Current legislation allows the teacher to tell a student to put their phone away in a pocket or backpack, for example, where it will not be a distraction.
The use of phones during breaks cannot be completely banned, as students have fundamental rights. The Constitution guarantees everyone the protection of property, which also applies to students' phones. Restricting the use of mobile devices must be considered from the perspective of freedom of speech and the protection of a phone call or other confidential message.
Section 12 from Finnish constitution:
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Section 12 - Freedom of expression and right of access to information
Everyone has the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression entails the right to express, disseminate and receive information, opinions and other communications without prior prevention by anyone. More detailed provisions on the exercise of the freedom of expression are laid down by an Act. Provisions on restrictions relating to pictorial programmes that are necessary for the protection of children may be laid down by an Act. Documents and recordings in the possession of the authorities are public, unless their publication has for compelling reasons been specifically restricted by an Act. Everyone has the right of access to public documents and recordings.
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See also: Convention on the Rights of the Child https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... Wikpedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
It's a strange concept to hold that there are rights that can't be taken away, but then take them away merely by passing legislation.
There are many rights that can be taken away, freedom of movement for example in the case of prisoners, but you need laws in order to not make that taking away a crime itself. You can't just apprehend and throw someone in your basement because they stole something from you.
Same thing with children's phones, a teacher can't just take away the phone because they didn't have the authority before.
I guess the nordics don't have a common-law tradition and so never inhereted the in loco parentis doctrine that allows schools to take substantial actions regarding students? I'm not familiar with their legal history.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY&pp=ygUcd2hpdGVzdCB...
Nordic legal system is interesting - it avoids a lot of Roman/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon influence and is rooted instead in the old tradition of "Tings". (Nordic communal gatherings). Which means there's a strong base of communal consensus instead of precedent - in the small, reflected by the presence of lay judges in legal proceedings. In the large, reflected in the Nordic countries together having a set of very closely coordinated legal systems. (Since late 1800s, I think?)
It's super-interesting (if legal systems are interesting to you ;)
This normally applies mostly to the parents of a child, but is taken over by the school during school time. The obligation comes with fuzzy yet extensive rights to enforce order, in whatever way and towards whatever goal can be argued to be in the big-picture-best-interest of the child or group of children.
Of course there are various laws specifically granting rights to children. To decide if a particular act is lawful or not, you (or a court!) needs to weigh all the relevant laws against each other.
Of course, as we've discovered, those rights don't mean much, when the executive doesn't want to recognize them. So what was the point anyway?
The Republicans* are. Important to be factually accurate here’s the Democrats have never done anything remotely this lawless and authoritarian before.
You are really pushing both-sides-ism to its limits.
It goes without saying that if you have to go back that far in history to find an analogy to today's abuse of power, you are proving GP's point: the lawlessness of the Republican party is unprecedented in modern history.
I never voted for Trump and I don't support the power grabs he's trying to make, but I also understand America has a history of playing footsie with authoritarianism every 80-100 years or so.
Internment camps, a civil war over literally owning humans as property, the Alien and Sedition Acts . . .
So, Roosevelt worked to find the necessary votes to pack the court. His "Judicial Procedures Reform Bill" was not so different from any of the other "judicial reforms" we've condemned when other strongmen around the world used them to strengthen their power. Politicians from Roosevelt's bloc spewed vitriol at the justices who were simply trying to do their jobs. In Iowa, effigies of the six justices who had opposed any of Roosevelt's actions were found hanged by nooses. Once Roosevelt secured political support and signaled his willingness to push for packing the court, the justices backed down and began ruling in his favor, repeatedly. Where months before it had struck down a New York minimum wage law, a nearly-identical law in Washington was deemed perfectly constitutional. The National Labor Relations Act was fine and dandy. Coal mining was suddenly interstate commerce after all. In fact, the Commerce Clause now covered everything; one clothing factory in Virginia was enough commerce to quality. Later, the court would rule that a man growing wheat for his own consumption was sufficient "commerce" to warrant near-limitless federal rule-making. After all, it meant he bought less wheat from someone else, so clearly it was within the feds' purview. Wickard v. Filburn stands as precedent today. The justices on that court kept their seats but gave up their power.
