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Well most of this is stuff I already know and/or do (my kids aren't getting smartphones until they can pay for the phone and plan themselves, for one thing—shared dumbphone for emergencies since payphones don't exist anymore, probably, but not personal smartphones), but: > This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response. Yeah, they do need them to do homework and check assignments and shit at home. Schools have made things like that more complicated and computer-dependent in the name of progress. Another way this whole computerize-everything craze has been a step back, I suppose. Overall I'm not sure landing at "literally be someone with college training and work experience in network security and still find all this a needlessly-complex pain in the ass" is going to be where people end up wanting the state of things to settle. Here I am running an extra router on my side of my ISP's because Google's router doesn't give you MAC-level time-bounded blocking, which is pretty much what you need with school devices. And it's less porn than mindless not-actually-educational faux-edutainment web games that the school's introduced them to, for god knows what reason. I'd rather they be in the Switch than playing that crap. ... except maybe other parents they actually won't care how hard this is, since they mostly seem to have given up. Most parents seem to be giving their 3rd graders smartphones anyway. Then act like I'm the weirdo when I suggest maybe letting kids have such phones and carry them at school is batshit crazy, even in high school. Though not, I've noticed, at the not-quite-fancy private school we have some affiliation with, where smartphone ownership among even 6th-graders probably doesn't even hit 20%, way under local public schools (I have insight into several of those, mostly the middling-nice suburban sort)—I think we may be looking at a whole new kind of "digital divide" in the coming generations, and it's the ones who didn't have unlimited access to the Internet at a single-digit age that'll have the advantage. That certainly seems to be what the Fussellian upper-middle is favoring: later, more-limited access to electronics and the Internet. IDK if the climate's similar at actually-fancy private schools and among those parents, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, and maybe even more pronounced. Meanwhile at the public schools "your family must be poor" if you don't have a smartphone by the time you hit middle school. LOL. |
I think the bigger distinction is that I had a desktop PC not a smartphone. Parents can much more easily regulate computer use with the former, and withhold access if their kid isn't getting good grades. I think desktop PC use also lends itself to hacking and promoting exploration of technology. Modding and cheating in games is how I got into tech. What I'd do is give my kid a desktop and a USB drive with Gentoo and let them do whatever they want - I'm mostly joking, but only mostly.
And yeah, giving kids smartphones for use at schools seems extremely bone-headed. When I was in school, teachers were all about keeping phones out of the classroom not brining them in.