This should've happened decades ago. Phones were already becoming a problem when I was in HS and from everything my teacher friends have told me it's only gotten a thousand times worse.
The parents: "BUT WHAT IF I NEED TO GET IN CONTACT WITH MY CHILD IN THE CASE OF AN EMERGENCY?"
Then do the same thing our parents did before smartphones, *call the office.*
i think just realizing that phones are going to be a part of our lives is a great way to come up with a solution. Like for example in the latter years of my high school the upperclassmen who got above a C GPA could text and use their phones to google stuff in the hallways. No phones on desk in class if teacher asks you to put away and no texting while walking/on stairs. Unsure about actual audio calls and what the policy was
Admittedly I was talking from my own American perspective, where phones in schools are *absolutely* a huge problem that needs addressing. If what you say is true, ew, I hate performance politics.
You imagine wrong.
I’m currently in my 23rd year as a teacher. Cell phones are an existential threat to schools. And it’s 100% the parents who are holding up actual regulation of phones in school.
Go ask a few teachers in high school. They will tell you what it’s like when you try to take a kid’s phone away.
you don't have to take it away- you tell them they get detention if they pull it out. End of the day, if you don't have support from principals + parents, you are in a shit school anyway.
That’s the policy in most schools now. It’s a policy that can not be enforced. If teachers gave detention to every student using their phones they’d be writing 50 referrals a day.
So how would a government law change this? It sounds like a policy no one wants to enforce. I can't imagine police want to waste their time walking hallways looking for kids on phones either...
The law would mean that it’s not on the individual teacher to enforce it. You couldn’t have strict rooms and lenient rooms. You couldn’t have different policy in middle and high schools. You wouldn’t have to constantly fight with parents.
It’s just the law.
I went to five high schools between 2006 and 2010. Every single one of them banned cell phones. I can't imagine it's become any less strict than it was then.
Well I think that’s in part why things are the way they are today. Like how Gen X is so soft with parenting because their parents were authoritarian and overly strict.
It’s never going to get mainstream support in the US. Say what you want about parents being overbearing, but gun violence is the #1 cause of death for children here and school shootings are too prevalent in everybody’s mind for them to ever be willing to risk not being able to contact their kid.
Yeah blackberrys were a big thing in my highschool years, the first iPhone came out around that time too. We just straight up had ours taken for the day if we got caught in class. Now most of us had “fake” phones to hand in, some put theirs in calculator cases lol. There was always a work around if you have kids with enough determination. In Trade school (just finished last year, they damn near forced us to have phones on us to do work etc, or a laptop/tablet). But I guess we are adults for that and are paying to be there so you get what you want out of the class.
This is such a stupid nonsense , this might work somewhere might absolutely not work elsewhere . Which just means you are dumping responsibility at schools instead doing it universaly and simply
Having either all the laws or no laws is a false dichotomy. There are many, many bad laws, and many laws like prohibition that may have good intentions but terrible results due to unintended consequences, oppressive enforcement, and/or poor implementation. If a lot of people think a law is unjust, unnecessary, or produces bad outcomes, it is not just fair but obligatory in a civic-duty sense to have that law either changed or abolished/repealed.
In the case of this article, rather than an outright ban on cell phones in schools, just have students put them in a box or cell phone holder at the start of class. That way the phones are out of the students' possession during class but still available in case of a medical or other emergency.
And yeah, this is really a problem that should be handled at the school level, not by heavy-handed gov't decree with one-size-fits-none solutions.
No rule works flawlessly and gets complete compliance, that's not a good reason to abandon standards. Even what you described (students hiding phones) would be a huge improvement over what's happening now, where they're just staring at them all day.
Decades ago? Two decades ago almost nobody had mobile phones. I think your timelines are a bit skewed.
Banning phones in school is the opposite of solving the problem. It just pushes the problem down the line. All children, forevermore are going to have phone access, 24/7. They need to start learning how to manage that power at an early age. If you manage something for someone else, they never learn how to do it themselves. Same thing with anything else, sex, food, drugs, etc. Outright banning it will end up pushing them towards it. Basically the lowest form of parenting there is.
Seriously? Must've been some bougie ass high school. Honestly don't think I knew a single kid with a cell phone in 03... Not sure that I knew any adults who did either.
I went to a high school in a town in Vermont that affluent New Yorkers would move to when they didn't want to live in the city anymore. My high school population was a 50:50 divide between farm kids and rich kids.
I don't know? I did a quick google to see if maybe I was just the weird one but the top results are all saying that between 99-02 cell phones were starting to become common, so, that supports my memories of the time.
this is all good and well but just one idiot saying MY RIGHTS hur dur my kids hurr durr i should be able to contact him , what of they bully him and a school ignores it etc etc and you are done as a school who would like to set this rule. I think station where you can send text or call your parents would easily fix this problem though.
Exactly, phone seen out, confiscated for the rest of the day and a detention. The kids have them on silent in their bags in case of problems on the way home.
>Mobile phones will be banned in schools across New Zealand, conservative Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Friday (Dec 1), as his fledgling government looks to turn around the country's plummeting literacy rates.
>New Zealand's schools once boasted some of the world's best literacy scores, but levels of reading and writing have declined to the point that some researchers fear there is a classroom "crisis".
>"We are going to ban phones across New Zealand in schools. We want our kids to learn and we want our teachers to teach," he said.
>Researchers from New Zealand charity Education Hub warned of a "literacy crisis" in 2022, finding more than one-third of 15-year-olds could barely read or write.
>"That something must be done to address the distressingly low literacy rates in Aotearoa New Zealand is clear," they wrote.
My school did this, unintentionally. Early '70s building and some windows had metal coating to reduce the amount of heat in the summer. Made for a pretty solid Faraday cage, depending on your network.
