If the goal of school is to develop children into young adults with good reasoning and analytical skills, a basic wholesome world and social model and some practical skills and basic physique, smartphones seem to contribute little and distract a lot from those aims.
- If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school
- If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time
- If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it
- etc, etc, etc
There's a ton of reasons for her to have her phone on her. Enough so that, when she gets punished with phone removal, we generally still let her bring it to school.
The fact that the phone doesn't contribute to the schooling itself (although it does when she forgets something she needs for school) doesn't mean that it doesn't contribute to QOL overall by being with her at school.
The first two aren't in school. The last doesn't actually require a cell phone.
It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.
The first two require she bring her phone to school with her. Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.
The last one doesn't require a cell phone, since the school has phone lines. But it's certainly more convenient to let her use her own phone than have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.
> It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.
Somewhat my bad.. but I was responding to thread's content and title.
- The article says "[Finland approved] a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools"
- The title of the thread says "bans smartphones in schools".. which is not at ALL what they did; they banned _use_ of smartphones in schools _without permission_.
And what I said was that my daughter brings her phone to school; she doesn't use it there unless there's a good reason (like I noted).
> Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.
I am pretty sure that no one would know if she just puts it on silent or airplane mode? But in any case my son's class did that for several months in 7th grade, due to an incident (minor but on the worrisome side) and with the agreement of the parents, and it was just fine.
> have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.
Maybe next time they will put more attention and in the meanwhile they'll share or borrow what's needed?
> > Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.
Yes they could for years NYC schools banned cellphones in schools which ment kids could not bring them in the building at all. Kids left their phones with nearby bodegas or in a van parked outside the school for a small fee. Basically a coat check for phones. This worked perfectly well and required zero effort on the part of the administration.
All of those problems can be solved without smartphones, as evidenced by literally every previous generation dealing with them. If anything, my grumpy self would argue that not having means to contact my parents if I forgot something ensured that I paid more attention the night before to what I had to pack.
But I'm open to compromise: let's give children bring dumb phones that can only call and text.
Sure. I remember standing in line at the phone for 10 minutes as a kid waiting for my turn to call my parents when my activity was done. Cell phones are better. Smart phones would mean I could use the time waiting for something.
Smart phones when class is in session is a distraction and should be banned. However outside of class they are helpful.
Those studies speak about social media addiction, smartphone addiction, and excessive phone use and not about having a phone.
If you want to prevent the negative effects of social media and (designed to be) addictive apps, then you should ban social media and addictive apps, and not phones (because that would just mask the symptoms).
The schools here I have experience with are stricter about smart watches than phones - you can get everybody to turn their phone off all day or keep it in a locker, but it's much harder with watches.
I did all of those same things while in school with a Nokia candy bar phone. I did waste some time playing Snake though.
Per the article this is a ban on using smartphones during class time, not a ban on bringing them to school at all.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. When I was in school if a teacher saw you using phone during class you might get one warning and then it was being confiscated.
> The law does not entirely ban the use of mobile phones at school, and their use will be permitted in certain situations. But generally, the use of phones *during class time* will be prohibited.
All of those reasons can be solved with her using a public phone. My school growing up had a phone in the hallway by the main office for those reasons.
I also grew up without phones in schools but in my opinion the problem is phones (and laptops, frankly) in class. If a student isn't in class, I don't see why they can't use their phone to talk to people or browse websites or whatever.
If they're in class, then 99% chance it's distracting them from learning. If they're not, I think personal autonomy is a good rule.
My argument against any phones from school start to end is that socialization and interpersonal skills are also learned in school.
Having a distraction box at hand slows that process.
Grade school kids aren't tiny adults: they're actively building the pieces that make them into adults (self control, emotional regulation, empathy, cooperation, etc).
I don't trust Google or Apple to sacrifice profits, at scale, to support those goals.
I agree with you. Also grew up through the full 90. To me, school is school, all of it. Not school, not school, but all time at school is: school. and imo personal devices in school is really bad news: period.
Its basically shitty parenting disguised with 'we care' and similar arguments as mentioned. Lets not forget about pedophile scare, that should convert the last remaining parents and make sure opposition is silent.
We raise kids mostly without screens (just some short old school cartoons on TV before bed if they behave well). Its harder, but kids behave much better compared to most peers (which can have 1000s of reasons and some out of our control, I know). We also limit sweet stuff, eat tons of veggies (so they do too and ie love broccoli, not sure where the proverbial hate comes from... maybe lack of basic cooking skills?). But the key is we eat same stuff, healthy food can be very tasty easily. We lay them down to sleep pretty early too.
Simply restrict highly addictive stuff, be it in food or behavioral like screens. It has no place when growing up, no matter how folks wrap it as a need. It forms neural pathways that are extremely hard to shed for rest of their lives, no need to fuck them up properly for life before they have a chance to forge their own path and make their own choices.
> The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones
Once again, for the people not paying attention. It's not about _need_. It's about quality of life. It's about easier, faster, better, safer.
Are there negatives to having cell phones? Sure. That's true for adults, too. And the benefits of having a cell phone need to be weighed against those negatives.
But saying "you don't _need_ a cell phone" is a straw man argument. Because nobody (that I see) says it's needed; they said it's worth it.
> Because nobody (that I see) says it's needed; they said it's worth it.
Oh, "need" is definitely the first-reach in these discussions. You should see Florida school parents go apeshit at the prospect of not being tethered to their little angels 24x7.
