minds... That was his core driver every class every day all 90 days that he "had us." Lots of teachers have these personal agendas, they're not all bad, and it's actually an important part of your education to experience some diversity among your teachers like that - you never know when you'll meet someone more or less like them in real life, and having that school experience might just teach you how to work better with the versions you meet in real life.
Your doom-scroll will always be waiting there for you at home, if your parents allow it. If you've made it to 18 years of age and still feel repressed, you're welcome to make your own way in the world and discover the truths, lies, and half truths that await you all on your own. I'll submit: if you've got enough skepticism to fact check your teacher in class, you can probably resist the brain washing without needing instant gratification from "sources you trust." And, classroom time isn't for you to convince your 12 year old peers how wrong that tool at the front of the room is, you'll have plenty of time outside of class for that.
My concern is that, as I said, they lied to me and I believed them. My first logic and critical thinking class was in freshman college, where I learned that media literacy is about checking multiple sources that don't like each other very much. The facts that are consistent between them are most likely the actual facts. I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.
Media literacy became super important in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration. The White House started giving preferential treatment to correspondents that covered only approved stories and kept the US in a positive light. (It marked the beginning of the end of free journalism within news agencies) Foreign sources started covering the extrajudicial torture programs and the use of PMCs in Iraq and the International War on Terror. It became really important for Americans to cross examine sources to determine for themselves what was really going on.
Today, it creeps me out to hear kids talk about the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the international war on terror, and cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.
In the present era, we have huge swaths of Americans in FOX News silos, since FOX, like an abusive domestic partner, encourages its viewership to cut off all other sources. We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school. We should be teaching how to use the internet as a tool and not a substitute for social interaction.
When the US proscribed alcohol consumption from 18 years to 21 years, the rate of alcohol related crime and DUIs didn't change, rather they just got older, and more people were imprisoned for it because they were old enough to know better (allegedly). If we cut off internet access to kids until they're 18, or even the current proposals to raise the age from 13 to 16, it only means kids will be less experienced and less prepared at a later age.
And kids who are diverse, and fit outside the white, straight, normal mainstream, presently are utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn't like deviance very much. These resources literally save lives.
I think an education system that actually took itself seriously, and intended to teach kids in good faith will be able to not only handle kids having internet access, but will be able to integrate its use into education, better preparing children for adulthood.
But also, as I said, I am an outlier. I'm neurodivergent and I'm queer, so I do not have the pulse of the children of the US. In the way I assume not all men are in concurrence with the manosphere, I also submit not all children are daft and need to be taught in single syllables without distractions. If they are, we should get rid of school sports leagues. I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access and robust training in media literacy (including social media savvy) than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).
Note: There are actual studies about the harms social media has on kids, and the scientific consensus is that harms are significantly less than what is being claimed to promote age verification. It's looking a lot like the same moral panic that occurred about video games, violent movies and television. But then big social media companies like Facebook, X and Google would enjoy the reduction in competition from smaller sights that would result from an AV mandate, hence they are lobbying to mandate locking up the internet.
Had a friend in the most expensive private school in my area. They had phones banned over a decade ago already.
Probably because richer parents have more mental bandwidth to worry about children's digital footprint and neural development rather than survival.
Thus I believe extending this ban to public schools is only fair. Distraction-free and surveillance-free environment for children shouldn't be a luxury reserved for few.
I can’t imagine sending my kids to an American school where phones are banned. I’d be terrified with all the school shootings.
And the schools themselves are just doing it because they're scared to death someone will record something in the school get they'll end up in legal trouble.
I mean, are phones conducive to learning? If not then forbid their usage at school and bloody enforce it. I think the fact phones became common place for kids so quickly and so early in their lives coupled with just the general insanity of American schools so often being under attack, the schools have just lost any agency to restrict them given their usage is already rampant.
It's the parents that are the problem. The problem is, when schools try to ban them, parents flip the fuck out. They become apoplectic at the idea of not being able to instantly reach their kids at every hour of the day. A surprising number of parents install tracking apps on their kid's phones. They have them tagged like wild animals under study.
So schools are stuck compromising with unenforceable rules. Instead of banning phones entirely, they'll ban kids from having them out in class. Which of course never works, as the kids just take them out as soon as the teacher turns their back.
as the kids just take them out as soon as the teacher turns their back
When I was in school the teacher's were seizing the phone if they caught you with it in class and sometimes require your parents to pick it up after school
Yup same. Then a few phones went missing, parents threatened to sue because cell phones were insanely expensive back then, and the school told teachers they couldn't do that anymore. 🤷♀️
It's darkly hilarious that parents are demanding that schools allow their kids to be stupid and the schools are just like "okay, we can't do anything about this."
What's even the point? Shut 'em down if they're not going to enforce any rules.
At that point, it's probably more healthy to send little Bobby down into the mines, at least he won't have time to melt his brain on a screen.
The logic is stupid. There are adults that are just as addicted to social media and the Internet as much as any kid would be. What changes once they reach 18?
more ranting
The real issue isn't being tackled or solved. This is yet another thing where we're trying to solve the symptom but not the cause. The real issue is that the software or the platforms don't take into consideration, by design, the well-being of the user.
We're being forced to do what these stupid corporations like Meta, Google, Reddit, OpenAI et al aren't doing already but should actually be doing. They don't give AF because their whole objective is to make sure you are addicted and they can then harvest your data, feed you scams, etc.
This is pretty much like how the big corporations push the blame on the consumer for wasting plastic even though it's the fucking corps choosing to sell their products that way in the fist place.
If software was designed with a kill-switch that could enforce better habits, this all wouldn't be necessary. All we're doing is delaying the inevitable and forcing them to seek alternatives that will be abused in the same manor social media or the Internet would be.
Why the fuck do they still sell cigarettes despite everybody knowing full well that it causes severe health issues?!
Can't make this shit up!!!
P.S. - If the schools wish to put in place this kind of ban, then they have the authority to do so. Fine. That doesn't fix the broken education system. Yes, it is broken.
When I was in highschool I had an app to help calm me (recommended by my therapist) because I had such severe anxiety problems. I know there are things you can do without an app but it was helpful when I was panicking so much I could hardly think. I don't think a blanket ban is appropriate. Phones aren't inherently bad and it really depends on how they are being used. It makes more sense to revoke phone privileges from individual students if they can't use them properly.
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