This baffles me as well. A large group of people seem to immediately treat it as a foregone conclusion that smartphone bans are entirely positive. Nobody seems to even question the idea that we shouldn't ban things by default.
The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?
Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.
We ban lot of things for kids that they have to cope with in adult life.
The US even bans alcohol for young adults, and there are few places where someone under 16 can buy it.
Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default. IMO we would be better off if adults stopped using it too.
>Social media is designed to be addictive, and it seems reasonable to ban addictive things for kids by default.
Like certain types of food? Watching TV? Playing video games? Reading (fiction) books? Getting into relationships/making friends? Pretty much everything great in life can become an addiction.
If the claim is that social media is designed to be addictive, therefore we should ban it, then I would love someone being able to demonstrate that and that in this instance it's worse than usual. I want to see what "rules" they use to design something to be addictive, but I don't think this demonstration is ever going to happen, because social media isn't designed to be addictive - nobody knows how to do that. It's iteratively designed. They try stuff and make more of what works.
We do ban lots of things that kids will have to cope with in adult life.
But we don't ban harmless tools that kids will need to learn to use in adult life.
And you can tell me all about the harms of social media, but social media can be accessed via computer also. Then you will tell me all about how computers are locked down to prevent access to social media at school. Effectively you will go on to describe reasonable controls that schools have decided they simply wont implement in this case.
The truth of the matter is technical literacy is in decline, schools have almost completely vacated the space. If teachers are mad at distracted students they can incorporate the distraction into the education (My secondary school did this with classes Excel in for basic financial maths, edutainment games, dedicated computer research lessons for otherwise book subjects) or choose to entirely stunt the kids by removing them.
Schools did this same shit to computers, they started by banning them, then incorporating them in lots of meaningful ways. If schools tried to ban laptops at school today we would be up in arms, but lots of "reasonable" people saw it as an easy quick win the last time around.
The trick here is to convince schools not to be 10 years behind but to keep up. If that means more funding in you jurisdiction, or higher fees, then do it.
I always remember a good friend of mine who was the first in his entire school to write an essay on his Apple II and print it off to hand in to the teacher. He got a zero for "cheating" and swore off computers until he was over 30. I imagine his experience would be familiar to kids caught "cheating" by using their pocket access to all of human knowledge to conduct research.
The evidence that's used for these bans is more "everyone knows this is true" and less "we have proven that this causes way too much farm, therefore we're banning it". Everyone knows sitting too close to the TV ruins your eyesight, right?
Of course smartphones shouldn't be in use during class, but that seems to hardly ever be in question. It's always "total phone ban" advocated by people who will never be impacted by it based on some bogus study like in the original article.