This is an older article. Today, the coalition decided on a measure with 'urgent advice' to not be allowed smartphones, tablets and smartwatches in the classroom [1]. Starting Jan 1st 2024, and so far only for secondary education, though they're deciding on primary education today.Schools are free in how they implement it, could be in the entire building or just classrooms. I don't expect any hard rules any time soon, with the coalition being so divided on the topic.
There's been interesting debates in parlement preceding this measure, with several interesting position papers on the topic from researchers, and even student associations [2].
The researchers emphasize that adolescents are much more susceptible to the bad effects of smartphones, due to inexperience with dopamine and its effects on dopamine production, being easier to condition, FOMO.
The main adverse effect they name is what they call a 'crumbling brain', with a short attention span unable to focus on one thing for a longer time. An often-repeated soundbyte is that students using smartphones often score in average 1-1.5 points less on tests, on a scale of 1 to 10.
I dunno what to think about it. As noted by the student association, it seems like children won't get the chance to learn how to handle the traps smartphones pose. Then again, I was free to use mine in high school and I'm still addicted to the thing :/
> due to inexperience with dopamine and its effects on dopamine production, being easier to condition, FOMO.
I don't understand the reasoning in performing this type of deep analysis. If the purpose of the device is to enhance education, it can be in the classroom. If it it's not, it's essentially a toy, and it has no place in the classroom. Why even bring dopamine in to it?
Perhaps schools should simply have an extra set of mobile phones that are specifically designed for education only.
That way, every student has access to the device, and every student will have the same device, and there is no risk that the device is used for e.g. watching tiktok.
Mobile phones are cheap enough for this to be a reality.
A device made with the best of intentions and with many helpful features for enhancing education may turn out to have harmful consequences in practice. Those harmful consequences typically include temptations to have fun instead of productivity and learning. And that's where all those concepts you quote come in.
Because they are a bunch of willful ignorants following buzzword-infused neo-puritanism? Not only is anything pleasurable bad for you so is pleasure itself!
> inexperience with dopamine and its effects on dopamine production, being easier to condition, FOMO
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but this is entirely in the hands of the parents and far from new. You build their mental toughness by taking them under your wing and introducing them to the offline world beyond the walls of home and school.
I’m not sure what’s worse, the damage done to your child by letting them use a smartphone, or the damage done by not letting them use a smartphone while of their friends use one.
> it seems like children won't get the chance to learn how to handle the traps smartphones pose.
No one learns. The bitter fact no one even wants to think about: Almost everyone in the modern society is an addict of digital screens as much as their real life obligations allow them to be.
I don't have a kid in school yet, but I see no reason to even give them a phone until they're 12 or so. Reading these messages makes it seem like that no parents do this: these kids always already have phones.
How realistic is my intention, parents with schoolgoing kids?
Make it until 18. Or even better, until someone finally makes a smartphone that runs necessary apps and opens necessary websites (think Whatsapp, govt websites) but no other app or website (games, social media).
I have a hard time believing such researchers. It's just way too politically convenient that they can pull such explanations and numbers out. It always feels as though that these policy advisors can support any position and if it eventually goes wrong then nobody will blame them anyway.
I personally think phones definitely shouldn't be used in a classroom. I don't even see what benefit you would get from it, but it definitely shouldn't be legislated over. If a teacher or school wants to ban it then they should be able to.
No idea how things work in Europe, but over here if a teacher or school wants to ban (or heck, even allow: see “banned” books) something — even if it’s for good reasons, the loudest local parents that disagree will show up to school board meetings screaming at them, and challenge them at the next election. Perhaps the local officials would rather have the cover of a law than look like they’re being capricious.
I can't imagine myself graduating high school if I had a smartphone back then. Those things are so addictive, they just keep on giving. When I was studying all you could play on your phone was Snake. Going out with friends and making a campfire was way more fun than playing Snake. Nowadays people can spend 14hrs a day on their phone and still not be bored, it's crazy.
Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
How many millions of children succesfully graduated already while having smartphones?
> Nowadays people can spend 14hrs a day on their phone and still not be bored, it's crazy.
How this can be crazy? You have unlimited library of people, photos, information, videos, absolutely anything in your hand. It would be crazy not use it.
I use my smartphone even now to write this comment.
> Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
And also it will succesfully separate you from social information, trends. Which is good but also could become issue.
