Can you brainstorm some downsides to smartphone use in school?
Not any that convince me taking cell phones away is the right thing to do.
Just quickly commenting.
I’m a bit confused by the response. Are you saying no cell phone policies equals taking away phones from the beginning? I’m sure many schools may do that and I think thats bad (not an issue I’ve given much thought though tbh) but I think a lot of no phone policies is no using phones throughout the school day or whatever. At least thats how the high schools in my area have/had implemented it. No phone use in class and if you do then they take away your phone. I don’t think thats entirely unreasonable? in a sense?
my thought process is something like this:
you agree to attend a class. the class has a no phone policy. they can be distracting for you and others. you can put it on do not disturb and not touch it. if the phone does cause a disturbance the instructor can either ask you to leave or give you a warning or something. the phone use is creating problems for the instructor.
in the above scenario i’m imaging more voluntary classes as opposed to regular public schooling, but i think the idea is roughly there. the phone is causing issues and the educator takes it away. would you be more in favor of them getting kicked out of the class for not listening to the rule instead of their property being taken away (which is what I assume the issue is with doing something like this)
Also, I guess because you were saying that no cell phone policies = taking cell phones you wrote:
but I don’t think that was clear and all Elliot asked was for brainstorm of potential issues with phone use.
do you think phone use is fine in educational settings? I think it depends but one thought comes to mind: do not disturb mode. i think a fair amount of people are now starting to see phones as a distraction in their own personal study time that they are starting to use tools like do not disturb and what not to not get distracted by their own phone. i think its the same ideas inspiring maybe bad ideas(?) around no phone policies.
Yes, some schools are having students lock their phones away in a pouch before they’re allowed on campus. It’s messed up.
*my bold ^
Almost no children have that option unfortunately.
I think adults have a hard time talking with kids that they rather stick to the easier rule of no phones. I think it’s less of taking them seriously and more about not knowing how to build good rapport with them. Also i don’t think adults know very well how to communicate to the child that they can find a good middle ground with each other. Like they’re not good at being rational
edit: my bad for replying to the wrong person. I don’t know if you can change that through edits
edit 2: @Neo
No, I think because children aren’t taking seriously in the first place, they don’t think building rapport to get a win-win outcome is even necessary. They just enforce things, and if kids don’t like it, tough luck. Only the adults have a say.
I think I see that like to me it seems rigid the way kids are treated. If they want to use their phones in a no phone zone then too bad. They’re problems or situation aren’t being taken seriously.
I do think there’s potential issues like it just seems easier to have the no phone rule than having phones allowed.
I wanna do a brainstorm:
- If phones were allowed the kids would be more distracted
- the teacher would have to keep reminding the student to put it away and focus on their work.
- The kids would rather use their phone than do work
- school work would be boring to do
- it’s easier for the kids to do the work in front of them when there’s no phone around.
- Phones would cause disruptions in the classroom like it would be harder for other kid’s to concentrate when others are doing their own thing.
- It would be hard to make rules for phone use cuz should they be allowed to play games on their phones? Should it be only family or emergency related stuff?
- Kid would rather use their phone on some work how should the teacher respond?
- How much space should each child be given to use their phone? Like how much phone time is too much?
The last two points were not really brainstorm. I just thought about them a while after making the list
Why?
I have a bunch of random comments coming to my mind but I just want to be clear on what your exact issue is here.
Is it because schools have the apparent authority to take the phone away (so this is kind of property rights issue?)? Is it because schools doing anything like taking away stuff is bad and adversarial (so you’d probably oppose some more voluntaryish options where someone may agree to allow their stuff to be taken away if they don’t listen to rules)? Is the issue no phones allowed to be used or just your phones be taken away? Hmm here’s part of something that comes to mind: schools are involuntary so is that why giving up your phone is bad, because of the involuntary nature of most schools today? Cause I can think of contexts of which you would give up your phone much more voluntarily. I vaguely remember being asked to put my phone in a bin for voluntary AP tests I took (I could be wrong about this, its totally possible I’m making up a memory but it still works as an example I think). Is this bad/messed up?
Yes. It’s not okay to force children into an environment they don’t want to be in, and then make it worse by inducing boredom and/or threatening punishment if they don’t conform.
I don’t see a problem with voluntarily giving up your phone in a voluntary environment.
You already agree that it’s better to not induce boredom or punishment in the involuntary environment. You agree that there’s a better situation than a worse one. How is not taking away the phones better and not make the problems in schools worse? If u could get rid of the rule of no phone use, would the pros outweigh the cons? And by no more phone rule, i think if that was in effect then children are already being taken more seriously at that point.
Maybe we have different goals or problems we’re imagining? Trigger warning, this is an intense, made up example I’m about to give but it’s the one that popped into my head at the moment.
Hypothetically, if it were the year 1810 in the US and slave owners were debating over whether they should ban slaves from reading books, or drawing or something, and they made a pros and cons list
Slave owner: They wouldn’t be as distracted while working the fields if books were banned. Also, they’d listen to our orders more often if they couldn’t draw…
The slave owner’s problems focused on how to get the slaves to be more efficient, or whatever, is not something I’m concerned with. I’m focused on the rights of the slave. I want to figure out how to get the slave owners to take the slaves seriously, see them as full people, as free men. Then work with each other to find win-win solutions as far as work goes. And while they are slaves, I want them to at least have a little happiness, like access to books.
