My kid’s school here in the UK banned them, but the kids all take them in anyways and the teachers don’t care.

I had banned YouTube in the house, but then the school started assigning homework to watch YouTube videos.

The dependence of our infrastructure on private social media companies is shocking and needs to be stopped immediately.

That’s not an unusual policy for schools in the US either. But the reach of social media extends far beyond kids using their phones in class. That’s part of the problem. Now you can be bullied at 10pm while lying in bed.

Someone close to me is a HS teacher. During covid, the schools changed their policy from “no phones in class ever” to “you can have your phone in class but you’d better only use it to help with classwork or in an emergency.”

They’ve been trying to reverse the policy back to how it was, but it’s hard to get all the kids to believe that they can’t do this anymore. They don’t take the threat of punishment seriously because everyone is doing it now.

Even if you manage to deal with the phone issue, the school gives kids chromebooks now to do their work on. The student wifi network seemingly has no restrictions, since the teachers sometimes need to have them watch something on YouTube or Netflix.

So kids, during class, watch Netflix on their Chromebook instead of paying attention.

Banning smartphones in schools is stupid, unless you have other alternatives like laptops (where you can block social media). The thing is, the internet is basically a huge library and kids learn how to solve problems on their own. I sometimes see 20-30 year olds who literally don‘t know how to use google and if they don’t know something, they don‘t know how to research it.

Digital literacy is as important as literacy itself in todays world. The computers and the internet have become interwoven with just about every facet of everyday modern life. I don’t see how we can educate people for that same world if education system tries to pretend we are still in the pre-digital era.

If we want to equip children with the skills to navigate a digital world we need to figure out how to thoroughly integrate digital skills into education.

I went to school in the time before mobile phones were really a thing at all. We still still had plenty of ways to goof around and plenty of ways to be pressured. Part of being educated is being taught how to behave and how to handle life’s challenges.

I went to high school before smartphones were really a thing (pre-iPhone) and we weren’t allowed to have phones during the school day. It seemed reasonable at the time, but it’s probably harder to pry phones out of high schoolers’ hands these days.