It's difficult to explain how the world was before 2007. Yes, yes, some of this is cranky old man shouts at cloud, but some of it is more objective.
Being bored was okay. It was part of life, and good for you. It not only got you to put in effort into not being bored (_eventually_), but just not being entertained is good for your mental well being. None of us realised this at the time of course.
How it can be crazy is that they are ignoring the existence of 4K, 30 inch monitors, peering into a tiny screen that you have to dab at like an imbecile.
This is a sign of you being out of touch with the times. I can assure you that a phone wouldn't be the source of this problem. I would play Kerbal Space Program or any other game on the school computer. There weren't many options for them to stop it. We had http proxies, linux live CDs, you name it. The schools just simply couldn't lock them down properly. Even the students that weren't technically inclined didn't have difficulty, but there were plenty of people that did know what they were doing too.
How is computer usage remotely comparable? At my high school we had 2 hours of computer class per week. The rest of the time we spent in regular, computer-less classrooms. We had smartphones already in my days and I promise you they were a major source of distraction for the students even though they were banned.
I cannot imagine I would have bothered to pay attention at all if I could just be scrolling twitter or reddit all day. There's a reason why I block these apps on my own phone during work hours.
Maybe it’s a symptom of where I live, but many teenagers I know would simply say “try and take it away from me” and wait for enforcement. Very few teachers would engage, and they know that. Teenagers crave and seek out agency. A phone not only provides some of that to them, but resisting having it taken away does as well. It’s a battleground.
If students can’t use them, neither should adults.
I think this might work in a country like the Netherlands where school shootings aren't a constant fear and teachers are generally entrusted to ensure safety of children while they're in school. In America I think some parents would freak out because of the potential of the child being unable to reach out to a parent or vice versa during an emergency.
It should be more specific, they should not be allowed a smartphone in school at all. But a phone, yes definitely. In europe it's a lot more common to send your kids alone to school, so I definitely think they should have a simple phone.
But at the same time I want them to go to school without any smartphone, I want them to feel that freedom from social media at least during the school day. Not just that school locks them up, but that they eventually learn to not even bring it.
> It should be more specific, they should not be allowed a smartphone in school at all. But a phone, yes definitely. In europe it's a lot more common to send your kids alone to school, so I definitely think they should have a simple phone.
That’s the usual policy here in France. Smartphones are not allowed at all. Dumb phones are but they can’t be taken out of the bags in the classroom, which makes sense. I am much more comfortable giving my kid a dumb feature phone as well. It’s enough to send text messages and call in an emergency, but it makes him less of a target for mugging.
That sounds dumb. Smartphones are a part of everyday life. Expecting kids to not use them is either doomed to fail, or worse, it will make sure they learn less about how to use them.
NYC had a similar ban until 2015[1]. The problem was always enforcement: you can "prevent" students from having phones, but this means nothing unless (1) you're actively preventing them from bringing them onto schoolgrounds, and (2) taking phones away from students who do bring them into school.
Part of why NYC lifted their ban was because neither (1) nor (2) was practical: schools ended up adopting an "out of sight, out of mind" policy around phones, and actual confiscations led to larger concerns (e.g., students who were unable to contact their caretakers after school). It will be interesting to see if the Dutch can overcome either (or both) of these problems.
> schools ended up adopting an "out of sight, out of mind" policy around phones
This was how it worked in my schools two decades ago. As long as you didn't use your phone there was no problem, but otherwise it was the teacher's discretion on how to handle it (within limits). Usually that meant confiscation until the end of that class, on rare occasion they'd allow calls/texts as long as it was shared with the class (to embarrass them into not doing it again).
> It will be interesting to see if the Dutch can overcome either (or both) of these problems.
Having recently toured about 20 secondary schools in the Netherlands I can say that most of them had a system for this. In each classroom, near the door, was a kind of cloth rack with 30 pouches where the kids would leave their phones as they entered.
"If you have a phone in class then _you_ leave the class."
Why is the school treating these children like clients? They aren't. If they can conform to the rules, they can come, if they can't, they don't. You don't have a natural right to be in the classroom.
I’m pretty sure that, as a matter of law, school attendance is compulsory in most western countries. Whether or not students are “clients” is immaterial; the school has an obligation to teach them, and the students are compelled to attend.
Again: the problem was enforcement. It turns out that making 1000+ teenagers put their phones into bags (and ensuring that they don’t open them) is not trivial.