Granted, on HN, it does trend towards worth.
But imho that's looking at smartphones with rose-colored glasses. As people in the industry, you think we'd have more realpolitik perspectives about what modern smartphones are designed to do -- grab, hold, and monetize attention.
Here around public phones are gone since long, even inside schools. However, mobile phones that just do calls and SMS are still a thing. And anyway, the Finnish law is not preventing any of the use cases you mentioned as far as I understand it.
No they cannot. My school had multiple doors that could not see each other - more than once my parents were waiting for me at a different door from the one I was standing at waiting for them. We did find each other, but only after a lot of searching - sometimes we even passed each other as we both switched doors to wait at.
Okay, it did work out, but not nearly as well as a simple cell phone. Smart phones add additional functionality. (I can see on google maps where each kid's phone is)
To me it seems such a dystopian thing to inflict upon ones kids. All day long being monitored by a spyware spreading company, just for some small convenience and probable impacting their ability to clearly communicate where they are or will be waiting. Maybe this kind of thing is the reason why so many people are unable to make an appointment and stick to the terms agreed upon when making the appointment.
So you could not agree with your patent to meet at a default pick up point? Have we become this short attention focussed that any pre-planning is outside of our mental scope?
I heard a variant of this recently. I told a colleague I don't use my phone for long periods, days at a time, that I miss nothing, am a happier person, do stuff with my time that makes me happier, etc, and she broke out in a mild panic, along the lines of:
"What about emergencies?? What about when you need to phone someone about X, or phone someone else because Y happened?"
It's a good argument - the typical phone in 1998 was a useful and practical device. Seriously, being able to ring people has many excellent and real use cases. Phones aren't just calling devices anymore, though.
While I see the utility of a phone in places where children can't move around independently for one reason or another, I reckon that in Finland, most children walk or cycle to and from school on their own starting in like first grade. So there's no need for this kind of coordination.
These are good examples of why a non-smartphone is valuable and a smartphone is not necessary. Also the linked article states that they will be allowed to use their phone when given circumstances require, which I think covers the cases you outlined
> Also the linked article states that they will be allowed to use their phone when given circumstances require, which I think covers the cases you outlined
Yes. I was discussing things from the thread's title and the arguments in the thread that phones aren't useful at school. The actual action that Finland is taking (Children aren't allowed to use cellphones at school without permission, effectively) is reasonable. But it's also not what the title of this thread says.
even all the above reasons are not actual reasons. None of these are a problem. you job is NOT to bring something to school because she forgot it nor to drive her to school if the bus doesnt show up.
> you job is NOT to bring something to school because she forgot it nor to drive her to school if the bus doesnt show up.
No, it's not my job. But it is my job as a parent to make her life easier where it makes sense (when it's not to impactful to my other responsibilities). And dropping off her computer so that she can participate in class does that (and makes her day in school more productive). And picking her up at the bus stop so she doesn't need to walk 5-10 minutes home, or 15-20 minutes to school... is a nice thing to do.
It seems like everyone in this thread against cell phones is arguing from the point of "well, you don't NEED this". It's not about need, it's about better.
I respect your opinion, I have children and I dont want to tell other parents what to do. please take it as an exploration of a what real necessity is and what the notion of better is in which context.
I fundamentally disagree that making life easy is the right thing.
what I am trying to say is, the feedback loop from a) forgetting something or b) the experience of missing out on something because of aspects of life that are out of ones control is so much better IMO and the phone is just 'convenient'
Of course that doesnt mean I prefer my child to be run over or die instead of protecting her/him or helping her/him
1) Point 1 and 3 can in many families be an impediment to the development of the child rather than a good thing. If you can always call on helicopter parents to solve your issues you do not get the experience that even if you mess up / get into a bad situation, in the end, you can solve the situation yourself -- or if it is not solved, that you at least survive it and life goes on. Important life skills.
2) The entire list can be equally well solved by dumbphones without TikTok and Snapchat. Which is what such bans as this is about.
3) It is always about pros/cons. In Scandinavia phones have (in my view as a parent and married to a teacher) essentially destroyed education wherever they are allowed in the pocket/backpack of the student during class.
Not to speak about downsides to social life. E.g., people not attempting dancing in high school proms because there are videos taken everywhere. People not showering in gyms due to phones. Just two examples. SO MANY things are killed by the phones.
The benefits have to be weighed against the quite massive downsides.
--
They banned phones on the high school where my wife teaches last year and she is basically a changed person. Instead of spending 50% of class time policing phone use, she can, you know, actually teach.
(She still has to deal with a generation addicted to dopamine, but a habit of phone confiscation during class is at least a massive improvement.)
ALL problems were solved differently before the age of smartphones. Breaking down on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and having to walk miles to find some way to ask for help was a damned nightmare; especially for a single female.
Lots of problems are solved in MUCH better ways now that we have smartphones. It's not about "can we do it", it's about "can we do it better / easier".
The school has phones in every classroom as well as the admin offices. Before I had a cellphone and needed to let my parents know I was staying after school or going home with a friend, I just used a landline.
Breaking down on the side of the road is completely different than being without a cellphone in a building full of landlines. It's disingenuous to compare the two situations. Breaking down on the side of the road is pretty much the impetus for portable communication systems. A kid being able to just text mom that they need a ride after school is convenient but not really critical enough to justify letting kids have their phones on them all day long.
She can have a basic phone just for calls—like the ones designed for older people.Or depending on the school, they might have a system where all phones are stored when children arrive and returned after school.