Now, another populist has shown up. One who has a different vision for the nation than that laid out by the neoliberal technocrats who have dominated American politics since Clinton. Trump has explicitly called out FDR's new deal coalition, the coalition emplaced by vaguely authoritarian means quite similar to those he is using, that was the underlying basis for politics for almost the past century. I don't care for Trump's vision much more than I care for Roosevelt's or Clinton's. But claiming that this is "unprecedented" only serves to point people away from the prior time in history when this happened, when we utterly failed to stop Roosevelt and remove his power. Perhaps learning from history is the better choice so this time we can do a better job of it.
Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure, and only through it can one be purified. None of us is free from history, none of our forefathers was clean, but neither are we responsible for their failings.
Opposition to slavery isn’t exclusive to the left, but also if that isn’t hyperbole you really need a wider sample. By far the most common perspective I’ve heard from anyone in the anti-racist camp is that nobody is perfect because we are all shaped by our environment. The whole point of entire campaigns is to avoid reinforcing those biases because they’re so widespread.
This also touches on the perceived inaccuracy you mentioned: my argument is that the key part for Black isn’t the Democratic affiliation but the southern white identity. People are motivated by issues but some people prioritize that one above everything else, and that’s what happened with the southern realignment: some people valued white supremacy most and changed what were in many cases generational party affiliations, while others decided that things like labor rights or social programs mattered more and shifted correspondingly. It was largely the same people but they sorted themselves into different parties and that shaped the policies of those parties.
So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for decades to come.
You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.
As someone who has lived in the south (my family is not from the south), I’ll tell you that the Republicans were correct. The clan controlled the local counties (most important offices) and nobody would stop them from disappearing people or burning them out of their homes regardless of that the federal government said.
What changed was the people. Each generation has grown more tolerant. That finally broke the clan control and the millennial generation in the South is overwhelmingly not racist.
Unfortunately, the recent moves away from MLK-style equality to the radical Marxist-style equity (equity except for people who happen to be born white as they see it — very similar to Russian discrimination against children of formerly Middle/upper class people like engineers) seem to be pushing gen Z back toward racial supremacy (this seems true across the whole country).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the...
The most interesting question is why republicans and democrats supposedly swapped parties in the 1960s, but the black vote shifted in the 1930s. The answer seems pretty clear. Black unemployment was through the roof and the New Deal promised jobs, so they broke with the part of Lincoln because they were forced to. As things stabilized, there was a risk of them switching back and once again creating a Republican supermajority which is what spawned support for a federal civil rights act by the racist democrats.
No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.
LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.
I am personally opposed to maintaining what I see as an overreach of the federal government. This goes back to the start of the new deal and stretches through much of what primarily the Warren Court found constitutional. Plenty of us "states rights" types are in favor of it on a whole host of other issues, e.g. many of the policies Trump promulgates. Please stop trying to erase the concept of local governance with hostile and incomplete interpretations of the past.
This doesn't mean that we don't have constitutional rights. The whole point of an inalienable right is that it's an inherent right recognized by governance. The state can't take them away, only violate them.
As for your other points, I think you're actually keying on the wrong one; the administration's actions with Garcia are much more clearly wrong. The Wisconsin Supreme Court today temporarily suspended Judge Dugan despite the fact that four of its seven justices generally lean liberal, and are elected rather than appointed. We'll see if there's anything to the charges. If not, maybe we'll see each other at a protest, but it doesn't appear she was "following the law". As for the children, I believe that was due to a policy of keeping families together; if their parents must leave the country, they must follow or be placed in foster care.
Dismissing rule-of-law as a concept is both premature and counterproductive, in the sense that it only discourages people who could otherwise focus on using the checks and balances in place for this reason to rein in the administration.
Different countries fall in different places on the scale between "a child is strictly a property of the parent, with which the parent may do as they wish", and "a child is a human being which the parent has been given an obligation to protect from harm, but not to control." The US is a lot closer to the former, most European countries, and especially the nordics, are much closer to the latter.
The former enables parents to send their kids to a private school with a decent curriculum if the state school forces propaganda on them, but it also enables parents to send their kids to a school where they teach creationism or prohibit being gay. The latter prohibits teachers from taking away children's rights to get a tattoo or use nail polish, but it also doesn't give schools the right to punish children for infractions or take away phones.
Those are extremes of course, and most countries fall somewhere in the middle, but that point is different in different countries.
