It's time to take phones away from students

https://thewalrus.ca/take-phones-away-from-students/

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

65 76 2 years ago

tgv• 2 years ago

They should be taken away from minors in general. No smart phone before 18. Ideally, nobody should ever have a smart phone. The best time to implement any strategy for limiting smart phone use was 8 to 10 years ago, when the addictive effects were obvious. The second best time is right now.

squigz3• 2 years ago

Nobody should have a smartphone? I know a lot of very interesting takes come up when the smartphones/kids debate comes up, but this comment certainly takes the cake.

nuccy• 2 years ago

/s I wonder how close we are with phones to what was back in 50-80s with smoking [1]. Maybe in 100 years, people will look back at early/mid 21th century and call it "like the Wild West".

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a2.htm

gambiting• 2 years ago

I mean the article says right at the start that until 90s(!!!!) it was legal for kids to smoke in school and in fact some people have been advocating for keeping it legal. Madness.

camtarn• 2 years ago

For those of us who live in places where 'students' usually means people at university or college, this article is about schoolchildren.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Sometimes I think about how wild it must have been that there was a time when people simply didn’t have smartphones. Just people going out into the world not knowing anything except what they carry in their brain and what is immediately around them.

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

I’m not even 40 and I remember growing up without internet access, much less a cell phone. I had to walk to a library to use their computers.

selykg• 2 years ago

Yup, I miss those days.

I had computers from an early age, but being connected all the time has had a negative impact on me personally. I've started really paying attention and doing the "Digital Declutter" that Cal Newport talks about in his book Digital Minimalism.

I have very very few notifications pop up on my phone now and I'm experimenting more with leaving it at home when I go somewhere. Trying to add a bigger disconnection between me and my phone.

mentos• 2 years ago

Thanks Steve

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

There was certainly a lot more conversations/debate around verifiable, but inaccessible, knowledge. You would ask a friend or family member something like, "what's the second longest river," and have a discussion about it if no one knew for certain or of two people had differing opinions.

Now we simply look it up which means we don't have those conversations. I feel that on a whole it's made us less comfortable with situations where one person thinks A and another thinks B that's spilled from verifiable knowledge to scenarios where personal opinions differ. Probably something something culture wars.

It also meant that if you told someone you were meeting them at a certain place and time that not showing up was a huge waste of their time and a larger social no-no. Nowadays people cancel at the last moment because you can be sure your message will be received.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

I feel like this is exactly the same feeling when you ask a question on the internet somewhere and people just tell you to go google it. Like okay sorry I even fuckin asked!!

thefz2• 2 years ago

Just people going out into the world not knowing anything except what they carry in their brain and what is immediately around them.

Ever seen a kid or young teenager interacting with a phone? It's not that they spend the day on Wikipedia searching for infinite knowledge, rather they mechanically swipe the next tiktok video or do the same on youtube. That thing is like a slug attached to your brain, draining all attention.

some-guy• 2 years ago

I don't live in Silicon Valley anymore but I found it _extremely_ ironic that in my experience, it's the parents that work in tech that are more likely to limit technology usage for their children. (Full disclosure: I'm part of this demographic)

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Someone on here recently pointed out that a FitBit-style watch where the kid can still be tracked-by-location and maybe receive pager-style notifications is a decent compromise to giving your kid a whole smartphone. That way you still get to limit technology but still reap the benefits of being able to track your kid and also ping them to contact you if you can't get a hold of them.

patrickmay• 2 years ago

This is me. I'm also the most technical person in my family and the only one with an analog watch.

tnel772• 2 years ago

I feel like being fully immersed in tech makes it that much more obvious. My children barely watch TV and we plan on waiting for smart phones until as late as possible. They’ll have a flip phone once they need to call for pickups from sports and such.

jjav2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't call it ironic though, when you know how the sausage is made and how toxic it is, it is a logical outcome.

