[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.