They cannot simply order children to comply, there has to be same legal basis like there has to be for ordering an adult to comply.
Now me being Estonian, just across the sea from Finland, I was surprised to learn this needed to be a law in the first place since when I went to elementary/primary school smartphones and laptops were not permitted in the classroom. Didn't need a special law for that, it was just the school's rules. You either play ball or you get called into the principals office. This happens enough times and you simply get kicked out of the school.
I too am a bit baffled by the idea that you need a law for that. But, as I said, we have a different common law tradition in America that changes things. The only two big legal influences which I've read on are common law and the justinian codex -> napoleonic code path; scandi law is alien to me.
The difference here is that in the US, children don't by default inherit the same legal rights as adults and instead have a different set of rights which often means they never had a legal right to, for example, privacy or ownership, in the first place.
You have free speech... then comes the list of exceptions, incitement of violence, defamation (libel and slander), Child pornography, perjury, speech integral to criminal conduct, copyright infringement, state secrets,
Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others. If you are robbed and nobody goes after the robber, the right to property does not de facto exist. The government must take an action.
The "cute wording" is important because the mindset matters. If enough of the population believes that rights are permitted to a person, they will attempt to revoke the permission. If they believe that rights are fundamental and inalienable, they wouldn't dare to think of trampling it in the first place. Of course, through the years, that perspective has shifted a lot away from the latter and to the former, to which I say "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
To defend your life, liberty, and property you absolutely do have that right in most of the civilized world. Some places may put restriction on your ability to access a firearm, but self-defense is a basic necessity to have /any/ human rights. That said, I agree, trying to shoot someone in the head /is/ crazy, you should always aim for center of mass because it has a larger surface area which matters in difficult situations. That said, the person you're replying to never even uses the word "head"
You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. A judge and/or jury will decide whether it was reasonable. If it wasn't, you broke the law. They did not "take away your right" to kill.
FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.
You are trying to indicate a difference where there is none. It's not me that decides another person's life is less than what they're trying to rob me of, it's them by taking an action that necessarily forfeits their life when I must defend myself against their criminal act against me. A right to self defense is /necessarily/ a right to kill, because in many cases self-defense necessitates lethal force.
I have no desire to ever kill anyone, but the right to self-defense is absolute, it is the very basis of /all/ human rights and is based on a foundation of the simple principle of bodily autonomy.
> FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.
You seem to be thinking that /property/ is the issue, it's the /taking/ that's the problem. How does someone /take/ your property? They use force. You have a right to defend yourself against that force, and in fact you MUST do so, or you will likely be killed or seriously harmed by the criminal through their use of force. Yes, you also have a right to defend your property, but the real issue is and always will be the force a criminal uses against you. Taking property is a forcible act. There is a false separation in the minds of some people between property crimes and violent crimes, property crimes /are/ violent crimes, in all but very narrow circumstances.
The progressives' attempts to make it even more complicated, which btw started with them outright wanting to outlaw personal firearm ownership, all failed. And now that the rising crime has people crying out for order, plus their dismal approval ratings, they will be voted out this December for sure, they stand no chance.
What helps is how you framed the idea that the act of taking something by force IS the violence, which is what we’ve been trying to get across here, something that most people are indifferent to, until they experience an attack to their personal safety. Mindsets have shifted here in the last five years.
I'm going to assume that you are American, and that many Americans agree with you. I can only say sorry. You can keep turning a blind eye to the stats, but it will not change the facts. You will need to change this way of thinking to save your country.
It is sad. Communities should help everyone within them so that nobody has a need to commit crime. Unfortunately many people commit crime because they don't care about others or have deep mental issues, not out of need.
On average 1% of the residents in communities in the US are responsible for >70% of the crime, including the most violent crimes. Who are those 1%? Repeat offenders. Those who have made crime their lifestyle and feel no conscience towards their victims. They are not "otherwise peaceful individuals".
I am American, but unlike most I am well traveled, speak multiple languages, and volunteer regularly in my community. No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact that a small portion of the population feels entitled to commit harm to others with impunity and they are unconcerned with killing or maiming decent people while in the process of their crimes. You should be prepared to defend yourself or all you have is hope that you get lucky.
Rather than trying to make me into a caricature so you can dismiss me, maybe you should also look at the data or go meet some of these people who commit crimes through volunteerism.