> - If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school
When I went to school the bus turned up every single day without fail. We've learnt to accept less because you can just call a taxi.
> - If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time
We had public payphones that we could use. We've learnt to accept less because everyone has a mobile phone.
> - If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it
I remembered to bring what I needed every day or I suffered the consequences. I soon learnt. We've become complacent because you can just get it delivered using your phone.
All in all I don't really see how it's a positive, but it certainly seems to have considerable negatives.
These are all normal childhood things that were managed long before smartphones existed. Yes, a mobile phone makes these things more convenient, but it is far from necessary.
Uh, yes, same exact reasons our kids have their phones with them to school. BUT, the phones are handed in, and when they are handed in during the day, the kids can ask a teacher either for their phone or for getting help using another phone. At the end of the school day, they get their phones back.
Give her a smartwatch with cellular instead (like an Apple Watch). She can do all the things you mentioned using a smartwatch without the distraction of apps and convenient texting.
If the bus doesn't show up? This must be public buses and not yellow buses. Call your council and tell them to fix the transit system. Meanwhile a child can walk home and get a ride, or show up to the stop earlier.
She can call from where she goes after school, no? Or she can go home first, or make plans a day ahead.
She can learn the consequences of not packing her school bags properly and keep a checklist to review each morning. The only time I recall in 12 years of primary schooling, where I had to get something from home after forgetting, was a prop for a demonstration in front of the class. I remember because it was the only time it mattered.
I am not familiar with your specifics, I don't mean to be personal. I don't have kids. But I am young enough to remember being one - I am also addicted to my phone, and I know how convenient it is to not plan anything and to instantly communicate with everyone. I am unconvinced that children in a controlled, supervised environment need a phone.
I say all this with humility because I haven't dealt directly with kids or the public school system in a long time.
...finally, if I did agree and say "yeah they should at least be allowed to have a phone on their way", it should absolutely be banned in the classroom. But what to do when the children inevitably break that rule? It doesn't sound like you would support them confiscating it, and it's a logistical quagmire to do so anyway.
I expect she'd probably drive home and get it. She doesn't have a car at 13 yrs old though. Nor would I want her walking home from her school at the moment to get it to the tune of 40+ minutes; so calling me is a reasonable option.
Could she get by at school without her computer? Yes. Is her school day more productive with it? Also yes.
Depending on where people are relative to each other, absolutely yes.
I’ve done similar for friends and family.
For most kids, the embarrassment of a parent appearing during the school day is enough to really negatively enforce forgetting things, at least after middle school starts.
It certainly did not appear to me that way, here in Germany. There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing. For the other things you described I do not think they were ever considered.
I know several teachers. So these sorts of comments are always funny. I know math teachers who lack support but continuously attempt to present topics from different POV because some students don’t get it.
So some self proclaimed smart person “learned nothing”, and therefore school is a waste of time. At the same time, ignoring that maybe a school or system is indeed not prepared to handle some individuals (which is not good), or that maybe some teachers are bad, or maybe the system does not support their staff enough. But that can’t be the case because they learned nothing. Whole school system must be a scam.
As I wrote below. My most memorable math class was a teacher failing to explain fractions to me, what later became obvious to me was that the teacher did not understand fractions either.
I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.
Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.
I’m not blaming you. But as intelligent as you may be, you have discounted all the possibilities for the failure of you school or your particular teachers. Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.
Curricula are standardized. All students experienced almost the exact same disconnect. This is also not some secret, all Professors know this and some try their hardest to bridge the gap.
Then this is a failure of the system in Germany, and does not reflect the experience of many American kids. Some, yes, but not all. Primarily, it's the "smart" kids who didn't have to work for good high school grades who have a bad time in university, not the kids in the fat part of the curve who more likely matriculated having already developed strong study skills. In my experience, at least, the biggest difference between high school and college is that high school teachers teach and homework is for reinforcement, whereas college professors expect self-learning to be the core method of pedagogy and their role is to reinforce and contextualize the topics. Switching from one mode to the other can be rough, no matter how innately intelligent a student is.
Maybe aligned/frameworked/pooled but no full uniform testing or single curriculum across all the states in Germany, for example - so variations exist and some schools might prepare better than others.
> In university the expectations were drastically higher.
Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.
Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)
If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university
Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).
To add another case: When I was 14 or so, a science teacher taught the whole classroom that the reason stars twinkle is because of light being waves. I considered interrupting and mentioning pockets of air with different densities, refraction, etc... I decided not to. I didn't want to be branded (again) a troublemaker. I hope nobody else in that classroom remembers that lesson.
Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.
I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.
Incompetence is rampant in government jobs. Schools aren't technically government jobs, but there are many similarities in terms of incentives, hiring practice, dismissal difficulty, talent pool, etc.
In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.
Most teachers are actually quite good and they're actively being held back by curriculum and being stripped of their autonomy.
I really, truly don't know how people form this opinion. Teachers are trained professionals with certifications and a degree. They know what they're doing. It's extremely likely they're far more educated in the subject matter they teach than you are.
Now, they're not miracle workers. Some parents expect little Timmy reading at a second grade level in Middle School to magically get great scores on his end of year exams. It doesn't work that way.
"Incompetence is rampant" is enough. No, incompetent people do not get fired from the private sector either. The dumbest tech question I have ever heard from a tech manager ("why don't we do datamining in Flash?") was from an established guy at an established corporation that controls a lot of the things the world does and really, really shouldn't.
