[BriggyDwiggs42]

Precisely. I moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I got a more wholistic picture of the public education system than most. I’m not sure I met a single teacher that wasn’t overworked. In the richer areas teachers typically wanted to teach; in the poorer areas even that often wasn’t true (An issue of filtering and work environment, not a personal failing thing). I once had a history teacher who only showed movies for the entire year I had her. With us placated, she’d go lounge in the corner. But even the teachers who gave a damn couldn’t do much with the absurd ratios; it was impressive they even managed to keep kids in their seats and fights from breaking out.

Any time the instinct to further police kids in schools arises, I get defensive. I know what that environment is like for the kids in it, and anyone would look for an escape while trapped in there. Schools right now function as weird little child prisons, somewhere to put kids while their parents (those who aren’t rich enough to do otherwise) go to work. If the schools aren’t gonna get any better (certainly not under this administration), then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

[jmye]

> then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

If the kids won’t learn anyways, we might as well give them their dopamine and depression machines so they can really double down on not learning?

Calling schools prisons?

Sorry, this is ridiculous. Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time, but it turns out playing video games all day has no value. It turns out, simply being a student with some anecdata gives one no insight into actual teaching.

This just reads as angsty teenage frustration.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

> Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time

Are you kidding me? That’s your takeaway? My man, I wanted to learn. Most kids want to learn. The issue, which I brought up in various forms, is that the teachers were overworked, the schools underfunded (or administratively mismanaged), and that many teachers were uninterested in trying to teach their classes. I don’t want kids to rot on tik tok, I want schools that are effectively able to teach students. My reference to prisons was very exaggerated no doubt, but a reference nonetheless to the very real phenomenon of a highly securitized and policed model of schooling I experienced while in attendance. An elementary school I attended in downtown Memphis had police doing random bag checks on entry, and most of the places I went were surrounded by walls and fences, had small windows, etc that were quite reminiscent of a prison. This is a known phenomenon, not my personal invention.

>If the kids won’t learn anyways, we might as well give them their dopamine and depression machines so they can really double down on not learning?

Look I understand why you read me this way, but no. I don’t want kids to have phones in schools. My issue is that people act like phones are the issue here, when the phones’ rampant use and abuse is just one tiny symptom of a broken education system that necessitates coping mechanisms by the students. Taking the phones without any will to actually repair this situation is a bandaid on a gunshot.

[phatfish]

No matter how good a teacher or school is it will never compete with the direct access to children tech companies have 24/7. They spend billions designing addictive apps that destroy attention spans and we are supposed to blame teachers and schools?

Modern mobiles should be banned from schools completely. Every kid who left school >15 years ago did fine without scrolling all day long.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

To start, I’m not blaming anybody in schools. Teachers have no time nor capacity to police device usage. The issues here are structural.

> They spend billions designing addictive apps that destroy attention spans

Yes that’s precisely what they do, and they suck. It’s also not the first time someone’s thought to capitalize on the addictive tendencies of adolescents. Why is this one the one that’s ruining schools?

See my position is that phones haven’t had an outsized influence on the stagnation of our (US) educational outcomes. I think that other, deeper, system-wide problems are at fault. Phones’ presence in schools, the fact that they haven’t already been banned widely by a crowd of concerned parents, is itself evidence of the issues I’m talking about. Many parents don’t have the time to worry about such things. Many others are worried for their kids’ safety due to overwhelming reporting of a somewhat real threat in school shootings and violence, and want to make sure they can contact them. Addressing the phone issue would involve addressing parents directly, or those mechanisms influencing their behavior. Again, though, why the hell are we so fixated on the phones? Is this really the big issue with schools? If we’re going to have energy directed towards reforming schools, can’t we maybe direct it towards something more useful and impactful than banning the phones? That’s my problem.

[jmye]

The article lays out why the students are “coping”. It’s not because teaching them geometry is “broken” - it’s because learning it is hard and there’s no dopa hit when you memorize sohcahtoa. Watching TikTok is easy, and there is a dopa hit every time.

This isn’t a “schools are bad” thing - this is a fundamental attack on young people by meta, Google, TikTok and the rest. Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre.

[balamatom]

>Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre

Pretending that this is what the parent poster is saying is absurd. They made an effort to express a nuanced and humane view in an exceedingly clear manner. They are also doing a great job at handling this interaction with you in an open-minded and non-confrontational way.

>this is a fundamental attack on young people by meta, Google, TikTok and the rest

I agree with that. But, funny thing, I thought these companies consisted of human beings who had excelled at their formal educations?