It's a difference in wording that reflects a fundamentally different conceptual model of what rights are and how they work, which in turn has wide-ranging implications for how law, politics, and social interactions are conducted.
> Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others.
That makes little sense, given that the concept of 'rights' is a normative framework we use to evaluate the legitimacy of people's behavior. The whole point of asserting rights is to make moral/legal arguments against behavior that does transgress against other people.
Construing situations where those transgressions take place as 'rights nonexistent' instead of 'rights violated' defeats the entire purpose of establishing a model of rights in the first place.
For the same reason, it also makes little sense to employ a model of rights that attributes the source of rights to human organizations that have the capacity -- and often the intent -- to violate them.
Otherwise a constitution becomes ineffective at some point.
There are such things as unconstitutional laws and laws that should not be observed nor enforced...
More accurately, I think, it's that children have rights under the law that must be respected. This changes the law and sets specific situations where these rights are specifically restricted. Outside of those situations, those rights still must be respected!
Kids must attend school to get basic education. When government mandates attendance, it does not mean that they can use it as excuse to take other rights away.
In voluntary activities no related to necessities, there possibility to make stricter rules, because people don't have to be there.
I didn't know teachers needed to use their smartphones for work. What do they need their phones for? Do they have landlines in each classroom to call parents or the office? Do teachers get laptops or PCs these days or are they expected to use a personal mobile phone to google things?
People scroll TikTok or equivalent scrolly things as they drive, eat, poop, cook, as they "talk", as they walk, as they queue, as they "watch" movies and tv shows, during their down time, up time, in the bed until the small hours of the morning, people wake up on their day off and have a big plan and then... scroll the whole day. People go to the beach and scroll, they climb a mountain and scroll. They cycle and scroll, I've seen them do it.
If they can't hold it - showering, exercise, love-making (sometimes) - they get the thing to pump audio and/or visuals in their general direction, sometimes propped up, sometimes just strewn there. It's a riot.
And yes - people also scroll on these devices, if you can possibly imagine it, when they work. In schools, even! And in post offices, betting parlors, nail salons, cafes, while they do their only fans performance, you name it.
I've never been to Finland, don't speak a word of Finnish, and don't know much about Finnish culture, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if I had a 20c coin for every time a teacher in Finland scrolled TikTok for a minute or two during work hours, I'd have, roughly, a completely ridonculously large bag of 20c coins.
(This is irony/sarcasm, please don't downvote. Haha only serious.)
- If he bus doesn't show up, she can call and ask us to come drive her to school
- If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time
- If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it
- etc, etc, etc
There's a ton of reasons for her to have her phone on her. Enough so that, when she gets punished with phone removal, we generally still let her bring it to school.
The fact that the phone doesn't contribute to the schooling itself (although it does when she forgets something she needs for school) doesn't mean that it doesn't contribute to QOL overall by being with her at school.
It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.
The last one doesn't require a cell phone, since the school has phone lines. But it's certainly more convenient to let her use her own phone than have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.
> It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.
Somewhat my bad.. but I was responding to thread's content and title.
- The article says "[Finland approved] a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools"
- The title of the thread says "bans smartphones in schools".. which is not at ALL what they did; they banned _use_ of smartphones in schools _without permission_.
And what I said was that my daughter brings her phone to school; she doesn't use it there unless there's a good reason (like I noted).
I am pretty sure that no one would know if she just puts it on silent or airplane mode? But in any case my son's class did that for several months in 7th grade, due to an incident (minor but on the worrisome side) and with the agreement of the parents, and it was just fine.
> have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.
Maybe next time they will put more attention and in the meanwhile they'll share or borrow what's needed?
Yes they could for years NYC schools banned cellphones in schools which ment kids could not bring them in the building at all. Kids left their phones with nearby bodegas or in a van parked outside the school for a small fee. Basically a coat check for phones. This worked perfectly well and required zero effort on the part of the administration.
But I'm open to compromise: let's give children bring dumb phones that can only call and text.
Smart phones when class is in session is a distraction and should be banned. However outside of class they are helpful.
They are not good reasons to have a phone at school.
In terms of QOL: there is a meaningful body of research about the impact of giving a teenage girl access to a phone on their quality of life.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/109/7/576 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...
