[Danihan]

Welp, you asked for my opinion. My opinion is that if you literally can't think of a valid use for the entire internet in a classroom setting, then you aren't trying very hard. It's tantamount to having a library at your fingertips.

* How about using an app to record the lecture, so a student can verify their notes later?

* How about taking a picture of the notes on the board, when they can't copy things down quickly enough?

* How about checking up on a sick relative using SMS, so they aren't feeling anxious about it all class?

I'm not even trying really -- there are dozens of valid use-cases that respect the preset curriculum. Let alone all of the uses that fall outside of respecting it, if and when the curriculum is too facile for the student.

Couldn't I have been learning programming during the time my high school English class was tackling "A Catcher in the Rye" one chapter per week, after I read the entire book within the first few hours we had it? Apparently not, because cell phones aren't allowed, and they can only used for Candy Crush.

>My question is how many kids are actually going to do that?

Not very many, and that's why most people will justify smartphones being taken away from all students. Which will primarily hurt the ones who were using them for more interesting purposes. Typical crab bucket mentality.

>And what justifies them to be the judge of whether what the teacher is discussing is relevant to them or not, given they are 10 years old.

I never said anything about whether the lessons were relevant, nor were ages brought up.

[jclardy]

Those are all decent use cases, but they could all be solved without the use of a personal smartphone (Which if we want to dive deeper would mean that we are now basing education on a class divide given most poor children likely wouldn't have a decent one.) A simple webcam on the teachers laptop could record the entire lecture and marker board and they could distribute it to students in numerous ways for free. A majority of teachers probably already have their lecture notes digitized, so those could also be posted online. Those solutions would be much cleaner, more distraction free and accessible to everyone.

The most likely case is that a huge majority of kids are going to text their bff, play a game or cheat on a test and not use it for "continued education" inside of the classroom they are already in.

I don't know, maybe it is just me getting an education in a pre-smartphone era that makes me think of them as more of a distraction when evaluated in the context of a functional classroom.

[orf]

> Which will primarily hurt the ones who were using them for more interesting purposes.

I guess they can record the lecture with a voice recorder (very cheap on Amazon) and get the lecture slides afterwards, like everyone else.

It's pretty simple: thing A is widely misused and is causing problems to 99% of people. Banning it has a huge net-positive effect, despite having perhaps a negative effect on 1% of people.

Worth it.

[Danihan]

You could use the same logic to ban all sorts of things for adults. And many governments do, to everyone's detriment. Alcohol prohibition says hello.

It's exactly this type of generalized authoritarian philosophy that keeps the War on Drugs going strong.

[orf]

Alcohol doesn't cause problems for 99% of people though does it.

You can apply that argument to anything banned. Why ban anything at all, why not let kids drink in class? Because it causes a lot more harm than good, especially in a learning environment.

So, we restrict things. You might not agree where the line is drawn, but there is a line and its position is obviously subjective. I guess we can measure the effectiveness of this on learning and with feedback from the teachers though.

[Momquist]

If the ban is limited to a specific space/community (school or classroom), then it's completely different from alcohol prohibition and more akin to the ban of smoking in restaurants, which is accepted by most people even the smokers themselves.