The problem with contact is when the student leaves the school: the phone was typically confiscated for multiple days, meaning that students would be left without their phones when they left the grounds. Many parents give their children phones so they can reach them if they’re lost or similar.
Notably, the city tore up all of the payphones around the same time.
Edit: as a piece of trivia: prior to the end of the ban, there was an entire thriving industry of phone escrow vans parked outside of schools[1].
School has breaks too. What are you doing if a teacher is absent or you have something like a 3h lunch break?
Growing up you were simply not allowed to actively use your phone during class, outrightly banning phones from school makes no sense. We'd also use them for some class activity at least once a week.
Even when I was in high school 20 years ago, we longer had a normal phone at school. I was the only odd one out, trying to call home using a perpetually broken phone booth while all my classmates had mobile phones.
To be frank many people don't remember phone numbers these days, and just enter them into their phone-books to use. I know as a kid decades ago it took me a while to learn my home phone number. Sure a refresher index card could be used but that just isn't the norm.
How could actual confiscations possibly lead to larger concerns? Cellphones didn't even exit until I was an adult and I'm still in my 40s. Sheesh. How the hell did anything happen before the year 2005?
Realized 10+ years ago that the only way I could have my kids grow up addiction-free was if they didn't have a smartphone/tablet and the only credible way I could ask this from them was if I also didn't have one.
In hindsight one of the best decisions of my life, sadly becoming more and more difficult to maintain as banking, public transportation, restaurants, and all other parts of life increasingly assume you carry a smartphone.
I’m rather disturbed by the discompassion society has towards people without smartphones. Be it menus at restaurants, banking apps (as you mention), or even map availability. We just assume everyone is connected all the time and that phones never break or have issues. I feel crazy, because my phone is constantly misbehaving.
Industrial society is coercive towards people that want to live more primitive life than one deem normal, that's essentially main thesis of anarcho-primitivists. Still, I don't think Luddites should ban for other people their technology. Why not ban electricity and cars too?
I have an elderly relative with dementia who is unable to use a smartphone but the local grocery chains provide discounts for their weekly sales through smartphone based digital coupons. The open irritation and verbal abuse they get from cashiers who have to go through their alternate manual process for entering those digital coupon discounts is depressing.
I think this is overstated. I can't think of anything essential I cannot do without a smartphone or computer. You have to do it like it's 1985, which is foreign to the last generation or two, but it's still doable.
It's even worse in Asia, lots of things require an app tied to local phone number. It's at the point where you literally can't pay for things, call a cab, etc. as a tourist
Lots of respect for this - I’d guess your kids have it too. I often felt frustrated as a kid that adults took power and control over you and didn’t adhere to the same demands themselves.
My college student still won't take a cell phone. His uni gave him an iPad but he leaves it home most of the time. It can happen. And since he doesn't have a cellphone, I don't pick mine up so much when we're hanging out together. Win-win.
Not sure which typical workplaces require smartphone use (I'm sure there are many), but indeed, in my case, I work either at the computer or in front of people or walking up and down while thinking :)
But I grew up in central California and surroundings in the 90's and rode my bike everywhere. And it was horrible. I nearly died multiple times, and drivers were sometimes furious at someone biking on the road. I rode from Sac to Folsom once over a narrow bridge with no shoulder and can't believe I lived.
I thought it might be better in cities, but Berkeley, while better, was still mediocre, and Santa Monica was bad. Really, everywhere in the US is somewhere on the spectrum from "merely horrible" to "dire hellscape".
Ten years ago my wife and I moved to Ireland. Ireland is also bad, but still massively better than anywhere I've lived in the US. But now we have young kids, and we don't want "better than the US", we want "good enough your child can bike to school, and when people kill children with their cars the people are angry with the driver, not sympathetic towards them". Which means the Netherlands, or perhaps Denmark. So that's where we're going. Ireland being wildly incompetent bureaucratically it took 4 years just to process mine and my wife's naturalisation applications.
I have no idea why this has to be a government-based rule (law? ... assuming they won't fix it until oct. 1st). Although I'm older, and phones were not as common as now, our schools had "school-rules" forbidding the use during classes, and if you got caught with a phone, the teacher would take it, and parents would have to come to school and pick it up. Are schools unable to implement simple rules and need the government to do it now?
I'm bothered mostly, because school rules are school rules. Need to adapt? Need some "modification" of the rules? A teacher can do it. If it's government rules, there are pretty sure to be some edge cases, where someone will have to break those rules to achieve something positive.