You have put your finger on something - the actual purpose of school is to socialise children (it isn't very efficient as a teaching system - tutoring is better and what the people who really care about educational attainment use). But a side effect is teaching them a lot of useful things.
And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
>the actual purpose of school is to socialise children
I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.
>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.
To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.
> I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.
Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.
But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough.
I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.
Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.
> I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
My view is that schools purpose is teaching everyone not only a common baseline in language/math, but also how to deal with expectations/responsibilities and other people (teachers and classmates).
By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).
Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.
Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.
I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.
I would expect everyone at all levels to do better under a more highly segregated model. In the desegregated model, faster students are artificially held back and slower students are left behind (unless the class operates at the level of the absolute slowest student). In a segregated model, you are better able to approximate a mastery learning approach, which is known to create vastly better outcomes for everyone.
The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation.
For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution.
I'm quite skeptical about the improved performance for everyone from earlier segregation; this neglects the negative feedback effects from sticking low performers together I feel, and I dont see how you preserve any semblance of "common baseline", meaning that counting on a kid knowing some prerequisite concept is gonna be a complete gamble (especially after school transfer).
Your outcomes as child are also likely to plummet if you ever get sorted into the wrong bucket, which I feel is super unethical.
Personally I also really question the whole concept of pushing a grade schoolers "performance": What do you hope to gain from it? Looking e.g. at asian english tests I can see a likely worst-case outcome: Genuinely difficult and stressful tests (that even native speakers would struggle with) that just test some meaningless grammatical minutiae.
I fully agree that having optional programs and learning opportunities for talented/interested children is a very good thing, but I don't think dismantling the current system would really help at providing those (and they are always gonna be an additional cost, just like more segregation would be in practice). I also think that attempting to railroad children into (or out of!) those options is not desirable at all.
What would be the negative feedback effects? Are we talking misbehavior? If so the ultimately needed solution there is to discipline them. If it's merely being a slower student, then being among other slower students means the teacher can move at a more appropriate pace, so should see improvements.
If you get sorted into the wrong bucket, it shouldn't be a huge deal. e.g. my elementary school had I think ~5 classes per grade level, so you have bands for 20%iles. Teachers can target the center of their %ile band for pacing. With a desegregated model, teachers end up targeting somewhere below the median student for everyone, so people in the top 50%ile and bottom 20%ile are all poorly served. You don't have to necessarily stay in your band either; if you do well, move up. If you do poorly, move down. If you're primarily segregating by ability, not age, then you might need to e.g. move into a younger cohort's top performing band to get onto the right pacing, but you don't need to lose much time. This is in contrast to today's system where if you're not close to the median, probably half your time in school is wasted.
In larger schools, you could potentially group kids into 15-10%ile bands. The tighter the bands, the less of an issue if they end up in the wrong band (assuming they're not completely misjudged). Personalized education is again the limit of this approach. The closer you get to that, the better kids will do.
As far as curriculum goes, I don't see why you couldn't have a baseline. The faster kids would just get through it faster, and maybe move onto more optional topics. The slower kids would progress more slowly, hopefully with a slightly higher end target than we set for them today.
Hopefully the thing high performing kids gain is to maintain their interest in academics instead of having it beaten out of them by moving at what is for them a snails pace. Testing them on larger volumes of meaningless minutiae is exactly the opposite of the goal. e.g. don't give them extremely tricky arithmetic/algebra problems; teach them calculus, linear algebra, mechanics, chemistry, etc. Teach the grown-up topics, but let them learn it when they're ready instead of holding them back several years.
Don't forget that kid that was 1 point off from making the gifted track that now gets stuck with much worse options for the rest of their life even though they could probably pass the gifted track as well (at the bottom of the class, but still a pass).
>Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.
In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
> In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway.
My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful).
Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming).
To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.
I would argue that, no matter what your perception is, school is much more than "sitting in a room for 8 hours". Sure, academic advancement can be accelerated massively through home schooling, self-study or tutoring -- and many families take advantage of this fact -- but most school districts offer all sorts of non-academic enrichment programming (even including things like elementary school recesses here) that you don't get otherwise and which result in more well-rounded socialization than you'd get without an intentional effort to augment homeschooling with the same.
Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives.
Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).
> To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is.
What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.
If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal.
It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.
We do need and have a goal. As a taxpayer I'm paying for school for kids other than my own. If there is no goal of that, then I am wasting my money: give me that back so I can go on vacation. Let those kids play in a park or whatever instead of spending time in school.
The goal is wide and open ended, but there is a goal. Likely others can word it better than me, but it goes something like this: "to produce kids that grow up to be productive adults that contribute to society and make the world a better place."
We all are not the same, and even if we were there are many different needs. I need someone to haul my trash to the wherever it is handled, but my city only needs a few hundred such people (thousand?). A few other people need to ensure I have clean water. A lot of people need to ensure I have food. Some of them need to provide medical care. Thus we need to have multiple different outcomes (if you are just hauling trash you need less education than the medical doctors, while the person designing the dump needs more education than a basic nurse).
Because of the different needs in society there will and must be debate over what the curriculum should be. There is no way to teach everything. Time spend teaching one subject is time that cannot be used for a different one. There are many different ideas how to teach, and we need better science to figure out what really works.
>We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.
