[throwaway50603]

There doesn't need to be any advantage. They're not causing any disruptions - nobody should be telling them where to put their property.

A phone contains private photos and conversations, has authorized access to email, chat and (in other cases) social media accounts, it's a second authentication factor, it has payment cards, saved passwords, browser history, potentially health data (for example, period or medication notification app) and other data that they might not want anybody else to access, or could even cause them problems if the wrong person saw some of it (which doesn't mean it'd be something illegal or inappropriate - but some teachers have really weird ideas about how the life of a student should look).

It's perfectly understandable they want to have it under their own sight and control. Touching it without permission is unacceptable.

I have seen kids steal stuff from the teacher's desk/other school property when I still went to school - one kid even stole a RAM stick from a school computer right during class. I would never trust the school's ability to keep my phone secure.

Also - the school day is not 100% class time, there are breaks in between. What they do during breaks is their own business.

[harshalizee]

Ok, then just don't bring it in?

I don't why America constantly acts like we have unique problems no one does. Most schools in EU just bans cellphone usage during school hours either by taking it away or barred from bringing it in and it's just effective.

Humanity dealt with periods/medications/emergencies long before smartphones and can still do.

[mock-possum]

> Ok, then just don't bring it in?

So - in my experience, when I find myself saying "why don't you just-" it's a flag that I don't fully understand the situation.

Use your imagination, in what ways could having ready access to a smart phone be a marked improvement in your ability to navigate the day-to-day experiences of a student?

You could take notes or record lectures, obviously. That's an easy one. One a related note, as an accessibility tool - you can automatically transcribe speech that you may be having difficulty following, and you can quickly look up definitions or even translations if you need to. Teacher just used a big word that you didn't quite catch? You could either raise your hand and interrupt their flow for the entire classroom... or you could glance at your phone and get your answer yourself.

Do you need to perform some sort of self-care activity periodically? Your phone can remind you that it's time for the next pill, or time to get up and stretch, or have a small snack to manage your blood sugar.

Along those lines, the assumption that it's so easy to just discard such an essentially integrated piece of modern technology comes off as subtle ableism, if nothing else.

[throwaway50603]

I'm right in the middle of Europe.

Why not bring it in? I don't understand why they should behave as if they lived in 19th century. They're people living in 21st century, making full use of new technology - nothing wrong about that.

It's bullshit to demand they have to go home to get their phone before they go on with their day after school - not to mention they use the phones before school too. My siblings buy breakfast and lunch with the virtual payment cards (from our parent's Revolut) they have in the phone.

Even their public transit tickets are apps - it's a QR code, and because the transit company wants to reduce staff, you pay 20% less if you buy tickets in the app. Will the school reimburse the additional 20% they caused them to pay? I guess not, right.

And remember Covid? Here in Europe the vaccination/test pass is an app too, and they needed it to get into the school building, the cafeteria, the public transit etc. Soon the ID and driver's licence will be apps as well.

The school itself is sending them homework and grades into an app, btw. It has web access, sure - but they access web on their phones. It's bullshit to make them unable to check their grades or homework assignments during schooltime.

Sure, they could go back to 19th century life with paper calendars, letters, money and transit tickets. But their quality of life would go significantly down. Schools have no right to demand that. Nobody has.

And as I said, school day is not 100% class time. What they do during breaks is their own business.

> Most schools in EU just bans cellphone usage during school hours either by taking it away or barred from bringing it in and it's just effective.

No, they don't. In my state it's very wrong to touch the phone - could be a fine and suspension (for the teacher/school employee) or even a crime, depending on what they did.

The school can demand it's turned off during class time (doesn't apply to breaks) but they have no way to verify or enforce. They can write a teacher's note in case of a disruption or take the student out of the class in serious cases, but they can't touch the phone.

Currently, the trend here is to integrate smartphones into the lessons. Make students use Google search, YouTube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT and other tools.

[than3]

Honestly, this sounds more and more like an association trigger and addiction seeking behavior.

You may want to: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-an-addicted-brain-work...

Additionally, each one of those apps has nearly full access to all your private information. Accurint goes out of their way to get most data about people.

That entire ecosystem lacks adversarial review. Additionally, coercively forcing you to only use those apps while removing more reliable methods for interacting is just one more way they can monetize you. You've got a rough road ahead.

[throwaway50603]

Honestly, it sounds like you're just fishing for reasons to ban phones because you personally don't like them and are unable to respect students as people.