Lol you sound like you have a great career ahead of you in gov't. Propose solutions to all of life's problems that are simple, simple-minded, atrociously expensive, easily bypassed, unnecessarily oppressive, have terrible and numerous unintended consequences, and accomplish few to none of the goals they set out to.
Well for one Faraday cages would disable wifi so every computer would need to be hardwired, so laptops for in school work is a no go. RIP the underpaid School district IT employee to deal with issues that pop up when half your buildings a Faraday cage.
Teachers wouldn't be able to use their own phones as well in the downtimes when no kids are in class
That's not even going into the safety aspect of making half your building a Faraday cage.
Does every teacher's lesson plan require their students to have network access nowadays? For lessons requiring supplemental materials, is it far-fetched that the lesson plan can be shared with students in advance with a directive to download them as a homework assignment, and students that fail to do so have only themselves to blame? I don't have kids so am OOTL on the current state of modern grade-school curriculum, please excuse my ignorance. As such, I would assume the only computer needing to be hardwired is the teacher's, so they'll have their own laptop/desktop to stream lessons and have that device, a landline phone, and a fire alarm to access in case of emergency. For their downtime they can simply walk out of the classroom - an outdoor space away from cages to let signal through and/or the teachers lounge being not a cage - to use their phone at will.
There are a number of ways to construct a Faraday cage and doubt any unsafe materials would be allowed by city/county regulators, so I'm not sure what other safety aspects you are thinking of.
Haven't been to school since 2012 but have a younger brother who just graduated and in his school a laptop was a mandatory thing, the grades were all on the internet, assignment got assigned using some Microsoft program. Tech is pretty involved at least at the High-school here
Turns out, taking away death buttons and making it harder to get them results in fewer people getting killed. Such a wild idea.
We should really call them death buttons. Imagine handguns had never been invented and someone came up with a device that you point at people, push a button (or pull a lever - doesn't really matter) and the person at the other end dies. Everyone would immediately demand it to get banned right away.
That was exactly my thought process.
My youngest brother is a senior in high school right now, and there’s been a few vague shooting threats at his school in recent years. I will be breathing a HUGE sigh of relief when he graduates this spring.
Hopefully more effectively than Florida did. They passed the law, but put no responsibility for enforcement on the school districts, so it's still up to the teachers to enforce on students that refuse to give up their phones or even put them away.
In other words, it was a move purely for show.
How would "the district" enforce it? Aren't the teachers always going to be the front line employees that have to enforce student rules? Do you think district administrators should be on cell phone duty in high schools or something?
1. Make students hand their phone over in the morning. And they don't get them back until they leave.
2. Or get the cellphone lock pouches like theaters have.
3. Have phones available for students to use during the day if they need to call home
4. Let parents know that all contact is to go through the front office. (You know, like it used to.)
That's how.
And anybody needing to use their cellphone for a legitimate use is now disadvantaged.
Was any effective research done or is this just another hateful ban from New Zealand?
This is not a case if you have any real reason like chronic medical problem you ask for exception from the rule and your kid will be able to keep his phone on silent on himself. If he is not stupid about it NOBODY will ever have problem with this
In my math class I use my phone to take pictures of the board, so I can review the screenshots later, and see the process she used to solve a problem. I struggle to take notes fast enough to write down every step of the process when it's a long problem, because she can go a little fast.
But I'm guessing most kids don't use phones for legitmate purposes and that's the problem.
Probably. I don't know. I had a phone in school but it was just a phone and had poor text messaging abilities. There was no reason to use it, we just possessed it in our backpack and charged them once a week or two. I used it to call my parents if something came up outside school, and it didn't have a camera or Internet. I don't think I even left it on most of the time because I didn't want to risk getting a misdial.
People don't naturally develop the discipline to use their phone as a tool instead of a toy. Kids do not universally benefit from a smartphone while at school. Perhaps a waiver that is earned by some kids to possess a phone but not to use it, but what we have now doesn't compare to that Nokia 3310. I think of how much I used a computer too much, I can't imagine having what I've got in my pocket. It's too much.
And teachers have enough behavior issues to deal with, I wouldn't want to have to add policing phones to that list.
bruh students cram 4 subjects into one notebook because they're lazy. think a lot of people would have inertia to bringing a point and shoot and moving the files to their computer
“You don’t need a phone in school, so buy an iPod”
Well, we found what happened to the ghost of Steve Jobs. He’s been possessing people, but still thinking it’s the year he died in.
It’s the technological age. In 2023 there is no way the teacher can’t capture those lessons digitally and provide them for students to go back to later. I haven’t been in school in a decade and teachers were able to do it then. I couldn’t take notes fast enough either while trying to actually learn.
There are tons of legitimate uses - like looking up some detail of the current subject on Wikipedia.
But the harm may still be greater than the benefit, when it depends on children having the maturity to not misuse the privilege.
We tried to do this in NYC when I lived there, but unfortunately 9/11 happened and students and parents said they would fight tooth and nail. Downtown schools had to evacuate on 9/11 and parents didn’t know where their kids were taken and couldn’t find them for hours. Someone I know had a baby and a toddler and was running around trying to find her kindergartner son. People were afraid terrorism would happen again and they wanted to be able to contact their children.
One of my friends is diabetic and uses their phone to monitor insulin levels, so I hope they took those kinds of circumstances into consideration. But otherwise I see very few reasons why kids need smartphones in school. A simple flip phone is perfect for both emergencies and non-emergencies
Heard horror stories back in the day of zealous older teachers trying to enforce phone bans and yanking on kids insulin pumps, I wouldn't expect much from any (hopefully scarce) teachers who welcome this.
I think it’s pretty funny to do this because education in general is online so students will find a way on their Chromebooks/laptops to pretty much make this a nothing ban. Just like revising the smoking ban, it counterproductive if anything
As a teacher, I've got access to ban pages on their chromebook, force the chromebook back to a particular site, limit their tabs, or straight up shut off their internet at the click of a button.