That’s similar to how I feel about school. I’m not focused on how to get the kids to pay more attention to the teacher in class, or get better grades. I’m concerned with not making their time in school worse by denying them cell phone use.
As an aside, I avoid pros and cons list because I don’t want to start thinking in terms of “weighted” decision making. It’s bad epistemology.
Oh i think i see. I thought those kinds of problems would be related. Like in school example i was thinking if the student doesn’t focus enough or are too distracted then them getting punished for it is worse than if phones were banned.
Also i didn’t give it a second thought that phones being banned is a concurrent thing. I thought it happened to all schools and it was a set thing in the US. That’s my bad.
Oh that’s comparable to taking kids seriously.
The slaves being taken seriously and being seen as people sounds like a big goal. I think you mean that as an overall goal and trying to find little ways to achieve it. I think just seeing the slaves as people right off the bat is hard cuz there’s a lot ways they were seen as not free men.
Idk exactly wat my goals are for the tcs stuff. I think i want to understand it more n know the good n the bad from it. Im too scared to say something about how kids should be treated. I dont know whats harmful or not or good or bad.
Yeah that makes sense. It sounds like there’s problems with pros and cons lists for making a decision.
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You can use pro and con lists in non-weighted ways. First make the lists, then go through and look for decisive factors.
This school is trying to combat gender memes/roles/conventions. Is this good or bad? What do you think?
I think that’s good at least for the boys. I like how they’re showing them to be more caring and social. Growing up it was hard to know if I was being too caring with others cuz nobody else was really doing it. Stuff like soothing each other or holding hands or hugs. I think it was seen as too feminine or gay. Why does expressing kind gestures have to belong to a certain gender?
I like that there’s more ways to express good feelings to each other without overthinking the gender.
I can see that parents and other people in like the US would be afraid of boys turning gay through this. Idk what to say about that.
I think the stated goal is good.
I’m ambivalent about the details expressed in the video. There are some details left a bit vague but it sounds like the kids are gender separated and doing these (opposite) socially gendered activities all day, or at least a large part of the day.
That seems weird and potentially problematic to me. It seems like that’s setting aside a large portion of the day where the kids are being forced to engage in activities associated with opposite gender roles. I get brainwashy/forced gender role conformity vibes from that, and even though they’ve flipped the gender roles that still doesn’t sit well with me.
I think the proponents would say they are trying to reprogram the social conditioning the kids already received. And they are only in this school part of the day, so they get more social conditioning of traditional gender roles as soon as they leave. I can see that point, it makes some sense to me, but I’m not really convinced by it.
I think I would like it more if the kids had options to engage in the other stuff sometimes, or if all kids of both genders were expected to engage in both kinds of activities at different times, or something like that.
Whenever I see stuff that purports to combat gender roles, and the method used is to just gender everything but the opposite of traditional roles, I think that’s misguided. This school seems like that kind of situation to me.
I would prefer to have less gender role conformity, not inverted gender role conformity.
But it’s a short video and the school may be more sophisticated than I am giving it credit for.
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Around 8 seconds in the video says they have gender separation for “most of the day”. I think that’s too much and intuitively I’d say using a quarter or third of the school day would be better.
It might also help to do these activities in mixed groups part of the time. Like part of the time the girls are throwing logs, some boys could be doing it too. Part of the time the boys do massage, some girls could be involved. If boys learn to be sensitive around other boys but aren’t comfortable doing it around girls, or girls learn to be fierce only as long as no boys are around, that would be a problem. Mixed groups sometimes could help them see less difference between genders since they can do the activities with both genders. You have to be careful though that e.g. the boys don’t take a dominant role in the fierceness activities (the girls should do it without boys first and then with more girls than boys second and maybe with equal numbers later when the girls are better at it and they could even potentially progress to like a single girl doing it in a group where everyone else is a boy). Seeing the other gender (not just the same gender) being accepting of this stuff is important to people being comfortable doing it and also the boys need practice seeing girls do boy stuff and being accepting of that and behaving appropriately about it (and vice versa).
I do think there are major potential upsides to this kind of thing too and overall I’m glad some people are trying. If individual parents try to teach their kids to reject gender norms, it’s hard to make that effective when there isn’t social support, peer support, support from other authorities like teachers, etc. I think doing some of this stuff in a group setting with multiple authorities legitimizing it can be more effective (multiple teachers across multiple grade levels, and also the principle, the curriculum designers, the parents of some of the kids, etc.).
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Since it appears to be a school for very young kids, I’m unsure how long kids are actually attending. In the US a lot of times preschools and kindergarten classes are much less of a full day than regular school. But not always. (Also my knowledge might be out of date on this.)
So does “most of the day” mean most of the chronological day, or most of the day at school? If school lasts 4 hours and they are required to spend 3 hours doing opposite gender stuff, I am less perturbed by this than if school lasts 8 hours and 7 hours are spent doing required opposite gender activities.
I basically agree with the rest of your comment.
Edit: Specifically, I think your suggestions would address most of my issues and push me from ambivalent to being solidly in favor of the schools, even if I still had some criticisms or misgivings.
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