In my child's elementary school (in Silicon Valley) there were no kids with cellphones at any grade level. The school didn't outright prohibit them (although they were discouraged), but all parents had agreement that it was an evil best postponed and cellphones have no place in elementary school. (Not coincidentally, every family had at least one, if not two, parents in tech.)

et-al• 2 years ago

If anyone watched The Social Dilemma (2020), they interviewed a number of managers responsible for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Dilemma#Interviewee...

And of course the managers are repentant now with a few million in the bank.

zknill3• 2 years ago

I'm confused why most of the discussion about these issues is based on blocking the means of access to the content rather than making those hosting the content responsible for it.

Here we're talking about banning smartphones, rather than making the social media companies responsible for their various harms. There's an idiom of 'internalise the externalities', which basically means making the party responsible for a cost bear the cost themselves. It's a useful way of making a market efficient and self-regulate, by making something that costs society also cost the producer.

This kind of narrative seems to be pervasive. For example; we aren't asking the biggest polluters to bear the cost of their pollution (e.g. airlines having to reduce carbon in the atmosphere in line with the amount they produce). We didn't ask the tobacco companies to bear the cost of the public health impact they create.

Instead of blocking or banning the means of access (smartphones), we should be 'internalising the externalities' and making the social media companies bear a cost inline with the negative social cost they create.

JacobThreeThree• 2 years ago

Here we're talking about banning smartphones

The topic is about banning smartphones for students during school, not in general.

Even if social media was the best thing for your health since sliced bread, it's not appropriate for learning in a school setting.

aeturnum• 2 years ago

I agree with you in the long term, but like the joke about solving something with regular expressions: now you have two problems. This is an argument for an intervention to reduce a certain harm in a certain way now. We should also, independently, pursue restitution. The article brings up smoking and that seems like a good model to me. We both restricted where smoking could occur and also went after cigarette companies - both efforts were worthwhile on their own and also were generally complimentary.

squigz3• 2 years ago

In your opinion, what would this look like? What would, say, Facebook be responsible for doing?

zknill3• 2 years ago

The article gives one example:

Today, physical beat-downs are filmed and uploaded to school-based fight groups on Instagram and other platforms—where they live on more or less indefinitely (sometimes they’re forced down, but they inevitably seem to crop back up, according to educators).

If a piece of content is taken down, it should remain down, and it should be the responsibility of the company hosting that content to ensure that it does not reappear.

If the 'cost' of not complying (regulation, fines, etc) is large enough, then there's an incentive to invent cost effective ways of complying with this requirement.

Right now, there's no real benefit to the social media companies to invest in this area. It's too easy for them to say both 'the content is user created and not our responsibility' and 'when we are informed about the content we remove it'.

ipython• 2 years ago

this is an interesting thought, but how workable is this? basically these companies are so powerful and US politics are so broken that I don't see any effective regulation getting passed any time soon

zknill3• 2 years ago

Various parts of the UK political system looked at a 'social media tax' that would then be funneled into the national health service for mental health.

The idea was scrapped when it became clear the US would retaliate in some way (to protect their big companies).

Const-me• 2 years ago

A simple ban of internet ads going to fix that.

Will remove incentive to create addictive services, because then people attention and screen time will no longer bring profits, quite the opposite they will cause costs for running all these servers.

Will also fix media because if people paid for the content they wouldn’t pay anything for the media we have now. It’s not informative anymore it’s outrageous. This is because the clients are advertisers, and people are the product. Outrage causes traffic, and each page view generates profit. Mass media worked fine for the previous ~400 years because people who consume the content paid for it.

But yeah, making it happen going to be very hard politically. Still, I hope it’s possible over sufficient time, after the consequences to the society will become impossible to ignore.

switchbak• 2 years ago

There's a lot of misunderstanding and oversimplification going on amongst many debating this issue, often with strong emotions. I think you're right that we need to be clear where the harm is coming from: social media and the corporations that profit from it. Blaming it on phones or even "screen time" misses the mark and makes it hard to specifically address the issue. If they take the phones away, kids will access via their laptops, watches, etc.

Now it's easy to say that we should put limits and regulation in place of these corporations, and I would agree. What I'm concerned about is giving more power to governments that have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent and prone to abuse/misuse of power.