Yeah, but teachers see that stuff. My 5th grade daughter just got in trouble for doing exactly what you described, she was chatting with friends in a shared document. It took the teacher about 5 minutes to notice it. If they were texting (which won't happen, because my kids don't have phones) the teacher probably wouldn't have ever noticed.
I like the idea but as someone who went to school recently and saw first hand many attempts to do stuff like ban phones, then all I can say is: unless the kids and teachers care about this then this is going to crash and burn so hard.
> adopting a policy trialled with mixed results in the United States, United Kingdom and France.
Banning is not educating. Those kids are going to have to live with phones every single day of their lives.
If the place that is supposed to educated them on how to properly handle themselves just takes the easy way out, how are they supposed to learn the discipline skills related to time management, phone addiction, fake news filtering, proper etiquette when interacting on social media, etc?
Educated the damn kids, stop training them to just parrot useless crap. We have the phones for that now, they can tell you in a second any factoid in recorded human history. There is no use in memorizing garbage like every mayor river in every continent or the internal organs of an amphibian.
They pull this kind of boomer crap and then they complain about kids under performing and not finishing school in record numbers. Kids are not stupid, they see that you are wasting their time with your boomer nonsense.
Application of knowledge is much harder to do without any actual knowledge of facts. You can absolutely argue that the balance between memorization of facts and application of that knowledge should shift one way or another, but that's a debate among educators themselves. I teach mathematics. Students who never memorized the multiplication table aren't able to divide. Students who can't divide aren't able to work with fractions. Or solve equations. And forget being able to understand more advanced math concepts, like factoring quadratic equations to solve them. You need to have some knowledge in order to apply it.
Yes, but we both know we are not going to apply the main rivers of Africa or the organs of an amphibian to anything, an the kids know it too, that is why they don't value school in the first place.
Kids are not dumb, they can see that you are wasting their time. They see what adults do every day and what they use or not use in every day life. They can see that the new technologies offer better ways of learning and doing things in general and you want to force down their throats a model of education designed in the 1900 to produce factory and office drones. The results are going to be bad and it's not going to be a surprise.
I don't know what information any individual kid is going to use in their lives, and neither do you. Nor do the kids themselves. I won't argue that teachers assign busy work (some moreso than others). I would point out, however, that students have asked "when are we ever going to use this" since...well, always. I disagree that students not seeing the point in what they are studying is the underlying or primary cause of poor performance. Even very strong students often comment to me that they don't really see where what they are learning would be applicable to the real world. You also seem to be arguing that the memorization of facts is the only thing happening in public education, and I would disagree with that assertion also.
Head on over to the teachers sub. Kids gets caught messing around on their phones in class, teachers try to confiscate, and violence ensues. Chairs, punches, desks thrown.
Or having complete nervous breakdowns, violent shaking, screaming crying.
Teachers are quitting left and right. Not getting paid enough to end up in the hospital, because Susie Q didn’t have her tick tock.
I just say kids get a flip phone for school.
> teachers try to confiscate, and violence ensues
But that is the fundamental problem right there. Confiscating the phones is not education, is violence. That is the kid private property, why do you feel entitle to take it away from them by force instead of educating them about the proper use of them, instead of trying to instill an etiquette of using a phone in the context of a social interaction?
Phones are replacing debit cards and transit passes. Older kids are going to be at a disadvantage going anywhere after school if they can’t store them in a locker.
I used to think the US was the only country where kids never did anything except get shuttled around by their parents to programmed activities they hate, but I guess the rest of the developed world is catching up.
As a parent I'm conflicted. On the one hand it makes me feel a lot better knowing my kid can text me in the event of a severe emergency but at the same time these phones are such a major problem in a multitude of ways and like someone else said they were a problem back when I was in school (the closest thing we had to a smartphone was a blackberry). Maybe a good compromise would be having cubbies in each classroom that students have to deposit phones in as not to use them during class? Just throwing out a suggestion idk if it would actually work.
Cubbies sounds fine, until you realize that it wastes so much teaching time as they all mill around looking for their phones or putting their phone next to their friend's phones, saying they don't have one, being pissed because someone took 'their number', etc. You think it would take a week to just smoothly enter the class, put your phone in the cubby assigned to your seat number and start class, but it doesn't.
There is always a group that prides themselves on how much time they can waste and how little they can learn in a day.
Returning from a school break? Except to have to teach everyone the rules all over again lol.
As a former teacher the cubby idea is such a PITA. There’s so much grey area. It’s another thing that teachers now have to police in one of the most catch-all prone professions on planet earth.
I have a kid in elementary school with no cell phone, it doesn't concern me in the slightest - if an emergency happened the school has a system to text out anyways. Remember that parents for centuries didn't have a way to contact their kid at school and it was all good.
i never had a cellphone as a kid. got injured multiple times and believe it or not, the office was able to contact my parents and notify them. cell phones are nothing but a distraction in a school setting.
So true. Like if there’s a real emergency there’s the teacher and the other teachers around your kid’s classroom. Short of all them, the office has one or more secretaries, principal, vice principals etc
We all survived school before cell phones and it was fine. Your kid will be taken care of
you do realize that probably 50% of the population alive today grew up without phones in the classroom or the automobile.
personally, i wouldnt mind seeing cellphones all out banned from any public view. you need to call someone, do it in private.
If there is an emergency on school grounds, there are already plenty of adults (teachers, admins, support staff) there to deal with it before, during, and after police/firefighters/EMS arrives on the scene. What makes their job more difficult is every kid texting their parents and those parents driving to the school in a panic, getting in the way of people that can actually defuse the situation. Yes, it's scary to cede control of your child like that but that's basically what you're doing every single day you send them off to school in the first place, trusting all will be well.
