I hear that most kids live on their phones. Phones are really powerful these days. If kids did their schoolwork on the same device they spent all their time on anyway, it could save lots of money, and latency switching. Plugging peripherals into phones isn't too hard. I don't think educational institutions are getting much value out of the near thousand dollar phones kids live on these days.
Or... maybe children benefit from the capabilities of phones and it's not the place for schools to fully take them away.
In class? Sure, zero tolerance.
But between classes and at lunch? What's a rationale that DOESN'T pretend like these kids aren't going to be connected 24/7 _outside_ of school?
On top of that, smartphones ARE the only computers that many people use these days. I think HN would agree that kids should have access to computers; I think there's an element of culture shock when folks here are reminded that the smartphone is still the device of the future.
That's without even bringing up ChatGPT, which anyone who went to high school can tell you, has been immediately adopted by lazy students and definitely changed the way that essays are written.
We live in a world of instantaneous communication and cheap, ubiquitous computaters. It hasn't made education less important, it's made it MORE important and highlighted which skills are uniquely human.
We should adapt our schools to reflect that instead of succumbing to "old man yells at cloud" syndrome.
When I taught, I found that student's having mobile phones was pretty useful.
They had to be kept in their bags and on silent during my lessons, unless I gave permission for them to be out.
They would use them to add reminders for homework, have a second screen for internet access, take photos of the board, connect to my Apple TV and then point their cameras at their work to display it to the rest of the class.
I rarely had issues, and when I did I would just confiscate the phone and then make the parents come in to school to collect it. That soon tempers a child's desire to get their phone out in class.
Kids are 11 and 15. Both have phones, laptops and share a switch and Quest. No limits. They watch and play as much as they want so long as they do homework, maintain hygiene and get some physical and social activity. They're both healthy and well-adjusted. My oldest is at an elite STEM school, younger one is doing well enough. The STEM kid in particular, they literally use their phones in class. Teachers tell them to look things up, use calculators, text classmates for group projects, find links on Google Classroom or watch lectures on YouTube. The war on phones is over and phones have won.
There are, in fact, studies showing that smart phone usage isn't bad:
I've seen the effects of teenagers + phones in US high schools first hand. Simply put, kids are distracted and overstimulated. The always connected nature of the phone ensures that critical planning skills will never be learned. Never being bored (and the decimation of shop classes) has sapped the creative impulse from far too many of them.
Contrary to what may be popular belief, many administrations set no guidelines around phone use in classrooms, leaving it to teachers to fight the never-ending battle. The lecture becomes hard or boring, and out come the phones.
Getting a kid anything more than a feature phone is pretty much daring the poor thing to walk tightrope across a canyon without a safety net.
The parents quoted in the article talking about how preschool kids with phones are no big deal need to spend some time in a typical high school classroom.
I think it's just a result of society insisting that their entire lives revolve around a phone due to convenience. Kids these days (I feel old saying that at age 33!) now are raised by parents who were around for the first wave of everyone having a phone, except those parents' phones up until college or later were dumb phones that could call, text, and take pictures (and play snake!). Thus, their well-intentioned move to give their kids a phone is self-defeating and will only hurt in the long run.
I went to a public school and don't really remember at any level of classes where my classmates were outright addicted to their phones - some would occasionally text or take pictures or whatever, but perhaps that was due to the limitations of what the device could do.
I do understand that modern problems need to be addressed with modern solutions, and smartphones, in a vacuum, aren't a bad thing - they open up a lot of avenues of education that were simply not possible when I was growing up....and I'm all for that, I think its better to prepare kids for the world of tomorrow rather than the world of yesterday. However, there needs to be a limit to how intertwined technology becomes with modern educational practices.
I dread the US becoming like China, where people's lives revolve around a smartphone from a very early age. Sadly, we might have missed that boat already.
Nowadays the kids are given laptops to perform their classwork on so there's no point taking the phones away when they have a more capable computer.
And it is concerning when you hear stories from teachers about how they spend half of the day telling students to stop playing fortnight or browsing social media in class.
I believe it is Haidt himself who said bringing phones is analogous to a kid in the 90s bringing in a portable TV and putting on a show during class, and no one thinking that it is out of place. Of course it is! As a society we've made the determination that personal TVs and music players are unacceptable in the classroom, but phones, the single most addictive device ever made, is OK?!
My oldest is only 7 right now but I'm also seriously considering middle and high school options for him that severely restrict phone use. We play Minecraft on the weekends, he does MakeCode Arcade coding tutorials, and occasionally gets (heavily supervised) YouTube time. I don't think he's missing out on opportunities to become skilled with computers.
My Aunt has a child in early middle school - years 6 through 9 or so, for people outside the US.
Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned about the microphone. And the kid is completely incapable of avoiding the more toxic aspects of social media and adtech, because the constant use of smartphones has become a central part of their education. At the age of what, 11-15?
I can only imagine what this is teaching the child. When we caught up over the holidays, they seemed to be more fed up and disgusted with technology than interested in it.
I don't think they have an advantage, as I've noticed that kids knowing their way around their phone are often completely lost when put in front of a computer. They never use the computer, they have everything in their phones. Compared to a computer, a phone is simple, and you aren't actually solving any problems while using it (you're just downloading and running apps). When you have a phone, however, there's no need to learn the computer. This means that they're missing out on the computer learning curve that we experienced.
If nobody can use it at school, then overall it makes it probably less likely they will be owned or used at all. Then your kids risk falling behind and becoming as adept with technology as "old people" today. Not saying that this trade-off means that everyone should use smart phones all the time, but let's not act like this isn't a potential downside when they are a part of everyday life for French adults.
The high school my kids went to (they are in college now) required them to have a phone. They used the camera for projects (videos and photo projects), were told to use the calendar for tracking tests and assignments), and used email and some other app that I don't recall the name of that let the teacher broadcast to the kids and the kids could reply privately to the teacher.
A homework assignment would be on the whiteboard and instead of having the kids copy it down, they would tell them to take a photo of it. They used the browser often for the all kinds of things.
If a kid couldn't afford phone service they could use an inexpensive or second-hand device on the school's wifi. Apparently it was never a problem though - everybody had a phone.
Assuming you can afford at least some kind of inexpensive phone for your kid(s), this is kind of a messed up position to take. Your children are failing classes because you want to make them purchase their own phones and plans, which of course is not realistic. So they failed because of something completely beyond their control and entirely within yours. As a parent, I’d be ashamed of myself if I had allowed that to happen. Even worse, you seem to be bragging that you deprived your children of this necessary tool.
In modern society, a smartphone and plan is as essential for school age children as the clothing you presumably did not make them engage in child labor to buy.
Good, I don't see any good reason for kids to have smartphones in school. If someone needs to get a hold of the kid, the old fashioned way of just calling the school still works just fine.
You know, now that I think about it, I'm not sure where I land on this issue.
On the one hand, kids not being able to get off their phone to the point it impacts their performance at school is worrying.
On the other hand, school is kid prison, and I really can't begrudge any kid who, when having to listen to a teacher for hours on end, takes any opportunity to do something more interesting they find.
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