> I have no idea why this has to be a government-based rule
You clearly have not met today's parents. Enough of them revolt at the idea of a teacher taking - even temporarily - the $1000 device they bought for their child and which they need to monitor/contact/supervise their child 24/7.
A rule like that might help teachers and schools to get overbearing parents off their backs.
I'm from NL but haven't been in school for some time so maybe this has changed. So far I thought helicopter parenting was mainly a USA phenomenon. Not that it doesn't exist here at all, just not the norm, at least ten years ago
My parents would intentionally delay picking up the phone as a punishment, but back then, it was a monochrome display three line phone, and I was in highschool when I first got it :) But it had both clock and alarm, which some of my classmates didn't have on their older-model phones :) (ericsson a1018 vs ga628)
Readit News
There's been interesting debates in parlement preceding this measure, with several interesting position papers on the topic from researchers, and even student associations [2]. The researchers emphasize that adolescents are much more susceptible to the bad effects of smartphones, due to inexperience with dopamine and its effects on dopamine production, being easier to condition, FOMO. The main adverse effect they name is what they call a 'crumbling brain', with a short attention span unable to focus on one thing for a longer time. An often-repeated soundbyte is that students using smartphones often score in average 1-1.5 points less on tests, on a scale of 1 to 10.
I dunno what to think about it. As noted by the student association, it seems like children won't get the chance to learn how to handle the traps smartphones pose. Then again, I was free to use mine in high school and I'm still addicted to the thing :/
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2481424-kabinet-geeft-dringend-advies...
[2] https://www.tweedekamer.nl/debat_en_vergadering/commissiever...
I don't understand the reasoning in performing this type of deep analysis. If the purpose of the device is to enhance education, it can be in the classroom. If it it's not, it's essentially a toy, and it has no place in the classroom. Why even bring dopamine in to it?
That way, every student has access to the device, and every student will have the same device, and there is no risk that the device is used for e.g. watching tiktok.
Mobile phones are cheap enough for this to be a reality.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but this is entirely in the hands of the parents and far from new. You build their mental toughness by taking them under your wing and introducing them to the offline world beyond the walls of home and school.
No one learns. The bitter fact no one even wants to think about: Almost everyone in the modern society is an addict of digital screens as much as their real life obligations allow them to be.
How realistic is my intention, parents with schoolgoing kids?
I personally think phones definitely shouldn't be used in a classroom. I don't even see what benefit you would get from it, but it definitely shouldn't be legislated over. If a teacher or school wants to ban it then they should be able to.
why do you presuppose a political motive for the researchers? What's political about this?
Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
> Nowadays people can spend 14hrs a day on their phone and still not be bored, it's crazy.
How this can be crazy? You have unlimited library of people, photos, information, videos, absolutely anything in your hand. It would be crazy not use it. I use my smartphone even now to write this comment.
> Deleting social media apps makes your phone _much_ less interesting though!
And also it will succesfully separate you from social information, trends. Which is good but also could become issue.
Being bored was okay. It was part of life, and good for you. It not only got you to put in effort into not being bored (_eventually_), but just not being entertained is good for your mental well being. None of us realised this at the time of course.
How it can be crazy is that they are ignoring the existence of 4K, 30 inch monitors, peering into a tiny screen that you have to dab at like an imbecile.
I was playing Oregon Trail.
I cannot imagine I would have bothered to pay attention at all if I could just be scrolling twitter or reddit all day. There's a reason why I block these apps on my own phone during work hours.
Not while sitting in the back row of math class, though.
For you, perhaps.
I sometimes forget mine exists; then I remember the thing and find it discharged.
I can waste hours on a real computer, though, with a large screen, and a real mouse and keyboard.
If students can’t use them, neither should adults.
That being said, discipline in schools is a huge can of worms in the US. Bu, in principle, the specific phone problem has solutions.
But at the same time I want them to go to school without any smartphone, I want them to feel that freedom from social media at least during the school day. Not just that school locks them up, but that they eventually learn to not even bring it.
That’s the usual policy here in France. Smartphones are not allowed at all. Dumb phones are but they can’t be taken out of the bags in the classroom, which makes sense. I am much more comfortable giving my kid a dumb feature phone as well. It’s enough to send text messages and call in an emergency, but it makes him less of a target for mugging.
Do they search the kid's bags?