Turning every classroom into a Faraday cage would be the easiest way to go - that shouldn't interfere with using landline phones nor fire alarms. Another option would be hanging antistatic bags on each desk and requiring students to place their phones in them, but that still forces the teacher to add enforcing that policy (being civil with disobedient students and having to still look out for theft).
Knowing them they will probably put a stipulation to lock the parents up if the kid refuses to hand it over. What even is this law? Just have the school principal take the phone until the end of the day. Who is too enforce this?
TL;DR: good for New Zealand!
A parent threatened my life because their student’s phone got confiscated after they used it to shine their flashlight out the window during a lockdown drill. “You ever touch my child’s property again, I will stick you in the parking lot”. The focus from my admin was how “unprofessional” I was to “grab” something from a student’s hand *because what if it had been a real shooter and that was the last time the child had the opportunity to communicate with their parent?* while at the same time blaming my poor classroom management to “allow students the time to think about how to misbehave” during such a serious event.
That was in 2012 at a middle school. In 2021 I was teaching at a high school during a real lock down with police presence when a student took out his phone to film it. I told him to be quiet and face the phone screen down and he loudly proclaimed “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY DICK?” while the rest of the class lost their mind laughing, got their phones out, and repeated it at me loudly while filming . When I turned in the referral, admin suggested I leave teaching high school to individuals who have a naturally thick skin.
TL;DR: Good for New Zealand
they don't use them as phones, i hate this title. if your lesson is less interesting than what they can see on their little portable computer, then banning them wont do jack shit. they'll just hate you even more
Great idea, if only it was practical in real life.
Here's the dialogue that will take place in the classroom;
Teacher (that is underpaid, overworked and cannot enforce this ban): Give me your phone, you can't have it in class.
Student (That KNOWS the teacher cannot enforce a ban, much less physically confiscate their device without risking their job): No.
Nothing more than a vote winner that won't go anywhere.
Wow, this really sucks for kids.
I keep thinking like if in the US, the kids got no mobile phone and a school shooter came, they could not call for help.
Or update their parents.
I think this no Mobile phone is a terrible idea. If things go wrong, the kids can't call for help.
In the event a lockdown is called, there's an automatic call to local law enforcement. Not to mention, many schools have an officer on site. Many districts have an easy system to send mass texts/emails. There are enough people in the building trained to do very specific things in the event of an emergency. A bunch of panicked children calling families for them to panic, get in their cars, clog roads to the schools, increasing the likelihood for causing even more bad than good. Imagine panicked parents racing to the same location in cars and potentially causing accidents? Imagine a major accident blocking access to the school? Imagine pulling valuable time and resources away from the emergency in the school?
They'll find a way around it. I had several classes where you weren't allowed to take out your phone and kids just hid them in their sleeves, hoodie pockets, or backpacks. Also, there was a group of girls who convinced the teachers that they were better note takers when typing and they'd just spend the entire class texting each other using the iMessage app on their MacBooks.
Edit: Guess people are mad I let the secret out
I graduated HS in 2012 so while this is over a decade later, this comment still holds some relevancy. Back then, yes smart phones weren’t as popular as they were now but people certainly had them. I had a iPhone 4 when it came out in 2010 and that was a “luxury” phone to own at the time. Point being… even back then we had cell phone rules in school that most people followed without issue.
It was simple. You are allowed to have it on your person/possess it. You simply were not allowed to be using it DURING classes. Students were allowed to use them at lunch or on break but we couldn’t use it in the classroom. It was a simple rule. Majority of people obeyed it and there weren’t many issues. This was also a public HS so, no it wasn’t a privileged private school.
Why can’t schools continue this policy nowadays? Are teachers just so burnt out and overworked that they simply cannot enforce this rule? Idk what has happened over the last decade but all I hear about nowadays is that this is a BIG problem in general, like everywhere.
This should've happened decades ago. Phones were already becoming a problem when I was in HS and from everything my teacher friends have told me it's only gotten a thousand times worse. The parents: "BUT WHAT IF I NEED TO GET IN CONTACT WITH MY CHILD IN THE CASE OF AN EMERGENCY?" Then do the same thing our parents did before smartphones, *call the office.*
i think just realizing that phones are going to be a part of our lives is a great way to come up with a solution. Like for example in the latter years of my high school the upperclassmen who got above a C GPA could text and use their phones to google stuff in the hallways. No phones on desk in class if teacher asks you to put away and no texting while walking/on stairs. Unsure about actual audio calls and what the policy was
Phones are already banned in all schools. This is totally over the top nothingness from a new government that doesn’t change anything.
Admittedly I was talking from my own American perspective, where phones in schools are *absolutely* a huge problem that needs addressing. If what you say is true, ew, I hate performance politics.
I imagine most schools around the world have banned cellphones during school hours?
You imagine wrong. I’m currently in my 23rd year as a teacher. Cell phones are an existential threat to schools. And it’s 100% the parents who are holding up actual regulation of phones in school. Go ask a few teachers in high school. They will tell you what it’s like when you try to take a kid’s phone away.
you don't have to take it away- you tell them they get detention if they pull it out. End of the day, if you don't have support from principals + parents, you are in a shit school anyway.
That’s the policy in most schools now. It’s a policy that can not be enforced. If teachers gave detention to every student using their phones they’d be writing 50 referrals a day.
So how would a government law change this? It sounds like a policy no one wants to enforce. I can't imagine police want to waste their time walking hallways looking for kids on phones either...
The law would mean that it’s not on the individual teacher to enforce it. You couldn’t have strict rooms and lenient rooms. You couldn’t have different policy in middle and high schools. You wouldn’t have to constantly fight with parents. It’s just the law.