If you want to prevent the negative effects of social media and (designed to be) addictive apps, then you should ban social media and addictive apps, and not phones (because that would just mask the symptoms).
Per the article this is a ban on using smartphones during class time, not a ban on bringing them to school at all.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. When I was in school if a teacher saw you using phone during class you might get one warning and then it was being confiscated.
so, the finnish don't prohibit that at all.
The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones at every moment rings hollow...
Because grade school kids actually did just fine without them.
Things functioned, people got where they needed to get, emergencies were handled, etc.
Especially with pre- and post-school access, we're balancing a minimum of in-school utility against a massive danger to learning and development.
We should just accept we built addiction boxes and therefore restrict them appropriately.
If they're in class, then 99% chance it's distracting them from learning. If they're not, I think personal autonomy is a good rule.
Having a distraction box at hand slows that process.
Grade school kids aren't tiny adults: they're actively building the pieces that make them into adults (self control, emotional regulation, empathy, cooperation, etc).
I don't trust Google or Apple to sacrifice profits, at scale, to support those goals.
We raise kids mostly without screens (just some short old school cartoons on TV before bed if they behave well). Its harder, but kids behave much better compared to most peers (which can have 1000s of reasons and some out of our control, I know). We also limit sweet stuff, eat tons of veggies (so they do too and ie love broccoli, not sure where the proverbial hate comes from... maybe lack of basic cooking skills?). But the key is we eat same stuff, healthy food can be very tasty easily. We lay them down to sleep pretty early too.
Simply restrict highly addictive stuff, be it in food or behavioral like screens. It has no place when growing up, no matter how folks wrap it as a need. It forms neural pathways that are extremely hard to shed for rest of their lives, no need to fuck them up properly for life before they have a chance to forge their own path and make their own choices.
Once again, for the people not paying attention. It's not about _need_. It's about quality of life. It's about easier, faster, better, safer.
Are there negatives to having cell phones? Sure. That's true for adults, too. And the benefits of having a cell phone need to be weighed against those negatives.
But saying "you don't _need_ a cell phone" is a straw man argument. Because nobody (that I see) says it's needed; they said it's worth it.
Oh, "need" is definitely the first-reach in these discussions. You should see Florida school parents go apeshit at the prospect of not being tethered to their little angels 24x7.
Granted, on HN, it does trend towards worth.
But imho that's looking at smartphones with rose-colored glasses. As people in the industry, you think we'd have more realpolitik perspectives about what modern smartphones are designed to do -- grab, hold, and monetize attention.
Okay, it did work out, but not nearly as well as a simple cell phone. Smart phones add additional functionality. (I can see on google maps where each kid's phone is)
Seems like a good trade to me.
Now there are other downsides of smartphones. We do need to mitigate them. However lets not throw out the good just because of the bad.
I do take your point though, this is probably the most reasonable, sane position:
> We do need to mitigate them. However lets not throw out the good just because of the bad.
"What about emergencies?? What about when you need to phone someone about X, or phone someone else because Y happened?"
It's a good argument - the typical phone in 1998 was a useful and practical device. Seriously, being able to ring people has many excellent and real use cases. Phones aren't just calling devices anymore, though.
Yes. I was discussing things from the thread's title and the arguments in the thread that phones aren't useful at school. The actual action that Finland is taking (Children aren't allowed to use cellphones at school without permission, effectively) is reasonable. But it's also not what the title of this thread says.
even all the above reasons are not actual reasons. None of these are a problem. you job is NOT to bring something to school because she forgot it nor to drive her to school if the bus doesnt show up.
No, it's not my job. But it is my job as a parent to make her life easier where it makes sense (when it's not to impactful to my other responsibilities). And dropping off her computer so that she can participate in class does that (and makes her day in school more productive). And picking her up at the bus stop so she doesn't need to walk 5-10 minutes home, or 15-20 minutes to school... is a nice thing to do.
It seems like everyone in this thread against cell phones is arguing from the point of "well, you don't NEED this". It's not about need, it's about better.
I fundamentally disagree that making life easy is the right thing.
what I am trying to say is, the feedback loop from a) forgetting something or b) the experience of missing out on something because of aspects of life that are out of ones control is so much better IMO and the phone is just 'convenient'
Of course that doesnt mean I prefer my child to be run over or die instead of protecting her/him or helping her/him
2) The entire list can be equally well solved by dumbphones without TikTok and Snapchat. Which is what such bans as this is about.
