[frde_me]

I'm going to go to an extreme, but if we had solid research that said banning phones at school resulted in some extreme, lets say 50%, improvement in their ability to learn, would you support the ban of phones during school time? Would you expect the school to _not_ implement a policy that would benefit learning that much?

What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles during class", would that infringe on your kids personal freedom too much?

In a world where parents feed their children fast food all the time, and let them play mindless Ipad games from an early age, I have lower faith in every parent reading the relevant literature and implementing best practices than I have in academic institutions figuring out how to optimize learning (not that I have a huge amount of faith in that either, just more)

[doug_durham]

Do you have children? It sounds like you don't since you are talking like someone on the outside. I'm not saying that would change your position, but you'd be talking with more nuance if you did.

[thrw42A8N]

No, I wouldn't support that policy. That would be like banning paper because someone prints porn on it. Absurd.

[frde_me]

If I follow through what you said, paper has obvious positive impact in schools, or we can at least imagine that positive impact. And so banning paper would be very likely not to result in an improvement if studied. And like any smartphone ban, it _should_ be studied rigorously before implementing.

But lets say they do find that smart phones during class _are_ good, but just social media is bad, then it also sounds reasonable to me that a kids phone might be required to have some type of block on social media app during class time. Just like it sounds reasonable for a school to ban papers _with porn printed on them_ during class time. There's no issue besides on a practical level with getting more fine grained and isolating the impact.

Or do you also oppose that later, is your kid printing porn on paper and bringing it to school part of the personal freedom you want control over and which the school should not have to authority to ban?

[criddell]

My kids’ high school requires kids to have a phone. They want the kids using the calendar to track assignments. The ask the kids to use the camera to take a photo of the board which contains their homework assignment. They use some messaging app where they can communicate with the teacher and the teacher can talk to individuals or the entire class. They’ve had assignments where they need to shoot a short movie with their phones.

I’ve never heard anybody say this, but I think one of their goals is to teach appropriate use of phones.

[thrw42A8N]

I'm pretty fine with restrictions on usage during class time - but not by direct remote control of such personal devices. The goal is to improve education and prepare children for life in the modern world. That can't be done without a smartphone, the most important item of most people that they use to run their lives. Today, many normal people don't even have desktop computers, they do everything on phones. That has privacy implications on what is reasonable to do with a person's phone - even a child has right to their privacy (in reasonable limits of course).