[BriggyDwiggs42]

From the article:

> I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

> But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Ah, you see, the article man, a man who clearly possesses no biases whatsoever, has simply declared it to be sophistry and spin from these so-called “experts,” therefore indeed it must be.

In all seriousness, the article shows that students are doing worse inside and outside of schools, increasingly since 2010 or so, and it shows that phone use has risen over roughly the same period. I’m happy to attribute some of the issue to phones, especially the students’ complaints of focus issues, but this period also encapsulates fucking covid 19, which is where the charts show the biggest rise in complaints. Why would I blindly assume the phones are the biggest causative factor here without the author providing an argument for it? Ah but that’s just “sophistry and spin” I’m sure. Jesus.

There’s other issues in this article too that a more honest author would have addressed. Why might prison students be more willing to learn? I tried to track this comment down, but it’s on one of his own articles (very unbiased stuff) and is thus subscribe(pay?)-walled. Because of that, I’m left to assume these are adult prisoners taking advantage of a voluntary program in their prison. Gee why might an adult who wants to go to school, whose alternative is prison, be more interested than a kid who doesn’t want to be there? Really strains the mind that one.

>Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre.

I didn’t have a phone in elementary school, my cope was fantasy novels. The reason was indeed largely to keep knives and drugs out. See, perhaps the fact that some of the kids were flirting with gang violence before age 10, and that others were bringing weapons to school to defend themselves against said gangs, indicates problems more significant than TikTok in school.

> The article lays out why the students are “coping”. It’s not because teaching them geometry is “broken” - it’s because learning it is hard and there’s no dopa hit when you memorize sohcahtoa. Watching TikTok is easy, and there is a dopa hit every time.

The article doesn’t even try to show that the learning outcomes are related to phones, much less that the reason for any mental distress of students is because “learning is hard.” Do the kids of billionaires with private tutors have a similarly negative experience with the process of learning? No I’m not delusional, we can’t give everyone private tutors. I am delusional enough, however, to think that a series of drastic reforms and restructurings could bring the student to teacher ratio more in line with that of the more successful developed nations.

[madphilosopher]

Ivan Illich argued that we should open the doors to the schools and let those that wanted to leave leave, and those that wanted to stay stay. And he meant this even for the teachers as for the students. Then, he said, true education would begin to be possible.

[dale_glass]

That'd be amazing for at most a decade.

Then you've suddenly a generation of students that don't know their heads from their asses out in the streets and useless to anyone.

This might have not been too terrible a century ago, but the day is coming when a warm body is effectively useless. Yeah, you can teach anyone to fry burgers, but we don't need that many of those and nobody wants to babysit a bunch of incredibly unreliable and stupid adults when they can get a far less troublesome burger cooking machine instead.

[floren]

> This just reads as angsty teenage frustration.

And it's a hacker news standby. Any discussion of schools will have at least one commenter calling them prisons.

[throwaway2037]

What is it about primary and secondary educate discussions that always bring out the doomers on HN? And, for most people, their sample size is very, very small, but they paint generalisations with a wide brush.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I regret this because it makes for such an easy attack. Not an entirely unjustified comparison though.

[jmye]

It is entirely unjustified. Schools are nothing like prison.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

This is sometimes too dramatic but does alright:

https://www.historytools.org/school/why-do-schools-look-like...

>During the 19th century Industrial Revolution, reformers explicitly modeled public schools after factories to habituate youth to regimented workplace environments.

>Cell-like classrooms with regimented rows of desks

>Rigid schedules and rules to control movement

>Obedience to authority figures

>Conformity and standardization

>In the 20th century, disciplinary issues led architects to also incorporate prison elements

>Enclosing perimeter fences up to 10 feet high

>Locked or monitored gates limiting entrance/exit

>Surveillance cameras blanketing hallways and grounds

>Metal detectors

>Mesh covered windows preventing exit attempts

>Sparse and durable interior materials resistant to damage

>Currently over 17% of schools possess 10 or more of these. Their prevalence continues rising yearly.

The article goes on but this should hopefully be illustrative of my point.

[balamatom]

>Calling schools prisons?

Ma'am, may I go to the bathroom?

>Sorry, this is ridiculous.

Classy.

>Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time

Parent poster was complaining about the school system being unfit for the purpose of teaching, the "100% fun" thing is in your imagination.

>but it turns out playing video games all day has no value.

Neither has the system of formalized education, if we were to judge purely by your reading comprehension.