(agree with everything else, just wanted to add a precision. Also, the school has the parent numbers).
Part of why NYC lifted their ban was because neither (1) nor (2) was practical: schools ended up adopting an "out of sight, out of mind" policy around phones, and actual confiscations led to larger concerns (e.g., students who were unable to contact their caretakers after school). It will be interesting to see if the Dutch can overcome either (or both) of these problems.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/013-15/mayor-de...
This was how it worked in my schools two decades ago. As long as you didn't use your phone there was no problem, but otherwise it was the teacher's discretion on how to handle it (within limits). Usually that meant confiscation until the end of that class, on rare occasion they'd allow calls/texts as long as it was shared with the class (to embarrass them into not doing it again).
Having recently toured about 20 secondary schools in the Netherlands I can say that most of them had a system for this. In each classroom, near the door, was a kind of cloth rack with 30 pouches where the kids would leave their phones as they entered.
Why is the school treating these children like clients? They aren't. If they can conform to the rules, they can come, if they can't, they don't. You don't have a natural right to be in the classroom.
Dead Comment
Banning cellphones in schools is very practical. You put them into the pouches they use at concerts. Pouches are opened at the end of the day.
If parents need to reach their kids they can do so easily. Call the school and ask for the kid.
The problem with contact is when the student leaves the school: the phone was typically confiscated for multiple days, meaning that students would be left without their phones when they left the grounds. Many parents give their children phones so they can reach them if they’re lost or similar.
Notably, the city tore up all of the payphones around the same time.
Edit: as a piece of trivia: prior to the end of the ban, there was an entire thriving industry of phone escrow vans parked outside of schools[1].
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/10/04/phone-valet/1...
Growing up you were simply not allowed to actively use your phone during class, outrightly banning phones from school makes no sense. We'd also use them for some class activity at least once a week.
Would it have been possible to grant access to a regular old school phone near the principal office or secretary office for outside calls ?
In hindsight one of the best decisions of my life, sadly becoming more and more difficult to maintain as banking, public transportation, restaurants, and all other parts of life increasingly assume you carry a smartphone.
They aren't alone either, e.g. https://www.wcpo.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/se...
People have not worked through the wide ranging implications of this "assumption", given who builds and controls everything about those devices.
As you should no matter if you have a smart phone or not.
This question is fascinating to me! What form of work requires using a smart phone?
Deleted Comment
But I grew up in central California and surroundings in the 90's and rode my bike everywhere. And it was horrible. I nearly died multiple times, and drivers were sometimes furious at someone biking on the road. I rode from Sac to Folsom once over a narrow bridge with no shoulder and can't believe I lived.
I thought it might be better in cities, but Berkeley, while better, was still mediocre, and Santa Monica was bad. Really, everywhere in the US is somewhere on the spectrum from "merely horrible" to "dire hellscape".
Ten years ago my wife and I moved to Ireland. Ireland is also bad, but still massively better than anywhere I've lived in the US. But now we have young kids, and we don't want "better than the US", we want "good enough your child can bike to school, and when people kill children with their cars the people are angry with the driver, not sympathetic towards them". Which means the Netherlands, or perhaps Denmark. So that's where we're going. Ireland being wildly incompetent bureaucratically it took 4 years just to process mine and my wife's naturalisation applications.
I'm bothered mostly, because school rules are school rules. Need to adapt? Need some "modification" of the rules? A teacher can do it. If it's government rules, there are pretty sure to be some edge cases, where someone will have to break those rules to achieve something positive.
You clearly have not met today's parents. Enough of them revolt at the idea of a teacher taking - even temporarily - the $1000 device they bought for their child and which they need to monitor/contact/supervise their child 24/7.
A rule like that might help teachers and schools to get overbearing parents off their backs.
I'm from NL but haven't been in school for some time so maybe this has changed. So far I thought helicopter parenting was mainly a USA phenomenon. Not that it doesn't exist here at all, just not the norm, at least ten years ago
How is that "overbearing" when horror stories like these are common? https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/yfskz3/aita_... https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/uc2gwy/wibta...
My parents would intentionally delay picking up the phone as a punishment, but back then, it was a monochrome display three line phone, and I was in highschool when I first got it :) But it had both clock and alarm, which some of my classmates didn't have on their older-model phones :) (ericsson a1018 vs ga628)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cclEuSxFd_M
Note: The autogenerated (english) subtitles are a pretty decent.