I would like to think there's a way we can limit access to social media within schools, but the damage also occurs outside school hours. Maybe it's a good enough start though.

Edit: elaboration.

throwanem• 2 years ago

In the limiting case, this requires the social media industry to implement a parallel judicial system, or else make everything hosted there immediately legible to the actual judicial system in a way that overrides any other system of visibility control.

I'm not at all averse to imposing back on that industry the detriments it imposes on the society on which it feeds. I also don't think this or any other superficial solution of that problem is likely to net out better than the status quo.

constantcrying3• 2 years ago

But these costs are inherently unquantifiable. A smartphone is an enormously useful tool, even for a child. Social media isn't something entirely negative, just having a way to access your friends and family can be a huge benefit. And even if on the whole social media is a net negative, how do you quantity that into a "cost" the social media site has to pay?

lotu2• 2 years ago

We have a legal system which is specifically designed to quantify these intangible costs. That’s what pain and suffering damages are.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

We didn't ask the tobacco companies to bear the cost of the public health impact they create.

We actually did, we just siphoned the lawsuit settlement money off to other uses.

lotu2• 2 years ago

I think it really matters who is talking. Which is easier for a school board to do? Take away students phones in their schools or force tictok to make their app less harmful.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

I'm confused why most of the discussion about these issues is based on blocking the means of access to the content rather than making those hosting the content responsible for it.

It's not just the content though, the device would be distracting if it was offline only. I wouldn't have been allowed to bring a portable television/dvd player into school either.

thefz2• 2 years ago

Here we're talking about banning smartphones, rather than making the social media companies responsible for their various harms.

If you want to prevent minors from accessing certain content you need to check their age, thus to enforce real-life ID check, which users nor platforms want.

(And fortunately since I am all for, not against, an anonymous web)

CodeWriter23• 2 years ago

So, cancel all the one-to-one laptop programs as well, seeing the primary culprit tagged is social media, which is totally accessible from laptops.

jacobgkau6• 2 years ago

To be fair, one-to-one laptops located on a school's domain can have social media websites blocked at the network level and the client level. Phones usually come with data plans, which means not even a filter on the WiFi would prevent students from accessing blocked websites, even while they're physically in the school. The article does mention this.

maximamas• 2 years ago

Banning phones is a waste of time, the children will find a way. We need to embrace phones and teach responsible use along with holding content providers accountable. A war on phones will be as effective as the war on drugs.

talldatethrow• 2 years ago

Making things illegal and not accepted works decently well. There wasn't a drug vending machine at my school, even though a few rogue students were probably buying and selling drugs at my highschool. Thus I was less likely to do drugs.

Very few handguns are in students backpacks, because we don't accept it. If we didn't accept cell phones, we'd have a lot fewer kids suffering from them.

khalladay• 2 years ago

This is about banning phones during class or school hours. Even though the war on drugs may have failed the general populace, the prohibition of drugs at schools has been largely successful in preventing drug use from taking place in classrooms and on school property. (the same with smoking bans at schools)

This is the same.

eesmith4• 2 years ago

Which was the argument against prohibiting smoking at school:

John Tolton, then chairman of the Metro Toronto School Board, was having none of it. Tolton doubted whether schools even had the right to ban smoking, and if they did, “it will merely drive smoking underground.” (He was also unconvinced of the dangers of second-hand smoke.) There were other concerns, including the belief that bans would drive smokers off school property, inciting conflicts with neighbours and exacerbating absenteeism. Some parents gave their kids permission to smoke, so (the thinking went) better to offer them a regulated space in which to do so.

Why won't the war on phones be as effective as the war on tobacco?

jacobgkau6• 2 years ago

Why won't the war on phones be as effective as the war on tobacco?

