This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean... fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there's certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it's good to be away from it.
It's not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there's an active shooter on campus. π
We've had a similar ban in the Netherlands for a year or two now. Mobile phones were already not allowed in classes. Kids seem to have survived.
Good, you don't need smart phones in school
For anyone screeching that you do: No. You don't.
We've been without smart phones for millenia, literally, and we were fine without. You will be fine without.
we didnt have clean drinking water either, or daily showers, we lived without soap for millenia
Lol, we definitely have had clean drinking water for far longer than we have had dirty drinking water, thank the industrial revolution for that. And try skipping a shower for a day - you'll be fine. Soap also has a long history https://www.soaphistory.net/soap-history/ over 4000 years
So literally wrong on all three points. Perhaps you need to read more instead of doom scrolling and swapping nudes on your smartphone
I'm pretty sure there can be other bad stuff in water that existed before the industrial revolution
"So literally wrong on all three points. Perhaps you need to read more instead of doom scrolling and swapping nudes on your smartphone" This made me feel like I was on reddit not lemmy lmao
Does anybody but me remember when schools banned walkmen? What about portable CD players? Gameboy? This happens everytime a new technology becomes popular and schools don't know how to regulate it they do this.
The downside is, a fair few student will have their phones confiscated by the school. But it won't dissuade them from bringing them in. You make them better at hiding them instead of creating tools and protocols to enforce for when they can and can't use them.
The crazy thing is, this should be about schools not wanting to be liable for or responsible for these pieces of tech. But Everytime I see legislation like this, it's to do with "children's mental health", or these devices being a distraction.
Model it. Nobody should be allowed to have a phone in schools by this metric. No phones for students? No phones for teachers and administration.
Yeah I think the adverse effect of handing an iPhone to a 10 year old in Atlanta, when that teen is still highly impressionable unrestricted and unsupervised access to the internet is far worse than handing a kid a Gameboy on which they can only game, or a Walkman on which the worst thing they can do is listen to Cardi B.
Does anybody but me remember when schools banned walkmen? What about portable CD players? Gameboy?
Except none of these things were feeding Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan garbage straight into their highly impressionable skulls.
I, for one, support the banning of phones in schools. The social media addiction has been shown to cause depression, particularly in girls, and the brainwashing is ever more apparent.
If anything, this policy fails by not going far enough. I question whether kids should have access to social media at all before a certain age.
Rush Limbaugh was broadcast on the free radio, you could listen to it on $1 worth of junk parts if you knew what you were doing. The ease of access is not what made republican bigotry accessible or popular.
Sure, but we're talking about a way different scale. "If you knew what you were doing" being a key word here.
It's never been easier to come across this garbage when youtube/Instagram/Tiktok comes installed on most phones by default. What's worse, there have never been so many grifters spewing the same shit.
Back in the day, you might have been able to call Limbaugh an isolated instance of a clear grifter getting paid to spread lies.
Nowadays, the Tate clones are so ubiquitous that it's hard to point out the flaws in thinking because so many people seem to believe in them. But its just the algorithm feeding you more of the same, over and over.
It was almost the entirety of AM radio for the past 40 years. Sports and this right-wing trash. On in the background at every work place, hardware store, and cafe until Muzac took over. Had that ranting asshole and his friends pumping into our ears wanting it or not. Many areas of the country had only that and Country Music for hours in any direction.
When I said "if you knew what you were doing" I meant you can build an AM receiver out of literal trash with a middle school understanding of electrics but no one bothered because you had one built in to every car, every tape player, boom box, alarm clock, and anything else with a speaker. You had a radio in every room of the house and 2 in the garage even if you never turned it on. There's no way to believe that phones have less cultural push than AM radio had pre-1990.
I remember when people didn't have phones on them 24/7 and kids didn't die and parents could call the school if they needed to talk to the kids. Somehow we survived.
And a bunch of people didn't but we don't talk about them, it was the norm back then.
Teddy sniffing glue, he was twelve years old, fell from the roof on East 2-9, Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug, twenty six reds and a bottle of wine.
But people don't like that song, so you're right about not wanting to talk about it.
About 'better at hiding them'; maybe so; but that will largely be down to how the rule is enforced. Some schools basically just say "please don't carry your phone. Put it in your locker." In those schools, basically every student has their phone in their pocket. Whereas other schools are more strict about it. The phone can be confiscated on site, and in some cases require the parent to collect it. In those cases, compliance goes way up.
As for 'no phones for teachers and admin'; unfortunately, some of the jobs and responsibilities of teachers are done using a phone. Teachers are required to carry a phone during yard-duty, for emergency purposes. And teachers often use their phone to mark class attendance rolls. ... But its definitely a bad look when a teacher is walking down a school corridor staring at their phone while student phones are banned.
As for the reasons for the ban... well, they are many and varied - including all of the things you mentioned. (liability, mental health vs bullying in particular, and distraction from class activities.)
What's funny is all the rich tech elite send their kids to schools that don't use tech to the same degree as public schools. Wonder why.
Probably because elite schools have smaller class sizes or teacher/student ratios thereby making it less necessary to have the ability to disseminate information via mass means with technology. Put it all up on a big screen where 30 kids can see it, send the assignments out to 120 kids via google classroom on school issued chromebooks (because there are plenty of kids from families that cannot afford computers), and do all the grading and review digitally. Iβd be willing to bet those expensive private schools use plenty of tech, maybe kids carry Macbook Airs instead, but thereβs no escape from tech in schools.
I can't believe it wasn't like that since the beginning.
How is it not one of the many distracting things they would ban immediately?
Good on you France!
I hope more countries start realizing how important this is. We have more than enough evidence demonstrating the damage that comes from being permanently connected, or even online for more than a couple hours per day, and minors are taking the worst of it because they are developing under those conditions.
I'm still not convinced that this is the answer to helping kids concentrate & learn more in school.
there is no "the" answer but it can be part of an answer.
I think it is fine but we also need lessons to properly interact with the technology. Scams, fraud, disinformation and checking sources were handled very abstractly at best and archaic at worst.
Gen alpha is significantly worse than prior generations on tech. Them having their phones on them doesn't teach them, they consume on the lowest level. They don't learn the actual Internet skills prior generations had to to survive.
I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren't as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.
I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was "improved atmosphere," in which case it's still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking "dealing with phone bullshit" off the teachers' plates.
Good. Boredom is the key to learning. Well it should be interesting on it's own, but take what you got.
Of course the manner of learning in most schools is not ideal, kids find it boring for a reason, but without distraction they might latch onto some bits of information just to survive the class.
This mentality is why I almost failed higbschool. Boredom fails us who need to be constantly invested.
Maybe you should fix the systematic problem instead of doing surface level fixes that impact the freedom and mobility of minors.
Wouldn't no phomes increase mobility since parents cant trqck their location
This is solving a systematic problem. The problem of social media companies having free reign to make kids addicted. This will give french kids more freedom to think and do actual things with their life.
