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UNESCO calls for global ban on smartphones in schools
(news.un.org)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Technology
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The school has an obligation to educate students to the best of their ability.
Allowing any student to have a phone for any reason is an abdication of that responsibility.
Ah ok, that's true, that is their responsibility to educate the students. I'd also say it's their responsibility to provide reasonable accommodations to in demand constituent methods of communication.
So how is allowing a kid checking a phone between classes and having it put away in a locker (so not on their person) during class the school abdicating it's educational responsibility?
(This specific case is my own "reasonable accommodation" theory, so I'm really curious about genuine counterpoints to this that aren't just devil's advocate, and you really seem to believe this, so thank you for your input so far, it is appreciated)
I have no issue with it being in a locker. I have an issue with it being in a classroom.
Let's be real for a minute. Most employers can't realistically ban adults from having personal cell phones on them, so it's just a tolerated intrusion, but the vast majority of adults can't be trusted to use their phones responsibly when they should be being productive. Kids are much worse, and they also desperately need the enforced long focus sessions without the distraction of cell phones in order to have their brains develop properly. As vulnerable as adults are to the extremely powerful habit-forming nature of modern technology, kids are even more exposed, because their brains are more adaptable and because they don't have the same body of work to fall back on.
Ahhh this is a case of I misread one of your posts it seems.
Yeah your stance seems reasonable enough to me with that clarification.
I don't really know about the long focus sessions being necessary for proper brain development (social conditioning seems to be more the point of that) but I'm not an expert here, so I am not going to trust my gut on this one. (In the effort of reigning in my pedantism, I'm not going to ask the definition of proper development either lol)
In any case, ty for the conversation!
It's not that their brain explodes or anything.
But focus and attention span are skills that need to be practiced to be developed. If you never get that practice, the scope of problems you're able to solve shrinks substantially, because a lot of big problems need sustained attention to make a real dent in. Coming in from a lateral angle with ideas from other areas are great, and a lot of problems are solved that way, but you need to be immersed in the problem space at some point before you get that stroke of insight.
You need to be able to sustain attention, though, and that takes practice.
I get you, it's just that I feel like this conversation might end up swirling into a "what is normal? Who gets to define what normal is and what are their motivations for defining those parameters as normal?" sort of deal.
With the current world the way it is at hand though, yeah, kids do need to be forced to focus for long periods of time so they can operate when they get into the world on their own.
In an ideal world, whatever shape that takes, I'm not so sure that would be necessary, but we don't get to work with ideals, so your stance seems the most realistic.
Good luck enforcing that.