I also just pointed the same thing out to the parent commenter, but to play devil's advocate: it won't be as effective because phones have a variety of legitimate use cases (communicating with family & coworkers being among them) that mean people will end up wanting/needing to use them later in life anyway, and will potentially want or need to use them (or learn how to use them) while they're still students. Tobacco/nicotine drugs serve no functional or productive purpose the way phones do.

jacobgkau6• 2 years ago

Funny you should say that, when the article specifically mentions how people said the same thing about "attempting" to ban tobacco cigarettes in schools last century, and how-- lo and behold-- while cigarettes do still exist, they're now considered socially unacceptable for students to use by all involved parties, and the percentage of students using them is negligible.

I don't necessarily agree with the article's assertion that cigarettes and cell phones are the same kind of problem in need of the same kind of solution (since phones have legitimate use cases outside of the problematic ones, and cigarettes don't). Just wanted to point out that the article specifically called out your argument, and you seem to draw a different conclusion about reality (war on drugs failed) than the article (students no longer smoke).

Ancapistani• 2 years ago

while cigarettes do still exist, they're now considered socially unacceptable for students to use by all involved parties, and the percentage of students using them is negligible.

Cigarettes have been almost entirely replaced by vapor products, which are arguably more popular than cigarettes have been in decades.

The bans weren’t effective; by the time they were in place, an new generation of products had already arisen and replaced the targets of those bans. Meanwhile, vapes are banned as well, but are ubiquitous.

flerchin4• 2 years ago

It's definitely worth a discussion. Owning a smartphone is practically mandatory in modern society, and kids are more online than anyone. I've held the line at 14 before first smartphone, and it's been challenging. I just picked up my 11yo from a GT test where he was expected to phone me after he was done. He used his mother's phone for that.

In the US, there's also all the murders to consider. My wife absolutely panics at the idea of not being able to contact the kids, and no amount of reasoning can reassure her. She is not alone in this sentiment.

My niece also almost succeeded at suicide, and her parents blame social media. This is specifically what we're trying to address with this article.

hypeatei• 2 years ago

My wife absolutely panics at the idea of not being able to contact the kids

I've never understood this reasoning but I don't have kids. How is a child being able to contact their parents going to help in active shooter situation?

flerchin4• 2 years ago

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. It's an exceedingly common sentiment among parents.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

The parents might be willing to attempt a rescue when the police are not.

bigstrat20033• 2 years ago

Dumb phones address the "kids contacting their parents" angle just fine, you don't need a smartphone for that. I also think that if parents are truly panicked by the inability to contact their child on a moment's notice, that is genuinely an issue they need to work on. It is neither normal nor healthy to feel that way. But regardless of whether they are justified in that stance, that too is addressed just fine by dumb phones.

flerchin4• 2 years ago

Did you buy your kids a big dumb phone?

jjav2• 2 years ago

Dumb phones address the "kids contacting their parents" angle just fine

There are also other suitable devices. My child has a Garmin watch which can send/receive text and voice messages, but only within a set of pre-configured people. And it can't run or access any ad-ware spam. It's very useful without any of the downsides.

iamleppert• 2 years ago

The manufactures of these devices need to be held liable for the creation and distribution of a harmful product. If it can be shown the phones have an effect on a student's mental health, the executives at these companies and the companies themselves should be made to pay for any damages caused.

shagie2• 2 years ago

Smartphones are not harmful to everyone (unless you're also going to claim that smartphones are dangerous to you and as an adult you are not responsible for your actions when buying one).

Apple nor Samsung nor Google sells iPhones to minors - they are not able to get a contract for phone service. These devices are sold to adults and it is the adults that give the devices to children.

bigstrat20033• 2 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately kids having smartphones is very often a case of parental negligence. Just like some parents would buy little Jimmy GTA without even bothering to think about whether that's appropriate, some parents will get their young child a pipe to the worst parts of the Internet without thought.

seoulmetro2• 2 years ago

Forks are dangerous too, should we sue IKEA whenever a child hurts someone with a fork?

tptacek• 2 years ago

For what it's worth, this is an article about banning phones for students inside school facilities in Canada, and not a broadside about kids and technology writ large. Kids will still bring phones to schools that ban them, the same way they smoked in the boy's room, but it's hard to argue that phone usage in schools that ban them won't drop precipitously.