I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
I disagree. Most kids need to be forced a bit to learn something hard. Sure the kid who likes sports should play. However only exceptional kids will ever be good enough to make a good future playing sports. Most kids will grow up to realize that much as they love the game they will never make a living at it. Thus we need to ensure those kids don't spend all their time getting better, but instead spend time getting useful life skills that they will need as an adult. Much as "post scarcity" people like to think otherwise, we are still not in a world where many people can "slack off".
Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.
> Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.
Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.
From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.
Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.
No, I don’t think that’s true. The 12 years of the pre-uni education set you up for being a member of society. You don’t see it because it became a part of you. You also learned to read, write, all basic math, geography, …
The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.
> Why couldn't I have learned university courses and these other skills at the same time?
Was that not offered at your school? It was at mine.
University level courses do presume you have some basic skills. But in many places, schools do offer university level courses for those who are prepared.
I think it would have been theoretically possible, but obviously logistically difficult as I would have had to skip multiple classes in other fields to attend.
It's also not like I was particularly interested in mathematics at that point in my life. I essentially chose my field of study based on what I had the best grades in. Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.
Schools in the US often offer different tracks within the same school but still offer different difficulty levels within them, including university level courses.
> It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.
Nah. You are mixing up the skill 'writing glyphs on a piece of paper and retrieving that information via optical means' with 'being well-grounded in a wide array of subjects so you can express an idea in a way that is mentally stimulating to a potential reader'.
Neither takes 12 years to learn. The first, we teach within a year, at most. The second we do not teach at all, and the best 'writers' often are those who were challenged outside of school, by parents who gave them a rich, intellectually interesting environment, not within it.
We most definitely teach number 2. That's what English class is - you read books, plays, maybe documents, and then you write essays on them. You need to be concise, persuasive, have a unique voice.
Just because you, and other's, did not pay attention or were not good writers, does not mean we don't teach that. We do, for years.
There is no such thing as a 12th grade level. 6th grade is all the farther English is taught. There are sometimes things called levels above that, but they are not levels in English they are levels in some specific specialization and have more to do with that specialization than reading. (doctors would not be expected to understand deep computer science writing even though doctors have very advanced reading skills in a medical domain).
I understand Spanish only goes up to a 5th grade level while Japanese to 9th. This is a reflection on how complex the writing systems are, and not the kids, intelligence, or school systems.
The years after you have your basic reading down are used to learn other skills that are of general use in life for everyone.
> In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.
You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.
Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.
In school I spend 8 hours listening to some teacher or playing silly learning games and did some busywork as homework. I never learned for any test or found any of the material particularly interesting.
In university I actually had to study, take notes, research the subject, study for many hours, etc.
>a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths
Hilarious to say this. As it turned out, my first semester of university mathematics was spent on learning everything I did not learn in school. And it made it extremely clear to me how badly school had prepared me.
You would think that school would put me in a position where university mathematics were just a continuation. Nothing further could be from the truth, nearly everything taught in school was taught in a way which made it useless for actual mathematics.
In school we learned nothing about: Sets, logic, deductions, Axioms or Proofs (which turn out to be really important!), we did however spend years solving integrals, which turned out extremely unhelpful for actual mathematics.
Really unnecessary snark, I'm trying to understand your position (unless you're just doing justice to your username!).
Two things:
1. You're not the only person in school. I sympathise that you understood the material quickly and wish you had been presented more advanced stuff (I do so too, it's a valid criticism!). But at least around me I noticed that most people were just barely catching it or even actively struggling. So yes, perhaps more "adept" students should be given more challenging material and students that struggle should be given more support so they're not left behind (interesting discussion to have; this has been touched on elsewhere in this thread), but it's important to realise that unless education is based around a 1:1 teacher–student ratio (unrealistic), this will always be a problem that is hard to work around.
2. You conveniently left out the parts where I mentioned subjects other than maths (I assume you studied maths in uni or an adjacent discipline). School is not just there to teach you whatever you end up needing in your academic or professional life when you're 18 years old. I'm glad I was forced to study history, and read literature, and learn a 2nd and 3rd language, and do physical exercise at least 2× a week, because while I might be curious and study science on my own I sure as shit wouldn't do any of these of my own volition as a kid.
You're either not arguing in good faith, have an unusual definition of "more", or hate school so much that it clouds your judgement.
Do you honestly believe that is you were sent to University (or some other educational institution) with absolutely zero school knowledge, not even literacy and grade school math, you would be able to learn everything you learned at school in less than one semester?
Seems experiences vary: For me, the first year of university mathematics was to a large extent a continuation or even what was covered in school (sets, axioms, proofs etc were covered in school). That said, that wasn't the case for everyone as far as I could tell.
> There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing
Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?
Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.
>Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?
It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.
Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.
>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world
None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.
School is about more than the part where you sit in class. The social skills, time and project management navigation etc. is all stuff you learn and do because of school but outside of class.
From what I know about Germany, they don't teach anything about the depths humans can go or how to prevent them recurring. They seem to just learn the Nazis were evil people and as long as you're not one of those, similarly evil things can never happen again. Also because only evil people can do evil things, calling out an evil thing is illegal because it implies someone involved is evil and that's an attack on their honour.
See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.
Quite a lot of Germans learn quite a lot. German schools expect quite a lot from students that do actually want to go to better schools. But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.
Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!
Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.
Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium
Hey, you are the genius who knew it all before learning and got highest possible grades with no effort. Congrats.
Overwhelming majority of people is not like that, they do not get highest grades, they do not get into gymnasium without effort, don't pass tests without effort.
My point is that the actual content of school material was very low, especially compared to university.
