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
We've been without a lot of things for millennia
Uh huh, and we can do without the bad things
For me school was a great way to learn almost nothing of any use while occupying 11 years of my life with pointless time filing busywork that I hated every hour, minute and each and every eternal second of of. The only thing worse than school has been work and my consolation is that at least it's not forever!
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.
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.
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.
Because personal tutors are engaging directly with the student the whole session?
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.
Make school fun and not a prison and then kids don't need phones like their office worker parents do.
Doesnβt matter if the teacher is an absolute gem and knows how to captivate kids who want to learn. Most kids prefer the dopamine hit from social media and other phone usage compared to actually learning. It just ruins it for kids who actually want to learn.
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.