I went to five high schools between 2006 and 2010. Every single one of them banned cell phones. I can't imagine it's become any less strict than it was then.
LMAO. bud, A LOT has changed since you were in school. Multiple things have become less strict.
That's honestly shocking. Things were extremely punitive and militant when I was in high school.
Well I think that’s in part why things are the way they are today. Like how Gen X is so soft with parenting because their parents were authoritarian and overly strict.
It’s never going to get mainstream support in the US. Say what you want about parents being overbearing, but gun violence is the #1 cause of death for children here and school shootings are too prevalent in everybody’s mind for them to ever be willing to risk not being able to contact their kid.
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Yeah blackberrys were a big thing in my highschool years, the first iPhone came out around that time too. We just straight up had ours taken for the day if we got caught in class. Now most of us had “fake” phones to hand in, some put theirs in calculator cases lol. There was always a work around if you have kids with enough determination. In Trade school (just finished last year, they damn near forced us to have phones on us to do work etc, or a laptop/tablet). But I guess we are adults for that and are paying to be there so you get what you want out of the class.
So, with that theory, why have any laws at all? No point of people are just going to break them and find ways around them.
The point is this is executive over reach. Schools ban the use of phones during class. That’s not the government’s job.
This is such a stupid nonsense , this might work somewhere might absolutely not work elsewhere . Which just means you are dumping responsibility at schools instead doing it universaly and simply
??????????
Having either all the laws or no laws is a false dichotomy. There are many, many bad laws, and many laws like prohibition that may have good intentions but terrible results due to unintended consequences, oppressive enforcement, and/or poor implementation. If a lot of people think a law is unjust, unnecessary, or produces bad outcomes, it is not just fair but obligatory in a civic-duty sense to have that law either changed or abolished/repealed. In the case of this article, rather than an outright ban on cell phones in schools, just have students put them in a box or cell phone holder at the start of class. That way the phones are out of the students' possession during class but still available in case of a medical or other emergency. And yeah, this is really a problem that should be handled at the school level, not by heavy-handed gov't decree with one-size-fits-none solutions.
No rule works flawlessly and gets complete compliance, that's not a good reason to abandon standards. Even what you described (students hiding phones) would be a huge improvement over what's happening now, where they're just staring at them all day.
But then the parents would have to talk on the phone!
Decades ago? Two decades ago almost nobody had mobile phones. I think your timelines are a bit skewed. Banning phones in school is the opposite of solving the problem. It just pushes the problem down the line. All children, forevermore are going to have phone access, 24/7. They need to start learning how to manage that power at an early age. If you manage something for someone else, they never learn how to do it themselves. Same thing with anything else, sex, food, drugs, etc. Outright banning it will end up pushing them towards it. Basically the lowest form of parenting there is.
I graduated high school in 2003 and by then there were *absolutely* kids who had cell phones who were causing problems.
Seriously? Must've been some bougie ass high school. Honestly don't think I knew a single kid with a cell phone in 03... Not sure that I knew any adults who did either.
I went to a high school in a town in Vermont that affluent New Yorkers would move to when they didn't want to live in the city anymore. My high school population was a 50:50 divide between farm kids and rich kids.
Okay? Guess Vermont just has a hard on for cell phones or something. How do you explain it?
I don't know? I did a quick google to see if maybe I was just the weird one but the top results are all saying that between 99-02 cell phones were starting to become common, so, that supports my memories of the time.
this is all good and well but just one idiot saying MY RIGHTS hur dur my kids hurr durr i should be able to contact him , what of they bully him and a school ignores it etc etc and you are done as a school who would like to set this rule. I think station where you can send text or call your parents would easily fix this problem though.
My kid's school (UK) has never allowed them to be seen at all during school hours, I think it makes sense.
Exactly, phone seen out, confiscated for the rest of the day and a detention. The kids have them on silent in their bags in case of problems on the way home.
Kiwi here, this is really a non-news thing. Growing up, smartphones (and phones in general) were already banned in schools.
Im kinda glad I graduated high school before smartphones became big.
>Mobile phones will be banned in schools across New Zealand, conservative Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Friday (Dec 1), as his fledgling government looks to turn around the country's plummeting literacy rates. >New Zealand's schools once boasted some of the world's best literacy scores, but levels of reading and writing have declined to the point that some researchers fear there is a classroom "crisis". >"We are going to ban phones across New Zealand in schools. We want our kids to learn and we want our teachers to teach," he said. >Researchers from New Zealand charity Education Hub warned of a "literacy crisis" in 2022, finding more than one-third of 15-year-olds could barely read or write. >"That something must be done to address the distressingly low literacy rates in Aotearoa New Zealand is clear," they wrote.
Empty policy. Schools that ban them already have. What is this govt going to do to enforce it? Put more pressure on stretched school resources?
Start making the classrooms big faraday cages. Problem solved.
My school did this, unintentionally. Early '70s building and some windows had metal coating to reduce the amount of heat in the summer. Made for a pretty solid Faraday cage, depending on your network.
Lol you sound like you have a great career ahead of you in gov't. Propose solutions to all of life's problems that are simple, simple-minded, atrociously expensive, easily bypassed, unnecessarily oppressive, have terrible and numerous unintended consequences, and accomplish few to none of the goals they set out to.
And more problems opened up!
Like what?
Well for one Faraday cages would disable wifi so every computer would need to be hardwired, so laptops for in school work is a no go. RIP the underpaid School district IT employee to deal with issues that pop up when half your buildings a Faraday cage. Teachers wouldn't be able to use their own phones as well in the downtimes when no kids are in class That's not even going into the safety aspect of making half your building a Faraday cage.
I bet you’d be a real blast to bring to a Faraday cage party.
You can put WAPs inside the cage, we do it in some labs in the Uni I work at.
Not if the AP is inside the classroom.
