What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian::Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them
What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian::Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them
Crazy how people otherwise firm supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of tech suddenly change their minds when the person involved is under 18.
Are you unfamiliar with the principal that things which are appropriate for adults are often not appropriate for children?
According to the United States, it’s appropriate to imprison children for delinquency that is things that are criminal for children that are not criminal for adults.
So no, I have little faith regarding what my society decides is right for kids.
I have no idea who you got from what I said to what you said, and I don’t want to.
The notion that some things may be inappropriate for kids is easly misused when it’s turned into a principle and as such we end up where the US is now, withholding civil rights from children and using child safety to push identity politics.
I do hope you are not a parent.
I wish we have restrictions based on mental capacity rather than age. Fucking dimwits aged 40+ can’t think better than elementary schoolers
Jefferson thought as much, thinking the common public was too daft to effectively vote.
Here’s the problem: We have no good way to decide who is savvy enough for civic engagement and who isn’t, and because of that ambiguity (and maybe without it) such a test would absolutely get corrupted for political purposes.
Part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is to develop an army of MAGA-minded clerical workers to replace all the bureaucrats that run the deep state since they’re not willing to follow illegal orders. Every power-seeking authoritarian movement seeks to weed out all those who disagree with them.
I hope you aren’t either. You probably try to make everything into a political diatribe.
Actually, I hope you don’t have kids, because you are clearly not a parent, regardless of whether you’ve been able to spawn.
I’m not a parent, a point that has informed my relationship with my stepdaughters and grandson. When we lived in the same household, they still had their respective dads, for better or worse, and I couldn’t replace them. As a friendly adult, my role was to affirm to my wife’s kids that their feelings are valid even when they couldn’t express them with the sturm und drang they warranted.
Of what I’ve seen of parents, including my own, their jobs commonly leave them far to exhausted to actually parent (or run a household, or relax, or engage in their civic responsibilities). Industry has long driven society to intergenerational mental illness, and kids are often having to confront adult situations early.
But yes, events and policy in Florida and Texas have shown us that it is en vogue in places to withhold information from children, not so much to protect them, but to keep them from questioning the values of their parents, teachers, ministers and officers who direct them. Efforts to obstruct access to porn turn quickly into efforts to obstruct access to health information, to LGBT+ content, to the darker chapters of US and western history, to alternatives to capitalism, to even the beatitudes.
To be fair, Moms For Liberty and the adults making scenes at PTSA (PTA?) meetings don’t represent all parents, and I actually kinda hope they aren’t parents (or as you noted, progenitors) themselves. But we naked apes don’t typically choose to breed for the benefit of our spawn, but because we want the cute thing, not thinking about the outraged, frustrated teen they will grow into, or the struggling, beleaguered adult struggling to fit into a society that wants to use and discard them like an expendable mechanical part.
Kids don’t know the difference between ignorance and innocence. That is a projection placed onto them by society, and I think kids should have the same access to information on the clitoris or plantation economics or communism or Sappho of Lesbos as they do Alexander Hamilton, the steam engine, Christopher Columbus and Washington Irving.
I never said anything about restricting access to information. We’re talking about banning phones from classrooms, which I see as no different from not letting kids drive cars.
Smartphones give access to information. Lock a kid in a classroom or a detention hall and without that phone they’re isolated.
They’re also isolated from family and people who might help them if they’re being wrongfully detained.
A car is large heavy machinery. Even adults in cars are dangerous. It’s a lot harder to cause destruction or accidentally kill someone with a smartphone. And it’s a lot easier to make someone disappear when they don’t have a working smartphone. Not a close comparison.
I’m familiar with the sad fact that many people believe that. Knowledge should never be age restricted. If a kid doesn’t want to learn about, for example, sex, and finds it gross, that’s one thing. An entire society conspiring to keep them from knowing about it till they’re about 11 is quite another.
How about restricting children from driving cars?
A phone is a tool, not knowledge. Kids can find all the knowledge they want without having phones on them at all times.
I think a lot of comments are thinking about this as a binary, or that it’s actually about if children should have phones or not.
As an adult, there are plenty of places I’m not allowed to take my phone, or at least must completely power it off. Concerts, court rooms, libraries, hospitals…
These rules are there only because it disturbs others if my phone rings or I’m talking.
That applies to schools, too, but even moreso. It also opens the door even wider to cheating in various ways.
While it is important to try to teach kids to regulate themselves, the fact is that there are still frequent phones going off at concerts and annoying people talking loudly in libraries. Schools are much more serious in nature - it can affect test scores, for example.
It’s also naive to think that all students / schools can just be taught to make responsible decisions. Many schools, especially inner city ones, are complete disaster areas. It’s hard enough as it is to get the kids to even stop talking, or sit down, or stop assaulting others.
Yes, that’s why I’m completely fine with my kids watching online videos of ISIS prisoners being burnt to death in a dog cage.
Can I ask if you have kids?
lol if you think you can stop that
That’s a strange comment. There’s obviously a difference between a 16 year old and a 4 year old (I have both). Are you saying because my 16 year old is curious and gets sent shit by her friends, I shouldn’t try to filter what my 4 year old doing?
once you no longer have eyes on them outside your home it is pretty much over
4 year old is fine, by 5 or 6 good luck unless you are home school helicopter parenting them
They’re probably 15
Given how responsibility for much of the violence in the world falls at the feet of the society that is deciding how to censor information from our kids, I find it quite appropriate that they have access to terrorist executions and cat killing videos.
The US gives few fucks that such videos exist, or that our society was built on massacres and slavery. We just don’t want our kids to know the grim legacy that they’ve been given.
Considering kids today are going to be middle aged when the climate crisis catches up to us, it raises questions of ethics what people were doing having kids in the first place.