Of course I did actually learn the material of the tests, but the actual learning outcome of my schooling is far worse then it could have been, given the 12 years invested.
And yet consistently the happiest, healthiest, and most developed societies are those with the highest levels of primary and secondary education attainment.
Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.
The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.
I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.
I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.
That is not childcare.
edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.
> The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.
Yes. Former teacher here to tell you I cared about the children. :)
But seriously, in the United States teachers are considered "In loco parentis" which "refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. "
At least used to. Last few years Finland's PISA scores as measured by the OECD have plummeted and now they are just a bit above average but nowhere near what they used to be.
I always felt like the teaching method in primary school was very much like "no pupil left behind". Teachers really tried their best to keep everyone up to speed on what they taught. If you were a huge troublemaker or just couldn't keep up with the (slowish) pace you would get moved to a special class where you would get more attention (even smaller class sizes) and wouldn't slow the rest of the group down.
As a "smart kid" it sometimes felt like waiting for everyone in class to grok something before moving on was a waste of time and that personally I'd learn very little, but ultimately I think it worked very well to ensure that everyone was on common ground.
At some point it was deemed that the current system wasn't inclusive enough so the special education for the troublemakers was gutted and they were put back into regular classrooms. At the same time, due to lack of funding and lack of teachers, class sizes ballooned from <15 to up to 30 or even 40 students per class in larger cities. I think there's some critical point where that system breaks down and now we're past it. The teacher has too many students to make sure everyone is up to speed, and giving too much individual attention in such a large class wastes everyone else's time.
Immigration has also played a role I think. Finland used to be quite monocultural, but that has changed. There are now more and more students who speak Finnish as their second or third language and as such have trouble keeping up. I don't think the solution is to stuff them into their own schools either as that promotes segregation and makes integrating into the society as an immigrant harder, and I don't pretend to know the perfect solution (if one even exists), but one thing's for sure: the Finnish school system was 100% unprepared for it.
The solution is almost always more teachers (though at some point you have two teachers per kid and that’s likely to be excessive).
A class of five can handle darn near anything; a class of fifty needs everyone to be as nearly identical as possible.
You can artificially increase the number of “teachers” by combining classes of different grades sometimes. 12 year olds can do great assisting 6 year olds.
Some common themes in the conversation are neoliberal cost cutting, failed attempts at inclusion and immigration.
* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.
* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.
In summary, Finland has brought the policies that have caused much destruction in other Western countries into their own education system, where those policies have also caused destruction, much to everyone's amazement.
Yep, this country is no longer that special by European standards. Childcare is still good, but later education and healthcare are very mediocre.
In EU only greeks are less satisfied with the availability of healthcare. Our unemployment rate is pretty similar to Greece and Spain as well. This is what right wing governments want I guess.
It's usual in Finland to let babies sleep outside in the strollers (even when it's cold) but in this case no one checked how the child was doing for 3 hours.
> * Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
Politically, isn't this the ultimate fate of most developed nations? I haven't yet see an answer to this. How do you deal financially with this? The obvious answer is for people to be in charge of their own late stage health but is that possible for the average minimum wage worker?
In Finland 16 olds are not allowed to drink and access to alcohol is state controlled.
IMHO learning foreign languages, math, history, biology and physics is not child care.
This is in preparation to getting access to upper secondary education (vocational or academic). Usually you start this at 16.
This is not a simple question but one part of the answer is that students are a) ready for upper secondary education b) their grades can be used to grade access to schools with top upper secondary schools being extremely hard to get into.
Ofc if you ask “why would a society do this” I guess the reason is that an educated population is expected to be more productive AND because the law requires schooling up to 18 it also implies all students must have access to free schools with close to zero material costs. So it’s intended also to level the playing field for all social classes.
Is this worse or better than germanys system is impossible for me to tell.
In my experience and observation, as the age and school level increases, there's more actual learning going on.
By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.
At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.
In my nation 16-year olds may work outside of school hours (school is mandatory until they are 18 years old). There are other hard limits on which types of jobs and the time of day they may work. Work shall never interfere with school.
Which suggests that the child labor laws for 16-year-olds are there to keep 16-year-olds in school, rather than school being there as a place to put 16-year-olds who are banned from employment.
In a very real way, adolescents rise to the responsibilities given to them. Usually teenagers that need modulating is a reflection on their upbringing rather than any innate flaw.
They are old enough to drive certain vehicles and old enough to buy alcohol. If we trust them with that surely we can let them do things during the day without constant adult supervision.
That's exactly the point. It's a middle ground ABV where there aren't a ton of products and below which are mostly fermented beverages and above which is distilled liquor.
In Switzerland, it is 16 for beer and wine, and 18 for spirits (or drinks that contain spirits, like "alcopops", even if they have a low ABV). I think Austria and Germany are the same.
People who make statements like that are the kind of people you dread will pick up your pull request. You just know you're going to go from maybe spending an hour cleaning up some suggestions to a 3-day philosophical battle to get them to a point where they deign to accept your PR.
Not at all. If the code is decent and shows effort I have no problem. If it's sloppy it shite code.
I really don't have time to care about what my peers think of me. It's work. I don't want to communicate with them outside work. Work is just another mind space that stays at work. I am strict when it comes to code, I expect the same.
I want working maintainable code to enable me to do my job. If people dread submitting a PR because they can't write code with effort, good. I like my ships built strong not weak.
If they fix their problem, good. Trust given, more than happy to salute however time and time they've proven to me they don't.