3) It is always about pros/cons. In Scandinavia phones have (in my view as a parent and married to a teacher) essentially destroyed education wherever they are allowed in the pocket/backpack of the student during class.
Not to speak about downsides to social life. E.g., people not attempting dancing in high school proms because there are videos taken everywhere. People not showering in gyms due to phones. Just two examples. SO MANY things are killed by the phones.
The benefits have to be weighed against the quite massive downsides.
--
They banned phones on the high school where my wife teaches last year and she is basically a changed person. Instead of spending 50% of class time policing phone use, she can, you know, actually teach.
(She still has to deal with a generation addicted to dopamine, but a habit of phone confiscation during class is at least a massive improvement.)
Lots of problems are solved in MUCH better ways now that we have smartphones. It's not about "can we do it", it's about "can we do it better / easier".
Breaking down on the side of the road is completely different than being without a cellphone in a building full of landlines. It's disingenuous to compare the two situations. Breaking down on the side of the road is pretty much the impetus for portable communication systems. A kid being able to just text mom that they need a ride after school is convenient but not really critical enough to justify letting kids have their phones on them all day long.
When I went to school the bus turned up every single day without fail. We've learnt to accept less because you can just call a taxi.
> - If she wants to go somewhere after school, she can call us and let us know she won't be home at her normal time
We had public payphones that we could use. We've learnt to accept less because everyone has a mobile phone.
> - If she forgot something at home, she can call and ask us to bring it
I remembered to bring what I needed every day or I suffered the consequences. I soon learnt. We've become complacent because you can just get it delivered using your phone.
All in all I don't really see how it's a positive, but it certainly seems to have considerable negatives.
I see no problem here.
Smartphones, no. I'm not subjecting them to any algos, thank you very much.
She can call from where she goes after school, no? Or she can go home first, or make plans a day ahead.
She can learn the consequences of not packing her school bags properly and keep a checklist to review each morning. The only time I recall in 12 years of primary schooling, where I had to get something from home after forgetting, was a prop for a demonstration in front of the class. I remember because it was the only time it mattered.
I am not familiar with your specifics, I don't mean to be personal. I don't have kids. But I am young enough to remember being one - I am also addicted to my phone, and I know how convenient it is to not plan anything and to instantly communicate with everyone. I am unconvinced that children in a controlled, supervised environment need a phone.
I say all this with humility because I haven't dealt directly with kids or the public school system in a long time.
...finally, if I did agree and say "yeah they should at least be allowed to have a phone on their way", it should absolutely be banned in the classroom. But what to do when the children inevitably break that rule? It doesn't sound like you would support them confiscating it, and it's a logistical quagmire to do so anyway.
The thing is: these benefits manifest at different time-scales.
Curious what this will lead to.
When she'll get a job, if she'll forget her laptop at home, will she call you and ask you to bring it to the workplace?
Could she get by at school without her computer? Yes. Is her school day more productive with it? Also yes.
I’ve done similar for friends and family.
For most kids, the embarrassment of a parent appearing during the school day is enough to really negatively enforce forgetting things, at least after middle school starts.
2. I'm not buying my daughter a 2nd dumb phone to bring to school with her.
"Bring it but don't use it (or leave it in your locker)" is a reasonable answer to me (and is actually what Finland is doing).
It certainly did not appear to me that way, here in Germany. There was a lot of time spend sitting in a room and "learning", yet I basically learned nothing. For the other things you described I do not think they were ever considered.
All around school was a giant waste of time.
So some self proclaimed smart person “learned nothing”, and therefore school is a waste of time. At the same time, ignoring that maybe a school or system is indeed not prepared to handle some individuals (which is not good), or that maybe some teachers are bad, or maybe the system does not support their staff enough. But that can’t be the case because they learned nothing. Whole school system must be a scam.
I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.
Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.
I know a high school teacher with a PhD and has tutored and lectured at the university level. But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
Where did I say that the intentions were bad?
>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.
Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.
Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)
If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university
Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).
Some teachers start with high spirits but most turn into regular slobs trying to get to the end of the month once they realise that their job is to mind the children while the parents work.
I was lucky enough to meet just a handful of teachers that tought me some values, the rest were just ... forgetable people.
