- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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They did something similar in Indiana. It’s not a ‘the cops are coming’ thing. It’s more about having a law that the school can reference when whiny ass parents get mad when a teacher takes a students phone away because it’s disrupting class.
Yeah, that seems reasonable to me
I was trying to think how this could be enforced. It actually makes sense when you frame it this way, didn’t think about the parent side. “Sorry Karen, that’s the law! Your kid week get her phone back in a week!”
Most send it to the front office and the parent can pick it up after school.
When I was at school we weren’t allowed to eat in class. One day we had a supply teacher who caught a kid trying to eat a sandwich. The teacher confiscated the sandwich and ate it at the front of the class.
Now imagine if it had been a phone: kid tries to use phone, teacher confiscates phone, teacher tries to root phone and bricks it in the process. “You can have this back at the end of the day.”
Good. Kids don’t need cell phones, and they really are a huge distraction.
Kids don’t need cell phone
It looks like the ban isn’t on all cell phones. Dumb phones are permitted; it’s phones capable of Internet use:
Hochul said she would launch the bill later this year and take it up in New York’s next legislative session, which begins in January 2025. If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts, which has been a sticking point for parents. She did not offer specifics on enforcing the prohibition.
Do kids need them? I mean, they obviously don’t need them. I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in school.
And they certainly can be a distraction.
But…the flip side of that is that they can also be a pretty important tool.
I use my smartphone as a reference, to reach Wikipedia, etymonline, various dictionaries, to get translations.
I use it as a tool. I have maxima on it, an open-source computer algebra system; think Mathematica. It’s a lot more useful than something like a TI calculator. I think I touched my graphing calculator about once after school. I have a unit converter on it. I have a weather program on it. I take notes, can search through them. Those are tools that I have with me all the time in life. If kids can’t have a smartphone at school – which is a mandatory part of a lot of the youth and teenage parts of their lives – that’s stripping them of access to a lot of important stuff.
At one point, I worked at a research lab that didn’t permit devices with cameras inside, a much lesser restriction. It was a pain in the butt, and that was a long time ago, before devices were as prevalent and important as they are today. I wouldn’t wish that on kids.
Part of functioning in the modern world is living in a world that has devices like smartphones. If a student literally cannot function in the presence of a smartphone, that seems like a much larger problem to me than anything else; employers are not going to cut them off from phones. I don’t think that this solution is a reasonable approach to “student is being distracted”. Like, part of socializing people for being able to function in society has gotta be to get them in a situation where they can function later in life, and if anyone should do that, it’s the school.
That’s a good take but I gotta say- kids are kids. They WILL slack off, they will goof off, they will use the phones for other things. This isn’t a critique- it’s what kids do.
If they need tools then a couple ipads or similar can be used. I don’t find the argument “they need to exist with smartphones in society” convincing for school. At work you know you’ll be fired if you’re caught using your phone too much, etc. and slacking off. Kids aren’t under the same pressure as that and quite frankly I wouldn’t expect them to act with that level of maturity as even some adults don’t and they’re older and should be wiser.
As for the problem of just existing with them? I feel like that is yet another thing that school won’t solve. That is up to their parents, etc. Good habits start at home. Expecting schools to solve all problems (especially ones so entrenched like socioeconomic conditions, poverty, etc.) is half of why we’re here in the first place. But guess what? If the kid is given a tablet or allowed to use a cell phone at the table and basically whenever/wherever they want, do you think their behavior will be different in school? Do you think it’s up to the school to be forcing this? That is yet another ridiculous burden I think we’d put on teachers and staff.
Moreover, don’t you think we should be conditioning these kids that it’s ok to exist without a phone?
These kids won’t be worse off without phones. Like you said- the rest of us did just fine without them. Let them have a calculator and computers in computer class and call it a day.
We did this a while ago in the Netherlands and so far the research results on the effects look promising.