My kids both just barely missed this era of parenting (I think the boy may have had a phone in his last year of high school), and honestly I have a hard time getting worked up about this stuff. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't, but if our school district decided tomorrow "absolutely no phones, if we see them we confiscate them", I'd shrug and say "sure, give it a shot".

rsolva• 2 years ago

This has already been done recently in (at least) Norway an the Netherlands. No phones in class. My SO is a teacher and she reports less distraction in class, although it is still early days.

jasonpeacock• 2 years ago

Relatedly, not providing kids with cell phones to start with isn't as bad as it first sounds - even the kids recognize the benefit of being without:

https://www.thecut.com/article/phones-teens-screentime-restr...

PeterCorless• 2 years ago

The issue is one of judicious allowance of smartphones — teaching students about time management and their phone use. A phone is not a "cigarette" in the sense that it is not universally and simply a cause of harm.

I can use a web browser or a smart phone to look up information for my job, or to educate myself on physics regarding communications and distances to Voyager 1 and 2.

Or I could use my smartphone to browse TikTok videos or to post political rants. Even then, if I watch TikTok I might be watching a solar observations, learning about coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares from Professor Nixy, or I could just be watching the lastest dances. If I were on Twitter/X, I could be learning about breaking current events and world politics for my social studies classes, or I could be listening to the rants of some idiotic get-rich-quick dudebro.

You could have a graphing calculator on your phone. A skymap for astronomy. Programming tools. Or... you could just fill it with games.

The tool isn't the issue. It's the judiciousness of the mind using the tool.

There is a time of day to do my work, and a time of day to have fun. We, as a society, as parents, as educators, are continuously failing students in terms of educating them on time and attention management, on effective learning and research techniques, and on properly using the once-supercomputer-level tools and technology they have in their hands every day.

Having spent time in the classroom teaching math, I believe it would be better to have smartphone use tied to attention span ("Okay, for this part of the class, all cellphones need to be put away..."), outcomes ("You did great on the quiz. Feel free to browse the web as a reward."), and so on.

Showing a student how to use a graphing calculator is awesome because it lets them finally understand equations. Seeing them plotted out. It's not just x's, coefficients and exponents. It's shapes and patterns.

This is entirely dependent on the school, the teacher, the grade and the class. Yes, I know the difficulty of teaching young men and women when cell phones are right there in front of them. High school you can hope to appeal to their better nature. Elementary school? Yikes. I don't think that's doable. Maybe with some better elementary level individuals. The kids minds are often just not equipped at that age to be able to discipline themselves. You'd have to have clear "all phones away" protocols. Maybe allow them to have it at recess and lunch. That sort of thing.

To my mind there needs to be a tiered approach. Different schools, different grades, different classes should have different protocols. I'd hate to be the middle school woodworking teacher who saw kids lose fingers because they weren't paying attention to a safety lesson then started haphazardly using a table saw.

Unless, of course, the teacher made them all watch a safety video on the table saw, and then take a quiz to prove they were paying attention.

Also, my fear: prohibition generally doesn't work. This "ban the phone" thing sounds swell and great until the first time a school is sued, perhaps because of some emergency issue where the parents could not get ahold of their kids urgently.

the_snooze• 2 years ago

This seems like a totally sensible solution. Just lock up phones in pouches that remain in students' possession.

They clicked the magnetic lock at the top of their pouches shut, then placed them into their backpacks or held them up to show teachers. The pouches would stay with them, locked, until dismissal at 2:45 p.m.
The school reminded parents that there is at least one landline phone in every classroom — and in many cases two. Teachers also still have their cellphones in case they need to call 911 (the pouches also are not “bank vaults,” Dolphin added, and can be cut open in an emergency).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/01/school-cell...

ppetty• 2 years ago

… as I read each paragraph, an icon for for 3 social media sites follows me while I scroll. There might be a few entities to blame, but something seems off when a situation is implied to be dire and related to social networks ... and by the way please share this.

jszymborski• 2 years ago

It's important to note that the author and the magazines editor are not in control of this.

However, I do take the point that authors have a choice as to where their work appears.

It's time to take phones away from students

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