These developers have proven to me they won't. These are developers who are those who do not fix the issuing code and will just move on to the next problem hacking it to make it work.
If you've never worked with such, then lucky. If this sting for you, time to put more effort in to your work.
No, they really don't. They submit their code. I submit mine. If they have a problem with mine, I'll fix what they have issues with if they are reasonable, why wouldn't I?
Where I work in enterprise your peers change daily. With my role and importance to the company implementing hacky code puts me at risk and so I will of course push back. The people I knew last months may not even work in the company.
The view of I must be a horrible person comes from the Comment OP being angry at me for having a reasonable standards to an Enterprise standard of code. "It works im done. Next please"
If their code isn't up to scratch I will tell them and reject it. The issue I have is lazy developers who implement hacks and don't actually go and fix the code.
I am being made the bad person from someone's angry hospitality. All I was saying is that lazy developers are lazy developers and that I axe their work because it's sloppy and doesn't deserve to be on show.
I'm not to engage further as you're only ever going to repeat yourself in more obnoxious ways, but I will say that if you treat people in real life the way you comment here, you will only ever be tolerated at best. Never respected and never liked.
Even the people you consider peers will abhor that you think and speak like this about people.
I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Is this a JavaScript complaint and they were meant to use a for..of? Are you an FP purist and think they were supposed to use map/filter?
This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.
The thing is: smartphones exist. The young adults these children will become will live in a world where smartphones are an essential part of their life. Using a smartphone is a practical skill.
That's why I don't think banning smartphones is the best idea. It is probably better than unrestricted access, but I feel that school should teach how to use them well instead. It is a bit like with calculators, there are classes with calculators, classes without, and classes that teach how to work with them, their strengths and shortcomings.
I don't know how to do it in practice though. Airplane mode and offline educative apps may be a start.
Cars exist and are foundational to modern living yet we do not push kids to learn to drive until their later teenage years. Some countries wait until they are 18 and others choosing a couple years sooner.
On the other hand, we don't teach kids in school the mechanical basics of automated locomotion, how to distill oil into usable fuel and how to mill an engine block before we allow them to get a driver's license.
Unlike modern education, which puts a massive emphasis on teaching how to do menial, useless things before going the sensible route [e.g. I remember vividly how we were tortured by doing table of values calculations in maths for what felt like weeks before we were allowed to use derivatives. I loved maths. Until that point. Then I hated the course (not the subject) with a passion.
Lo and behold, I enter university, and the first thing we do in Mathematics 101 is 'let's forget everything we have learned, we're going to start from the beginning'. Joy.]
I want to stress the point: Smartphones exist (and have existed for 15 years - a more modern 'scary new tech' would probably be LLMs). Banning these things from school will only keep teachers happy because they can keep their teaching methods from the 1890s alive for some more time, instead of using what is available to get kids educated better.
No, it keeps teachers happy because the kids are able to focus on the teaching instead of sneaking looks in their phones every chance they get. (Not all kids, etc, but certainly a lot of kids do this.) No matter what method of teaching you can imagine, a cell phone will be a distraction to a teenager.
Kids still get to walk with cars around, ride bikes, drive motorcycles usually a few years before majority, they also ride cars and are usually familiar with how they work way before driving.
I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.
We do, they're called regular cellphones. They can be used to make phone calls and even to send text messages, but they can't be used to access social media hellscapes.
Phone calls are for emergencies at this point. If it's not it's spam. Then Apple ruined SMS ( except for the US apparently?), nobody wants to gamble whether a message will reach a phone or the iPad sitting in a drawer still associated with the phone number.
So social things, like communicating with people, happens on social apps.
Kids also would be better with map apps, GPS, electronic payments and auto-charging bus/train pass if you expect them to have any independence.
All in all, kids should be the last ones IMHO to get real dumb phones. We might as well give them pagers if that's what we're going for.
In NL, cycling proficiency is tested at school (around 10yo). You don't get a license though, and it's not really taught as many children already bike to school at a younger age.
What’s the skill though? Most everything you do on a smartphone is trivially easy thanks to all those hard working app developers. We all know from experience that the vast majority of actual phone time is spent consuming some kind of media. I’m not at all worried about kids not learning to use a smartphone well enough- that part will sort itself out. It’s all the other (boring) skills that get pushed aside in the mindless scramble for dopamine that concerns me.
Where my kids went to high school, a smart phone was required. The teacher would encourage kids to put assignments and tests on their calendar. They would use the camera to take a picture of a home work assignment written on a whiteboard. They used the camera for photo and movie projects. They had some twitter-like app for the teacher to broadcast to all students.
I think there might be something to be said for the idea of teaching computer literacy on smartphones. There's often a real gap in comprehension of conceptual computer use in those who grew up in the age of ambient smartphones/socialmedia/etc.
That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).
There are quite a lot of things you can mess around with. Install a custom ROM, a custom recovery or build a custom ROM from scratch. Use emulated players such as winlator for gaming. Use GrapheneOS for maximum privacy and security. Use termux for learning CLI. There are tons and tons of things you could do with that little rectangle screen
Smartphone should not be compared to a calculator. The closer analogy would be kids bringing in their friends, cousins, music, games, photo albums, films etc into a class and interacting with them.
Glossy magazines, handy-dandy mobbing tools, porn, a kiddie slot machine, a big stack of totally random niche zines that include yes the icky ones, a kiddie panopticon, their anxious parents, a gaggle of marketers and influencers grooming their income streams (this is a fun game) and interacting with them.