Yes even the kids’ reactions generally seemed positive, some mentioned there were more conversations and joking going on in between classes, and cyber bullying was less prevalent (although ‘old school’ bullying seemed to make a comeback somewhat)
Makes sense. They’re distracting. Not sure why they were allowed in the first place.
Hey at least us parents could take comfort in that if there is a school shooting we might get a voicemail of our children’s last words
Lmao, Jesus
A bit dark!
So are school shootings
These seem all over the place - or maybe it is just this article that is not explaining it well?
For starters, “smartphones” aren’t the only SIM-carrying devices that can access the internet and install apps - dumbphones can do the former and tablets can do both, which you wouldn’t even be able to visibly see someone using, if it is in their bag and they use something like a watch interface to it. Laptops too…
The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids act addresses algorithmic feeds. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with a default chronological feed composed of accounts they have chosen to follow rather than algorithmically suggested ones.
Ngl, that sounds awesome - and not even just for kids! But immediately after that the article continues:
The bill would also mandate that parents have more wide-reaching controls like the ability to block access to night-time notifications.
Isn’t this already built-in to various OS’s, so why put the onus onto the app itself?
Electronic devices like calculators have been a staple inside schools for half a century at least, and poor people who cannot afford one of every type of device will generally opt for one device that can install many different types of apps - so to now ban these apps, b/c they might be used in a certain particular manner… while simultaneously NOT stopping school shootings, it blows my mind.
“Political theater” is the phrase that comes to mind. Another phrase is “No child left behind”, given how the parents seem to be against these policies, but the State has deemed that it knows better™.
Then again, perhaps it has a real purpose in mind after all, as a law designed to extract money out of big tech companies as fees pile up?
While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.
I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.
But even if you decriminalized drugs (good!) you could still ban drugs in schools (also good!). Schools should be allowed to ban smartphones, which is what this bill would do.
They don’t allow phones in actual prisons so why should schools be any different? \s
Foucault salivating involuntarily at this comment
Only question I have is is there exceptions? I know a few kids with some medical conditions like diabetes that have monitors that synch to their phone to control medication or send alerts… Wonder how they are going to address those situations. Otherwise, I could see the benefits on a smart phone ban during school hours. I just wonder how they are going to administer that.
Schools with good administrations will make accommodations for kids that need it. Schools with bad administrations won’t until somebody sues.
I don’t mind it as long as the phones stay in the classroom in the students’ view, not stored in some office outside. The latter would make the owner worry about their phone being stolen or damaged while out of sight.
Dumb ass American politicians don’t know how to govern beyond “ban or blow up something we don’t like”.
What do you suggest as an alternative?
I don’t know, maybe good parenting?
You could have just admitted that you have no alternative. It’s okay to do that.
deleted by creator
Tik Tok, abortion, delta 8
Yeah pretty much.
“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” she said.
literally capture them? you should be literally ejected from office.
Spend 5 minutes on any HS campus during passing period and you’ll see that it’s correct to say capture.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literally
literally
(degree, figuratively, proscribed, contranym) Used non-literally as an intensifier for figurative statements: virtually, so to speak (often considered incorrect; see usage notes)
Synonym: virtually
He was so surprised, he literally jumped twenty feet in the air.
I agree that it’s a goddamn obnoxious use of the word that is a recipe for ambiguity, but I think that the battle over this has been lost.
I blame Paris Hilton.
I wonder how many comments on Lemmy were written out under a desk in class.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” she said.
The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children’s privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.
In New York, the bills have faced pushback from big tech, trade groups and other companies, which collectively spent more than $800,000 between October and March lobbying against one or both of them, according to public disclosure records.
This differs from other state-level bills across the country, which place some reliance on self-policing by tech companies to decide which features could be harmful by completing assessments of whether products are “reasonably likely” to be accessed by children.
“Meta itself admits its own parental controls aren’t widely used – they’re often confusing and frequently fail to work as intended,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a policy advocacy organization.
The major social media firms have faced increasing scrutiny over harms against children, including sextortion scams, grooming by predators and worsening mental health.
The original article contains 922 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is dumb
