New York City schools have had a long history of phone restriction policies, with an outright ban in the early 2000s that was reversed about 10 years later. Individual schools, like the ones where Corletta and Leston teach, have had the freedom to implement their own restrictions.
That will change again in the new academic year as all schools in New York state will implement a bell-to-bell ban — one of the strictest among dozens of other states that have passed similar legislation — barring students from access to personal devices that can connect to the internet for the entire school day. Schools will be required to provide storage for the devices.
But with such new policies, many being implemented for the first time this school year or in effect for less than two years, no one knows what the perfect model looks like.
Researchers are moving cautiously as they grapple with uncertainty about the effectiveness of in-school phone bans on mental health. Data yields mixed results — and there’s growing a sentiment that more has to be done outside of schools to get kids off their phones and back into the world.
A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly three quarters of Americans support restrictive phone use in schools, up six percentage points since last year — but many are also unsure how far the bans should go. About 44% of respondents supported all day bans, with others split on whether students should have access to their phones between classes or at lunch.
Leave the kids alone. They’re already oppressed enough (the real reason their mental health is shit, phones are a scapegoat)
Remember all the shitty stuff happening in classrooms that’s been outed by phone cameras over the last 10+ years? Pepperidge Farms remembers…
Smartphones are the medium through which children are most oppressed through social media apps, poisoning their brains. Instagram and Facebook deliberately targeted young girls to make them feel like shit about their bodies, and engagement based algorithms (particularly YouTube) pumped harmful fascist ideas to young boys.
You’re downvoted, but the data show this to be accurate.
Not really bothered by downvotes when, like you say, the data is pretty clear on the matter.
Then it is the social media companies that should go or fix their act, not phones in and of themselves.
Sure, but the phones are the tools which are facilitating the harm and they’re not necessary for a child to have in school. I’d even go far enough to say that no minor should have full unfettered access to a smartphone or the internet but this requires a level of involvement from parents.
Kids get bullied in school. Kids feel alone. LGBTQ+ kids, neurodivergent kids, others. Phones connect them to support. Friends, like minded folks, etc. Some get support at home. Some don’t.
Bans will harm a lot of kids. It’s a sad and dangerous moral panic.
Parental involvement would be wonderful, but we should not punish all kids just because some parents aren’t up to the task.
I’m showing my age here - I was alone in school. I am neurodivergent and part of the LGBTQ+ community, both things that were not well understood or accepted when I was in school. The only brief pieces of support and connection I had was online needed to be on a PC as smartphones were simply not a thing.
Are you saying that children today must have instant and immediate access to friends and like minded people online during school hours? The children I know (i.e. children within my family and the children of friends) don’t have smartphones at school and are able to wait until break times or after school to socialise but they’re also not American; is this a uniquely American issue?
We have to acknowledge the times we’re in. Many kids only access to non-face-to-face communication is their phone, no desktop, no laptop (or at least not one that isn’t school-issued and locked down). Many kids don’t have the support they need at home. Many kids don’t have enough friends they can regularly meet face-to-face. Kids have less autonomy these days than the times when we grew up, too.
Consider if your PC was taken away because landline phones existed. Or if your landline phone was taken because you could use the postal service or pass notes in class. Etc.
So, no, please don’t focus on the “instant and immediate” part of your question, and focus on the “access”. In that sense, yes I am saying kids today must have access to friends and like-minded people. Banning phones in schools could take that access away for a significant portion of their waking hours. And for vulnerable kids who don’t have steady home lives, that might be a disproportionate effect.
I do believe that we should adapt to prevent new technology from disrupting education, but I believe blanket bans have too great a potential for harm.
Thank you for expanding more on this, it’s gone a long way to helping me understand better.
I still believe that social media, as it currently exists, is something which is harmful to children for reasons I laid out previously but connection and support are important.
The perfect solution would be to disallow any kind of traditional social media outside of break times whilst bolstering better spaces for support and friendship both online and offline; the first part of that is definitely a symptom of the second but I’m not sure how to best solve that outside of direct community support and advocacy for such spaces.
I agree with this. I do think that traditional social media is often (maybe usually, for some platforms) harmful.
I think local community advocacy is vital, and I also think it’s a “muscle” our society has allowed to wither.
I do think it’s possible to create positive digital spaces as well. I remember the old Google Reader social networking features (few remember), but they created a really positive way to discuss things. And before that, there were a handful of great forums and irc channels I frequented.
I wonder if it’s possible (legally and practically) to make a beehaw equivalent for 13+ kids.
Why are you so obsessed with taking away that access? That’s not a good thing you know
The thread lays out my opinion retty clearly; characterising a discussion as an obsession is being deliberately disingenuous.