In any normal (private sector) job, if you can't perform the basic job requirements you get fired or retrained. Maybe you're moved to a different area that better suits your skill set. But you don't just sit in a position for 20 years screwing it up day after day as you see in government / lower education.
I really, truly don't know how people form this opinion. Teachers are trained professionals with certifications and a degree. They know what they're doing. It's extremely likely they're far more educated in the subject matter they teach than you are.
Now, they're not miracle workers. Some parents expect little Timmy reading at a second grade level in Middle School to magically get great scores on his end of year exams. It doesn't work that way.
And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.
>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.
I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.
To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.
Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest.
But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for everyone in society, those twelve years are already barely enough.
I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top.
Optional programs for faster/more targetted learning are much better and can be very positive IMO, but even there you need to be careful with how you set things up to avoid problems.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're going to have kids bored out of their minds learning nothing and being unengaged, and you're going to have kids that can't keep up and would need extra support / a different kind of support. You're not doing either of those any favours.
By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).
Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.
Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.
I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.
Maybe AI will solve it :P
The mechanism AI would use to solve the problem is to give everyone individualized education, which would effectively be maximal segregation.
For socialization, another commenter here wrote a few months back about their experience at a school where they had more academic classes segregated by ability and more social classes segregated by age[0], which sounds to me like an excellent solution.
Your outcomes as child are also likely to plummet if you ever get sorted into the wrong bucket, which I feel is super unethical.
Personally I also really question the whole concept of pushing a grade schoolers "performance": What do you hope to gain from it? Looking e.g. at asian english tests I can see a likely worst-case outcome: Genuinely difficult and stressful tests (that even native speakers would struggle with) that just test some meaningless grammatical minutiae.
I fully agree that having optional programs and learning opportunities for talented/interested children is a very good thing, but I don't think dismantling the current system would really help at providing those (and they are always gonna be an additional cost, just like more segregation would be in practice). I also think that attempting to railroad children into (or out of!) those options is not desirable at all.
If you get sorted into the wrong bucket, it shouldn't be a huge deal. e.g. my elementary school had I think ~5 classes per grade level, so you have bands for 20%iles. Teachers can target the center of their %ile band for pacing. With a desegregated model, teachers end up targeting somewhere below the median student for everyone, so people in the top 50%ile and bottom 20%ile are all poorly served. You don't have to necessarily stay in your band either; if you do well, move up. If you do poorly, move down. If you're primarily segregating by ability, not age, then you might need to e.g. move into a younger cohort's top performing band to get onto the right pacing, but you don't need to lose much time. This is in contrast to today's system where if you're not close to the median, probably half your time in school is wasted.
In larger schools, you could potentially group kids into 15-10%ile bands. The tighter the bands, the less of an issue if they end up in the wrong band (assuming they're not completely misjudged). Personalized education is again the limit of this approach. The closer you get to that, the better kids will do.
As far as curriculum goes, I don't see why you couldn't have a baseline. The faster kids would just get through it faster, and maybe move onto more optional topics. The slower kids would progress more slowly, hopefully with a slightly higher end target than we set for them today.
Hopefully the thing high performing kids gain is to maintain their interest in academics instead of having it beaten out of them by moving at what is for them a snails pace. Testing them on larger volumes of meaningless minutiae is exactly the opposite of the goal. e.g. don't give them extremely tricky arithmetic/algebra problems; teach them calculus, linear algebra, mechanics, chemistry, etc. Teach the grown-up topics, but let them learn it when they're ready instead of holding them back several years.
In Germany you have schools for students targeting university. I was in such a school. Every student there was there to get into university.
Yes, but if half the class was not smarter than you (by whatever standard), then that segregation was too low to really hit the spot anyway.
My personal experience was the completely opposite: I learned more useful knowledge in school than in university, despite wasting like a year of math on trigonometric sum formulas and similar nonsense; but the baseline for physics/electronics, programming and math was much more applicable and necessary than anything I learned in university (frequently overspecialized and barely useful).
Sure, I also learned a lot during university on my own, but mostly thanks to sufficient free time and personal interest; university itself did not contribute too much there, and this was somewhat similar during school already anyway (most specifically with programming).
To me, it sounds like you suffered from mediocre teachers in school and learn better on your own-- but neither is universal enough to draw system-wide conclusions IMO.
