Like it or not, smartphones and the internet are now a part of everyday life. Digital literacy is now as important as traditional literacy. Pretending that this shift has not happened, because education systems cannot adapt to it, is absurd.

The problems that are claimed to be caused by smartphones in class seem to be more down to to a lack of discipline and engagement. I went to school before any kind of mobile phone was a thing. There were still plenty of potential ways for students to goof off, yet teachers by and large managed to keep us focused and behaving.

Mobiles should not be in a classroom.

They are distracting, rarely help with actual learning, and are a source of anxiety. Children do not need to be contactable 24/7. The supposed pros are all bs too. Learn to use a computer, sure, laptops are a different matter. Much easier to police, much easier to manage, much more helpful to learning, and most skills transferrable to a mobile too. Have online courses, excellent! But rarely at primary and secondary level education will a phone actually be beneficial. Long overdue for a ban.

Long overdue for a digital overhaul too. Paperless offices are here, where's the paperless schools? (Paperless offices are never paperless either btw, plenty of stuff still printed, physical books read, and things written down)

How would this work? What about people that need to contact their parents?

We need to move away from schools just being prisons for children while parents are at work, and encourage learning and more autonomy over what to study. Imagine having full access to Coursera and EdX and being able to choose what you wanted to study and collect credits like that - building your own syllabus from some of the best educators in the world.

Let kids program video games together at school, build sensors and robots, do basic genetic engineering (e.g. plant patterns), simulate and build model bridges, etc. like stuff that is actually fun but requires basic skills. So you're not just memorising the trigonometry equations but really learning it because you need it in your projects.

And have zero tolerance for disruption and bullying with cameras, etc. It should be a place for collaborative learning, not a prison. It should feel like a much better place to learn than anywhere else.

Taking away the most versatile and most commonly used tool shouldn't be the way to go.

If we keep up these obsolete paradigms, students will be forced to stick with ineffective handwritings off whiteboards. Their documents go to the trash after school since the serve no purpose anymore and they use up far too much space.

Instead, students should make excessive use of their digital helpers - as we already do at work or for all the other daily tasks.

How to teach a bullyer responsible smartphone use ? 😑

In my opinion, the whole school system needs a serious update.

But that will never happen because the function of the school is not to learn.

These types of changes feel like they're a decade too late. We've had a solid 10-15 years of smartphone mainstream usage and it's crazy that they haven't been banned in schools until now

Paper and pencils are ruining our children's learning experience! We have to go back to stone tablets!1!!

clearly shows the tendency of people to ban things instead of finding a fix that isn't lazy like, for instance, actually good digital education.