[BaRRaKID]

I'm with you on this. I can understand controlling the use of phones during class because it's disrespectful for the teachers work, but a complete ban is just dumb and seems like virtue signalling. If this is a problem for you as a parent, you have the choice of not buying your kid the phone in the first place, or not letting him take it to school. I thinks that any rule or law that takes away from the parents the responsibility of educating a child is probably not good for the kid.

Also specially in the US with all the school shootings, banning kids from having phones that allow them to call for help seems like a really bad idea.

[jader201]

> If this is a problem for you as a parent, you have the choice of not buying your kid the phone in the first place, or not letting him take it to school.

Whenever I see arguments like these, I always feel that the person likely isn’t a parent of a teen.

There is a real sense of isolation and exclusion that teens feel when they don’t have cell phones or aren’t allowed to use them. The consequences are likely (for some parents/teens) worse than letting them have them.

Only when phones are more widely seen as shameful or unhealthy to have before adulthood will that not be the case. Until then, some other form of banning seems to be the only way to level the playing field and make it less isolating.

[bamfly]

> Also specially in the US with all the school shootings, banning kids from having phones that allow them to call for help seems like a really bad idea.

Run the numbers. This isn't a justification for much, really.

They're a shameful occurrence, but the odds of a kid being present during any kind of shooting at school (gang member standing in the parking lot and firing at someone not on school property, and not a student or faculty member; targeted jilted-lover killing of a teacher; targeted crime-related [think: beef over drug territory] killing of one student by another, with a gun; and yes, also mass shootings) at any point during their k-12 education, are low. Present, not killed or injured. Indiscriminate mass shootings are very far from being the most common kind of shooting at schools, so that's even less likely—being present at all, that is, not hurt or killed, that's vanishingly unlikely over all 13 years of school. Nb that's assuming even-odds of shootings at all schools, which isn't the case.

So you're harming all kids' educations and exposing them to some messed-up stuff (talk. to. some. teachers. What you think I meant by that? Shock images or something? Not as messed-up as I actually mean) in case they're in a mass shooting (rare) and also their having a phone makes a difference in the outcome (narrowing the slice of this-was-a-good-idea circumstances even more)

It's awful that they happen, absolutely, and they are one small but striking feature of our messed-up gun laws and culture and we really do need to fix all that, but perceptions of how common they are are completely out of phase with reality, which leads to bad decision-making.