On the other hand, at least half of everyone I know learned the language that we are currently conversing in from videogames.

[jmye]

> Ma'am, may I go to the bathroom?

You think not having ten year olds wandering the halls at will makes an elementary school “like prison”? Really?

> Parent poster was complaining about the school system being unfit for the purpose of teaching, the "100% fun" thing is in your imagination.

The entire conversation spawned from a comment about how phones should be banned, and the poster I replied to talking about how it’s unfair to take them away from students, for “coping” or as a source of “escape”.

Would you like to re-discuss reading comprehension as an artifact of reading an entire comment chain to gain context before snarkily responding to only the last thing that was said, or are you good?

Maybe that video game didn’t do you quite as much service as you’d like to pretend.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Actually in high school (thats 14-18) we didn’t have to ask permission. We had to go over to a sign out sheet, write our names on the sheet, and take a hall pass which we’d be asked for if we ran into any adults. We then needed to sign in upon return, to ensure every sign out had a corresponding sign in, which the teacher would briefly check at the end of class.

[balamatom]

>Maybe that video game didn’t do you quite as much service as you’d like to pretend.

No, I learned English at school from a teacher. Thus, I was a relative straggler in language learning, in comparison with those of my peers who could afford PCs able to run GTA3.

For your benefit, I re-read the whole thread just now and I still find your reasoning faulty and your premise, frankly, cruel.

Your only response to salient points such as, I quote, "incompetent education system", "The customers are captive", "The incentives could hardly be more misaligned" was, basically, "boo fucking hoo".

I'll leave you to ponder why your putative ten-year olds would even have anything to "cope" with or "escape" from. Maybe they're trying to cope with the traumatic realization that the world they've been born into is hell-bent on turning them into you.

[dns_snek]

> then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

Firstly, I use TikTok myself so this isn't coming from a place of "old man yells at clouds", but why does it have to be smartphones and addictive algorithms? There's a practically unlimited number of ways to cope, they can daydream about their interests, draw and sketch things, read, interact with others, at least that's what we used to do, but just about anything that doesn't involve algorithmic content is practically harmless in comparison.

When overused, streams of dopamine such as TikTok can completely drain your desire to do anything creative, productive, to learn things, to experiment, to be curious, to do anything that delivers less than immediate, consistent reward (even video games can be low-reward in comparison).

I've been on both sides of this. I've gone years without engaging with these algorithms at all while harnessing my creative energy, and I've gotten stuck in the depths of these algorithms for weeks at a time.

It's questionable whether they're going to be able to get out of it, much like kids who start doing drugs in their tween years. It may be a coping mechanism, but in kids and teenagers it's probably about as healthy as daily cannabis consumption.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I more or less completely agree with you about the harms. Regarding your weed comparison, I knew kids in middle school smoking tons of pot to get through the day; no doubt they were messing themselves up for life (at least a bit) with that habit. I hope social media isn’t quite so harmful, but I bet it’s not a ton better.

The weed example is a good comparison though. I view kids smoking lots of weed as a failure of a system. Knowing some of them, we’re usually talking about shitty family situations on top of a shitty school they’re made to attend for a solid amount of their waking life. The school should take their pot, of course it should, but it’s a marker far down a road that shouldn’t have been started along to begin with. There’s an enormously complicated set of social reasons that those kids’ schools, and their families, are messed up, but it’s as though there’s no will to tackle these issues. It’s much easier to attack the simple things you can see, the smoking and the phone use, with bandaid solutions that ignore the underlying causes. I almost see it as a distraction from really fixing anything. That’s where my frustration comes from, I really have no problem with the banning of the phones itself.

[mike_hearn]

Daydreaming is what they're doing and it's what the teachers are complaining about: "When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in… They’re not there."

It's a bit hard to notice because Gioia is a polemicist trying to whip up a crowd, but what he brings up isn't actually complaints about kids using smartphones in the classroom. Rather they're about students being uninterested in the material (or less charitably, perhaps in the teacher's presentation of it), and then he implies very strongly that this must be due to smartphones but doesn't try to argue that case. Instead he gets mad at people who point out that correlation is not causation, claims they're engaging in "sophistry and spin", that's he's "dumbfounded" anyone could possibly disagree with this amazing argument, then immediately goes off on a tangent about AI cheating (a form of sophistry).

Actually, at no point in this article is smartphone usage in the classroom ever brought up as an actual problem. The link is implied to be causal whenever children have any access to "tech" in general, anywhere at all.