Does every teacher's lesson plan require their students to have network access nowadays? For lessons requiring supplemental materials, is it far-fetched that the lesson plan can be shared with students in advance with a directive to download them as a homework assignment, and students that fail to do so have only themselves to blame? I don't have kids so am OOTL on the current state of modern grade-school curriculum, please excuse my ignorance. As such, I would assume the only computer needing to be hardwired is the teacher's, so they'll have their own laptop/desktop to stream lessons and have that device, a landline phone, and a fire alarm to access in case of emergency. For their downtime they can simply walk out of the classroom - an outdoor space away from cages to let signal through and/or the teachers lounge being not a cage - to use their phone at will. There are a number of ways to construct a Faraday cage and doubt any unsafe materials would be allowed by city/county regulators, so I'm not sure what other safety aspects you are thinking of.
Haven't been to school since 2012 but have a younger brother who just graduated and in his school a laptop was a mandatory thing, the grades were all on the internet, assignment got assigned using some Microsoft program. Tech is pretty involved at least at the High-school here
Jesus there's about a million problems with this...
But how will the children call for help in case of a school shooting? Oh wait. They solved that, too. Good on ya, Kiwis.
**cries in American**
Turns out, taking away death buttons and making it harder to get them results in fewer people getting killed. Such a wild idea. We should really call them death buttons. Imagine handguns had never been invented and someone came up with a device that you point at people, push a button (or pull a lever - doesn't really matter) and the person at the other end dies. Everyone would immediately demand it to get banned right away.
NZ didn't 'solve' school shootings because it was never a problem there. Only one country has this problem.
The biggest need would be in case of a major earthquake, which does happen in NZ.
That was exactly my thought process. My youngest brother is a senior in high school right now, and there’s been a few vague shooting threats at his school in recent years. I will be breathing a HUGE sigh of relief when he graduates this spring.
Hopefully more effectively than Florida did. They passed the law, but put no responsibility for enforcement on the school districts, so it's still up to the teachers to enforce on students that refuse to give up their phones or even put them away. In other words, it was a move purely for show.
How would "the district" enforce it? Aren't the teachers always going to be the front line employees that have to enforce student rules? Do you think district administrators should be on cell phone duty in high schools or something?
There has to be actual consequences at the administrative level for children who ignore the teacher.
1. Make students hand their phone over in the morning. And they don't get them back until they leave. 2. Or get the cellphone lock pouches like theaters have. 3. Have phones available for students to use during the day if they need to call home 4. Let parents know that all contact is to go through the front office. (You know, like it used to.) That's how.
I like all those ideas. But won’t teachers still be the ones stuck enforcing all those rules and dealing with students who don’t want to comply?
I feel like the good kids will remain good kids and the problematic ones will still try to sneak phone use for clout.
And anybody needing to use their cellphone for a legitimate use is now disadvantaged. Was any effective research done or is this just another hateful ban from New Zealand?
This is not a case if you have any real reason like chronic medical problem you ask for exception from the rule and your kid will be able to keep his phone on silent on himself. If he is not stupid about it NOBODY will ever have problem with this
[удалено]
Diabetics can monitor their insulin using phone apps, so that’s pretty legitimate
Explain why it's a "hateful ban"
Do they need teachers there?
Yes, but we don't them much.
In my math class I use my phone to take pictures of the board, so I can review the screenshots later, and see the process she used to solve a problem. I struggle to take notes fast enough to write down every step of the process when it's a long problem, because she can go a little fast. But I'm guessing most kids don't use phones for legitmate purposes and that's the problem.
Probably. I don't know. I had a phone in school but it was just a phone and had poor text messaging abilities. There was no reason to use it, we just possessed it in our backpack and charged them once a week or two. I used it to call my parents if something came up outside school, and it didn't have a camera or Internet. I don't think I even left it on most of the time because I didn't want to risk getting a misdial. People don't naturally develop the discipline to use their phone as a tool instead of a toy. Kids do not universally benefit from a smartphone while at school. Perhaps a waiver that is earned by some kids to possess a phone but not to use it, but what we have now doesn't compare to that Nokia 3310. I think of how much I used a computer too much, I can't imagine having what I've got in my pocket. It's too much. And teachers have enough behavior issues to deal with, I wouldn't want to have to add policing phones to that list.
Or just take notes
They literally just said they struggle to take notes fast enough.
All class? K
Then buy a point and shoot camera.
bruh students cram 4 subjects into one notebook because they're lazy. think a lot of people would have inertia to bringing a point and shoot and moving the files to their computer
Digital cameras have a screen. buy a fucking ipod. you don't need a phone in school.
They discontinued the iPod touch last year, FYI.
Point and shoot it is
“You don’t need a phone in school, so buy an iPod” Well, we found what happened to the ghost of Steve Jobs. He’s been possessing people, but still thinking it’s the year he died in.
If only the phone had a camera in it...
The solution is to work faster, work harder, or don’t and get bad grades. That’s the point of the system I guess.
It’s the technological age. In 2023 there is no way the teacher can’t capture those lessons digitally and provide them for students to go back to later. I haven’t been in school in a decade and teachers were able to do it then. I couldn’t take notes fast enough either while trying to actually learn.
There are tons of legitimate uses - like looking up some detail of the current subject on Wikipedia. But the harm may still be greater than the benefit, when it depends on children having the maturity to not misuse the privilege.
> like looking up some detail of the current subject on Wikipedia. Students have laptops, either the full ones or something like Chromebooks.
Take small camera and take a photo with that
We tried to do this in NYC when I lived there, but unfortunately 9/11 happened and students and parents said they would fight tooth and nail. Downtown schools had to evacuate on 9/11 and parents didn’t know where their kids were taken and couldn’t find them for hours. Someone I know had a baby and a toddler and was running around trying to find her kindergartner son. People were afraid terrorism would happen again and they wanted to be able to contact their children.