Not sure what you mean about the reliability - the apps are more reliable than the previous methods like paper tickets. I don't really want to go back to standing in endless queues.

And no, these apps don't have nearly unlimited access to my private information, not sure where you got that idea. They have access to some of my personal information that I gave them, but they always had that access - the public transport app has the same information that I had to fill out in a paper form when buying a yearly pass, for example. And of course, my email provider has access to my email - news at 11.

Here in EU we have GDPR and DSA, that's enough adversarial review for me.

[_siis]

I deploy VOIP solutions professionally as a System Admin/Engineer, I happen to see all the problems that you haven't yet noticed.

Reliability wise, I'm talking about messaging improperly handling timestamps, not sending messages but saying their sent, and silently discarding messages sent to you. Timestamps and other dated items are necessary for non-repudiation; or proving to a specific level that is acceptable as evidence in a court of law (to hold business accountable).

I've seen messaging apps, text messages (which are a messaging app), not display errors and silently update fields later or disappear the messages when compared with a separate device on the same network. You only see it if you happen to have equipment to monitor what the baseband modem is sending and it fails at the cell tower (which may not be official). Phone providers open a ticket, then auto-close them within 30 days without resolution.

The way these systems work, there's heavy coding theory so if a transmission fails, it gets resent. Its not a result of interference but of failures at infrastructure nodes.

So what might happen to the relationships in your life if you stop getting messages from your friends, and from their perspective they stop getting messages from you. You miss things because you don't know about them. You think they'll be your friends long? If they aren't having the same issue, do you think they'll believe you when you notice it without provable times just on your say so, and they discount date and timestamps since they get updated?

If someone did that maliciously to isolate you, you wouldn't know and wouldn't be able to do anything about it. People would look at you like you were crazy. You do it long enough and isolation does interesting things to your psychology, and if your thinking there's no reason for someone to target you like that, you would be wrong.

Political warfare, or the destruction of the national will, in part involves priming people's psychology so they polarize into groups that are complacent (don't respond), or lash out at anything they see as remotely triggering (similar to your attachment to a cell phone). This allows a smaller group during a destabilization event to seize power; historically.

There's a great book published and freely available on the USMC University website about political warfare and what it exactly entails. Bezmenov isn't that reliable.

GDPR and DSA are only reactive. What happens when the violators are moving targets (nefarious non-business).

Your email provider has access to read, and more importantly prevent you from sending email to others. Preventing communication without alerting the sender is how this is weaponized.

WhatsApp regularly uses your microphone in the background; maybe its location finding from your local power hum (50/60hz) did you agree to that or did they update the terms after the fact and continued use is acceptance?.

All these things happen regularly. The fact that you think they don't happen, and have discounted it so completely and are so attached to a device that literally can make you go crazy under the right causable circumstances looks like an addiction spiral to me or impossible levels of extreme ignorance about how you are manipulated on a daily basis (sheep-le) with no real thought because thought requires risking being wrong to learn what's right.

A non-attached person would simply say, I go with what works and leave it at that, and take a critical eye towards reliable methods being deprecated. It certainly appears you are attached whether you know it or not.

[red-iron-pine]

> There doesn't need to be any advantage. They're not causing any disruptions - nobody should be telling them where to put their property.

Bollocks. Even on silent it's disrupting someone's attention, if only the owners.

And those under 18 years old aren't adults, and are wards of their parents. They're required by law to go to school and during the duration they're wards of the state. They don't get to own property in the direct sense that actual legal adults do.

> It's perfectly understandable they want to have it under their own sight and control. Touching it without permission is unacceptable.

They're kids, you think they're going to agree to that? Confiscate em -- put em in a box at the start of the day -- or else make them stay at home.

> I have seen kids steal stuff from the teacher's desk/other school property when I still went to school - one kid even stole a RAM stick from a school computer right during class. I would never trust the school's ability to keep my phone secure.

Then they can keep those phones at home.

> Also - the school day is not 100% class time, there are breaks in between. What they do during breaks is their own business.

This isn't a job -- there is no expectation of freedom in between classes. If they're in the building they're still wards of the state. They're just not in classes.

Listen, if this was a 19 year old on a construction site, I'd agree with you, but there is plenty of legal, moral, and basic cat-herding involved in having kids at school. You wanna get treated like an adult before 18 then drop out and get emancipated, otherwise thems the breaks.