Fwiw, my local public school district (I have three kids at three different public neighborhood schools) does provide kids instruction like this, as well as lots of other programming around empathy, acceptance, drug/alcohol use, common health/physiology topics, driver training, etc. This is my tax dollars being spent on things that aren't core academic topics but imho absolutely help develop youth into better decision makers with a more holistic view of society than many of them might otherwise given their home situations.
The middle and high schools here ban phone use during class, and the high school confiscates phones (and grants detentions) for students who flaunt the ban. In practice, it usually works with teachers using those door mounted phone holders as a way to take attendance. Put your phone in the pouch when you get to class, and grab it when you leave. Occasionally, a teacher will also ban smartwatches if they become too distracting, but this is not common.
That said, many teachers take advantage of their students having phones to augment their methods & curriculum, and afaik this is the teachers' prerogative.
I think a PC is a more apt comparison. Yes we learnt them in computer class but they weren't in the Math classroom. Hell learning software engineering I didn't use my laptop at all during lectures.
For some reason, we learn math as if we were farmers in the early 1900s.
We do not learn (Bayesian) statistics early enough to tell fact from fraud, what city dwellers and voters could probably use instead.
And applied math on a PC would be great, but we barely have applied math on a calculator.
And kids love calculators: only digital numbers are numbers. 2/3 is cleary not a number to anyone below 20 years of age, that is two numbers, we have to write .6666666\dash_over{6} down as a solution instead.
At least when I was a kid 20 years ago in the US, the math curriculum worked toward physical science and engineering applications (i.e. algebra, geometry, calculus), which also sets you up to understand probability/statistics. My impression was that's more or less standard all over. Has that changed?
I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement, but that seems like a problem worth correcting if true? They're going to need to understand fractions to do any math more advanced than elementary school level.
The problem is they do damage, at home and as a teacher, you get to compete against the dopamine kick for attention - the whole day, even if the device is not around
The thing is that using a smartphone is a _very easy_ skill. I mean, who are we kidding. These devices are set up such that the stupidest person can use them.
It's not 1995 anymore and we aren't walking in a line to the computer lab. These things are idiot-proof. You really don't need hours of practice everyday to learn how to use them.
It's probably still appropriate in 2025 for kids to go to the computer lab and learn to use an actual computer (ideally running some flavor of Linux so that they can learn to expect that the computer is a tool that obeys the user). Phones are both idiot-proof and expert-proof, and while you can use something like Termux as another commented noted (and I use it on my phone), it's sufficiently horrible that you'll never see the potential productivity boost, and will think that anything outside of "apps" is unreasonably difficult (because phones make it so).
So it's not that phones are easy enough to use that you don't need to teach them; it's that the thing you want to teach is the power of a general purpose computer, and phones try very hard to hide the fact that they are extremely powerful general purpose computers. You need to learn on a real computer to know what you even want the phone to be able to do.
I agree 100%. From what I've personally seen, I think younger people are actually becoming less versed in computers. There was a brief moment in time in which:
1. Most people had access to computers.
2. Computers were difficult to use and required building skills.
2 is no longer true anymore, so those skills are getting lost. Try asking a 15 year old what a filesystem is.
Many real world distractions exist. Drugs and alcohol exist, and will be part of many of these children's lives. Just because something exists in the real world doesn't mean it belongs in schools.
Frankly, smartphones should be discussed in health class, much like drugs and alcohol, and in a similar tone.
It's not really smartphones by themselves that need to be discussed, but rather (simplified) the dopamine loop reward system.
Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.
Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.
You know I used to think this but my cousins were raised extremely strict on phones and media consumption and today they're successful and well-adjusted. They didn't binge and lack self control when they became adults.
I agree with your take on the purpose of schools and that smartphones contribute little.
But my concern is that actions like these teach students an additional lesson: That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes. Children and teens absorb a lot, and while they don't always absorb the contents of their lectures, they do typically absorb how they're treated and how that implies they can treat others.
The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.
>But my concern is that actions like these teach students an additional lesson: That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes.
Well, of course it is. Organized society largely rests upon this principle. In the oppressive ones coercion is exercised arbitrarily or by a select few, and in societies based on rule of law it is exercised, well, using law.
>The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.
Maybe. Or maybe the pesky slot machines and gossip aggregators are impossible to compete with, if you leave the adolescent attention economy in the hands of the almighty free market. Either way, banning cell phones certainly won't hurt efforts to engage students, if any.
>That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes
It is acceptable for public schools, whose mandate is education of the youth, to enaxt restrictions on behavior to that end.
And smartphones are an addictive item. I want school to be fun and engaging. That doesn't mean every kid who's been raised on an iPad since age 0.5 will put down their phones if the teacher has rizz.
> [...] how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.
Is there any precedent for this that we can model / reproduce? Any country or region where students are considered academically successful, while having unrestricted access to the internet in their pocket?
If it exists, it would be very worthwhile to understand what gives those students such strong self control. Do they do it on their own? Are they somehow admonished/shunned publicly for that behavior?
We put a lot of restrictions on minors and what they can do or be done to. On top of that, some things which would be ok in a different setting would be inapropriate and disruptive in a classroom environment.
Also, with regards to the motivational aspect, I would not expect a toddler to be able to make the appropriate choice between a healty meal and candy. I do not expect a teen to be able to restrain themselves from the pubescent games of social media prancing and paying attention to the class teaching.