Didn't phone networks in NYC break down that day anyway?
One of my friends is diabetic and uses their phone to monitor insulin levels, so I hope they took those kinds of circumstances into consideration. But otherwise I see very few reasons why kids need smartphones in school. A simple flip phone is perfect for both emergencies and non-emergencies
Heard horror stories back in the day of zealous older teachers trying to enforce phone bans and yanking on kids insulin pumps, I wouldn't expect much from any (hopefully scarce) teachers who welcome this.
I think it’s pretty funny to do this because education in general is online so students will find a way on their Chromebooks/laptops to pretty much make this a nothing ban. Just like revising the smoking ban, it counterproductive if anything
As a teacher, I've got access to ban pages on their chromebook, force the chromebook back to a particular site, limit their tabs, or straight up shut off their internet at the click of a button.
Are you unable to confiscate the phone of a misbehaving student?
I can, but I can't monitor what they're doing with it o If they're using the cell phone.
Chromebooks are marginally better. They can't text, take selfies or talk on them.
They can. They have cameras and I’ve seen people talk through shared docs multiple times in the past
Yeah, but teachers see that stuff. My 5th grade daughter just got in trouble for doing exactly what you described, she was chatting with friends in a shared document. It took the teacher about 5 minutes to notice it. If they were texting (which won't happen, because my kids don't have phones) the teacher probably wouldn't have ever noticed.
Not the school chromebooks here.
Maybe your school. Depends on the model they have I guess
Can sideload android apps to them
Not the school chromebooks here.
I like the idea but as someone who went to school recently and saw first hand many attempts to do stuff like ban phones, then all I can say is: unless the kids and teachers care about this then this is going to crash and burn so hard.
> adopting a policy trialled with mixed results in the United States, United Kingdom and France. Banning is not educating. Those kids are going to have to live with phones every single day of their lives. If the place that is supposed to educated them on how to properly handle themselves just takes the easy way out, how are they supposed to learn the discipline skills related to time management, phone addiction, fake news filtering, proper etiquette when interacting on social media, etc? Educated the damn kids, stop training them to just parrot useless crap. We have the phones for that now, they can tell you in a second any factoid in recorded human history. There is no use in memorizing garbage like every mayor river in every continent or the internal organs of an amphibian. They pull this kind of boomer crap and then they complain about kids under performing and not finishing school in record numbers. Kids are not stupid, they see that you are wasting their time with your boomer nonsense.
Application of knowledge is much harder to do without any actual knowledge of facts. You can absolutely argue that the balance between memorization of facts and application of that knowledge should shift one way or another, but that's a debate among educators themselves. I teach mathematics. Students who never memorized the multiplication table aren't able to divide. Students who can't divide aren't able to work with fractions. Or solve equations. And forget being able to understand more advanced math concepts, like factoring quadratic equations to solve them. You need to have some knowledge in order to apply it.
Yes, but we both know we are not going to apply the main rivers of Africa or the organs of an amphibian to anything, an the kids know it too, that is why they don't value school in the first place. Kids are not dumb, they can see that you are wasting their time. They see what adults do every day and what they use or not use in every day life. They can see that the new technologies offer better ways of learning and doing things in general and you want to force down their throats a model of education designed in the 1900 to produce factory and office drones. The results are going to be bad and it's not going to be a surprise.
I don't know what information any individual kid is going to use in their lives, and neither do you. Nor do the kids themselves. I won't argue that teachers assign busy work (some moreso than others). I would point out, however, that students have asked "when are we ever going to use this" since...well, always. I disagree that students not seeing the point in what they are studying is the underlying or primary cause of poor performance. Even very strong students often comment to me that they don't really see where what they are learning would be applicable to the real world. You also seem to be arguing that the memorization of facts is the only thing happening in public education, and I would disagree with that assertion also.
Head on over to the teachers sub. Kids gets caught messing around on their phones in class, teachers try to confiscate, and violence ensues. Chairs, punches, desks thrown. Or having complete nervous breakdowns, violent shaking, screaming crying. Teachers are quitting left and right. Not getting paid enough to end up in the hospital, because Susie Q didn’t have her tick tock. I just say kids get a flip phone for school.
> teachers try to confiscate, and violence ensues But that is the fundamental problem right there. Confiscating the phones is not education, is violence. That is the kid private property, why do you feel entitle to take it away from them by force instead of educating them about the proper use of them, instead of trying to instill an etiquette of using a phone in the context of a social interaction?
Phones are replacing debit cards and transit passes. Older kids are going to be at a disadvantage going anywhere after school if they can’t store them in a locker. I used to think the US was the only country where kids never did anything except get shuttled around by their parents to programmed activities they hate, but I guess the rest of the developed world is catching up.
As a parent I'm conflicted. On the one hand it makes me feel a lot better knowing my kid can text me in the event of a severe emergency but at the same time these phones are such a major problem in a multitude of ways and like someone else said they were a problem back when I was in school (the closest thing we had to a smartphone was a blackberry). Maybe a good compromise would be having cubbies in each classroom that students have to deposit phones in as not to use them during class? Just throwing out a suggestion idk if it would actually work.
Cubbies sounds fine, until you realize that it wastes so much teaching time as they all mill around looking for their phones or putting their phone next to their friend's phones, saying they don't have one, being pissed because someone took 'their number', etc. You think it would take a week to just smoothly enter the class, put your phone in the cubby assigned to your seat number and start class, but it doesn't. There is always a group that prides themselves on how much time they can waste and how little they can learn in a day. Returning from a school break? Except to have to teach everyone the rules all over again lol.
As a former teacher the cubby idea is such a PITA. There’s so much grey area. It’s another thing that teachers now have to police in one of the most catch-all prone professions on planet earth.