We disagree, there are many reasons why they should be allowed, including in order to facilitate learning, and to stop abuse by providing evidence of it happening.
Yeah, good point. There’s lots of phone camera footage that those in power would rather not have made, like cops chokeholding kids in the middle class
Surely learning can be facilitated with devices provided by the school if such devices are necessary? There are dumb phones with cameras that can be used to document any evidence of abuse.
School is prison
Not really what we were discussing and trivialises the harm done by systems of retributive punishment but okay.
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I want to respond to the unschooling bit here as I have some personal experience.
First I acknowledge that this is an anecdotal thing and there are likely examples of unschooling going way better. Second, I really do empathize and appreciate people wanting to not have kids grow up in a system that perpetuates toxic aspects of capitalism.
This being said, I think unschooling, while having a fine motive, can set up children to have extremely difficult lives. We have family friends who are unschooling their children and their knowledge and behavior is concerning to me. The eldest is 13 years old and doesn’t know how to read, because she never had any interest in learning. I am fine if a child wants to be a creative. But learning to read and write I feel is too important a skill to leave out of any curriculum. I won’t let that become just some tool that perpetuates capitalism.
Do I enjoy our capitalist society? No, and I want to work towards a better future in that regard. But I also think unschooling just tries to cover ears to the reality we live in. I think it’s important to teach children to criticize the systems we are in. But if a child grows up wanting to be a creative, but can’t read, write, do simple arithmetic, all sorts of skills that one would need to just survive in a capitalist dominated world… Like what’s the point. Traditional school does not have to be nefarious. I grew up in Seattle public schools and was taught to criticize these systems despite being a cog in it at the time.
We did not want to be in school and ran away from it all the time. It was a terrible, awful experience. Yet we did have a thirst for learning just not in a rigidly defined system where we could only fail or pass, where hierarchy was the main thing going on, where teacher’s egos could not take being told they were wrong. Where we were bullied and stressed all the time.
We did not do well in school but thrived outside of it as far as learning was concerned.
We hope you can appreciate why we push so strongly for unschooling or any other system that is not the terrible experience we were forced into, and we know many still are as well, to this very day.
I was abused (bullying is a cutesy term to.avoid calling it what it really is) in school and still have social anxiety from it. It’s only “a good place for socialization” because all the other ones are banned being banned (see OP’s post) or are engineered out of the built environment. In high school I learned as much out of class as I did in, and the more valuable half too.
I’m sorry y’all had a bad experience in traditional school. But I still think a healthily funded well curriculumed public school system can be a great thing. I recently had my 10 year high school reunion and it was a really awesome time with a bunch of smart thinkers and kind souls. Ofc that’s not the experience for everyone, but a lot of people have great experiences in school. I mean I was also bullied in school but overall am very happy I had my public school experience. I’m sure unschooling can go well too. We can trade anecdotes all day though. I can’t say for sure that unschooling is actually bad and public schools are actually good. What I do know is I’m not ready to throw away the public school system just yet
What we are saying is that it needs to exist for reasons other than teaching to a test or to get a job, we agree it shouldn’t be thrown away but it needs to be massively different and way less abusive.
Oh yeah I for sure agree with that. Standardized tests are fucking stupid. There are issues with the way it’s set up and think it can and should be changed and overhauled. I don’t think giving youth some direction on things to learn is bad but it for sure right now drives kids to a certain capitalistic end goal. Which I also still think isn’t totally un-useful in this fucked up system we find ourselves in (though it can be done kinder). Give kids the tools to understand why the system is fucked up while also gentally preparing them to work through it and maybe try and change it for the better.
I think we’re mostly on the same page. I do sometimes get worried about homeschool stuff as this perpetuation of the hyper individualistic nature of the United States (where I live) but there are some things a traditional school system can learn from it. Thanks for talking through it with me though c:
Yes, we agree on that.
Oh, we are well aware how homeschooling and unschooling can go wrong, especially in such a system, we are not fans of it and so not support abuse perpetuated in any education, public, home, or otherwise.
We are against it being for religious reasons or conspiracy reasons, we just want people to be able to choose what truly works for them, public school does not work for everyone currently and those who it does not work for should not be forced into it.
Those who it does work for still deserve better than what is avaliable currently though.
Snapchat in particular (but TikTok and Instagram, too) is absolutely toxic for children and should be illegal, imho. This legislation is a step in the right direction, but we’ll need to educate parents to move the needle even further if we want to see major mental health gains.
If you’re a parent reading this, please consider getting your child a dumb phone instead of a smartphone! A tablet at home is fine—not having notifications 24/7, and being in a semi-monitored space (with no social media apps installed) will make a big difference.
Sounds like a problem specific to Snapchat. I recommend everyone against corpo crap. It’s not even strictly an age thing they jsut abuse us all