To me this sort of bans always feel like an easy way out. Why educate good phone use when you can just impose any rules you want?
While small things like this create a big contrast between "school" and the "real world". When kids are at home doing homework they will have access to phones. They live in a world where every adult always has a phone in their hand. Why not teach them good and healthy ways of using tools and technology?
Phones should be banned from school. It was hard enough to focus without smart phones. I cannot imagine how it would be today.
As a parent I would probably consider giving my kid a flip phone for school hours. Maybe that’s a creative solution.
I had my Gigapet(Tamagotchi clone) taken from me in 5th grade even though I kept it in my locker. I don't see how phones are acceptable.
> “We talk about Stanford behavioral scientists hired by Big Tech to design the little dopamine slot machines we carry around,” Hertz said. “I tell them about my own struggles with my phone, I remind them that their eyeballs are dollar signs, and tell them it’s not their fault that they can’t stop looking at these things.”
This is interesting - I wonder who she was talking about in particular, perhaps someone from BJ Fogg's Behavior Design Lab (formerly Persuasive Technology Lab?) Though it appears that the lab, and its graduates, are generally oriented toward more positive outcomes.
Fun fact: Good grades during high school is directly positively correlated with future success and occurrence of fights. Good luck convincing teenagers to get good grades.
The path forward might be to go backward.
Are there parental controls on Apple Watch and iPhone that make it easy for a parent to limit the kid to just messaging or calling the parents during school hours? I wouldn't even want my kid to see notifications from others, since the curiosity would be distracting.
> Those who need to make emergency calls must do so from the main office, and those caught with cell phones have them confiscated, she said.
Sometimes it isn't possible to get to the main office.
Less gossip spreading like wildfire too.
I left school in the UK about 2 years after the release of the first iPhone. We were always banned from using phones even during breaks. If they were seen they were confiscated.
I can only imagine how distracting phones are today for kids in school, especially with the rise of extremely addictive apps like TikTok.
I think banning them in schools is a good thing and I’m not surprised schools are seeing improvements in behaviour without them.