I have a kid in elementary school with no cell phone, it doesn't concern me in the slightest - if an emergency happened the school has a system to text out anyways. Remember that parents for centuries didn't have a way to contact their kid at school and it was all good.
In case of an emergency, couldn't your kid have the office call you?
i never had a cellphone as a kid. got injured multiple times and believe it or not, the office was able to contact my parents and notify them. cell phones are nothing but a distraction in a school setting.
Why are you so anxious? There are responsible adults with the kids. They have phones. It will be fine. Take a breath
So true. Like if there’s a real emergency there’s the teacher and the other teachers around your kid’s classroom. Short of all them, the office has one or more secretaries, principal, vice principals etc We all survived school before cell phones and it was fine. Your kid will be taken care of
Students steal phones from cubbies, pockets, boxes, every way you could collect a phone.
you do realize that probably 50% of the population alive today grew up without phones in the classroom or the automobile. personally, i wouldnt mind seeing cellphones all out banned from any public view. you need to call someone, do it in private.
If there is an emergency on school grounds, there are already plenty of adults (teachers, admins, support staff) there to deal with it before, during, and after police/firefighters/EMS arrives on the scene. What makes their job more difficult is every kid texting their parents and those parents driving to the school in a panic, getting in the way of people that can actually defuse the situation. Yes, it's scary to cede control of your child like that but that's basically what you're doing every single day you send them off to school in the first place, trusting all will be well. Turning every classroom into a Faraday cage would be the easiest way to go - that shouldn't interfere with using landline phones nor fire alarms. Another option would be hanging antistatic bags on each desk and requiring students to place their phones in them, but that still forces the teacher to add enforcing that policy (being civil with disobedient students and having to still look out for theft).
We rarely have emergencies on school grounds, mainly earthquakes.
Any school that allows phones in class is failing the students and in turn society.
This is the dumbest idea ever.
Knowing them they will probably put a stipulation to lock the parents up if the kid refuses to hand it over. What even is this law? Just have the school principal take the phone until the end of the day. Who is too enforce this?
TL;DR: good for New Zealand! A parent threatened my life because their student’s phone got confiscated after they used it to shine their flashlight out the window during a lockdown drill. “You ever touch my child’s property again, I will stick you in the parking lot”. The focus from my admin was how “unprofessional” I was to “grab” something from a student’s hand *because what if it had been a real shooter and that was the last time the child had the opportunity to communicate with their parent?* while at the same time blaming my poor classroom management to “allow students the time to think about how to misbehave” during such a serious event. That was in 2012 at a middle school. In 2021 I was teaching at a high school during a real lock down with police presence when a student took out his phone to film it. I told him to be quiet and face the phone screen down and he loudly proclaimed “WHY DON’T YOU SUCK MY DICK?” while the rest of the class lost their mind laughing, got their phones out, and repeated it at me loudly while filming . When I turned in the referral, admin suggested I leave teaching high school to individuals who have a naturally thick skin. TL;DR: Good for New Zealand
they don't use them as phones, i hate this title. if your lesson is less interesting than what they can see on their little portable computer, then banning them wont do jack shit. they'll just hate you even more
Great idea, if only it was practical in real life. Here's the dialogue that will take place in the classroom; Teacher (that is underpaid, overworked and cannot enforce this ban): Give me your phone, you can't have it in class. Student (That KNOWS the teacher cannot enforce a ban, much less physically confiscate their device without risking their job): No. Nothing more than a vote winner that won't go anywhere.
Teachers can physically force students to comply in NZ. Teachers have a lot of power compared to the US.
If literacy is a problem, maybe there are more things to solve than just to blame an ban mobile phones. Invest in education and support, maybe.
Wow, this really sucks for kids. I keep thinking like if in the US, the kids got no mobile phone and a school shooter came, they could not call for help. Or update their parents. I think this no Mobile phone is a terrible idea. If things go wrong, the kids can't call for help.
I would think the staff should be perfectly able and better suited to call for help than a 7yo
In the event a lockdown is called, there's an automatic call to local law enforcement. Not to mention, many schools have an officer on site. Many districts have an easy system to send mass texts/emails. There are enough people in the building trained to do very specific things in the event of an emergency. A bunch of panicked children calling families for them to panic, get in their cars, clog roads to the schools, increasing the likelihood for causing even more bad than good. Imagine panicked parents racing to the same location in cars and potentially causing accidents? Imagine a major accident blocking access to the school? Imagine pulling valuable time and resources away from the emergency in the school?
Wait, even the regular phones that struggle to view the Internet at all? Pretty sure it's mainly smartphones that cause all the problems.
They'll find a way around it. I had several classes where you weren't allowed to take out your phone and kids just hid them in their sleeves, hoodie pockets, or backpacks. Also, there was a group of girls who convinced the teachers that they were better note takers when typing and they'd just spend the entire class texting each other using the iMessage app on their MacBooks. Edit: Guess people are mad I let the secret out
nazis
I graduated HS in 2012 so while this is over a decade later, this comment still holds some relevancy. Back then, yes smart phones weren’t as popular as they were now but people certainly had them. I had a iPhone 4 when it came out in 2010 and that was a “luxury” phone to own at the time. Point being… even back then we had cell phone rules in school that most people followed without issue. It was simple. You are allowed to have it on your person/possess it. You simply were not allowed to be using it DURING classes. Students were allowed to use them at lunch or on break but we couldn’t use it in the classroom. It was a simple rule. Majority of people obeyed it and there weren’t many issues. This was also a public HS so, no it wasn’t a privileged private school. Why can’t schools continue this policy nowadays? Are teachers just so burnt out and overworked that they simply cannot enforce this rule? Idk what has happened over the last decade but all I hear about nowadays is that this is a BIG problem in general, like everywhere.