Also, the sometimes dramatic gulf between private and public school academic rigor means that some private school students are essentially receiving an early college level education during their tween/teen years. This isn't necessarily bad, but it absolutely is more time consuming for most kids who aim for straight As and high test scores, and this in turn impacts their ability to pursue extracurricular activities with seriousness, and without impacting their health/wellbeing. The fact that many public school students are learning slowly means those same students can work outside of school, can pursue sports/arts/etc interests almost full-time, can be caretakers for family members in need, and have flexibility in their social lives.
Yes, it's unfair to paint with a broad brush but this is largely true if we're looking at the high achieving population (say, kids who might be expected to apply to Ivy League universities). No matter how suboptimal the pace of academic instruction is at public schools, it's important to recognize that kids are still developing into adults and it's not normal or fair to treat them as adults (from a brain development, psychological and relationship management POV).
What can I say; I like arguing. We don't actually have to choose a single goal - everyone can have different goals. If schooling isn't compulsory then you could have a mass of different people doing different things for different reasons and it all gets called 'schooling'.
If schooling is state managed ... the same interest groups exist, they just have to fight over the curriculum in parliament or the Department of Schooling. The end result will be a weird hodge-podge of compromises that nobody can confidently say satisfies them completely and doesn't have a clear goal.
It happens that we cannot say that there is a goal of schooling. Some people may have one goal, but other people may have alternative goals. There are some really tricky edge cases, like History - should Mongolian schoolchildren be taught that Ghengis Khan was a hero, a scumbag, a disaster, a triumph, a fact, a national symbol or someone best forgotten? That is not a question where a reliable and enduring consensus can be reached because real life is too complicated to take a final universal stand on something that happened 1,000 years ago.
The goal is wide and open ended, but there is a goal. Likely others can word it better than me, but it goes something like this: "to produce kids that grow up to be productive adults that contribute to society and make the world a better place."
We all are not the same, and even if we were there are many different needs. I need someone to haul my trash to the wherever it is handled, but my city only needs a few hundred such people (thousand?). A few other people need to ensure I have clean water. A lot of people need to ensure I have food. Some of them need to provide medical care. Thus we need to have multiple different outcomes (if you are just hauling trash you need less education than the medical doctors, while the person designing the dump needs more education than a basic nurse).
Because of the different needs in society there will and must be debate over what the curriculum should be. There is no way to teach everything. Time spend teaching one subject is time that cannot be used for a different one. There are many different ideas how to teach, and we need better science to figure out what really works.
I completely agree. If I wanted anything from current schooling it would be giving students more abilities to develop themselves. Obviously that doesn't mean a 16 year old playing videogames for 12 hours a day, but students who like doing sports should be doing much more of it and those who like learning should be doing much more of that and so on.
Kids learning how to develop themselves is a good thing ONLY if they choose the "right thing" to develop. You can get really good at video games, but as you already said probably not a good only investment (a fine hobby, but keep it a limited time hobby). There are some sports that because of injuries should really be banned (but I won't list them because as soon as I do there will be a lot screaming from people who live that sport). What we need is kids who develop themselves into something that makes them good productive adults - for some jobs we need adults to do this is boring and so kids won't do it unless forced.
Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.
From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.
Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.
In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.
I learned more in a single year on the job than I did in 3 years of university. That doesn’t make university useless
The uni taught you more real-world expected skills but I‘m certain you learned more before uni.
Was that not offered at your school? It was at mine.
University level courses do presume you have some basic skills. But in many places, schools do offer university level courses for those who are prepared.
I think it would have been theoretically possible, but obviously logistically difficult as I would have had to skip multiple classes in other fields to attend.
It's also not like I was particularly interested in mathematics at that point in my life. I essentially chose my field of study based on what I had the best grades in. Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.
> Only during my studies, when the material actually became difficult, I started to be interested and engaged in the subject.
Many schools solve this by having different difficulty-levels of courses. My school, in the US, had three.
It takes people twelve years to learn to read and write at a 12th grade level.
You could study it for another 4 or more years at university if you wanted to develop your skills further.
> What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.
This is your personal experience. I learned to read and write quite well at school and was well-prepared for university.
Nah. You are mixing up the skill 'writing glyphs on a piece of paper and retrieving that information via optical means' with 'being well-grounded in a wide array of subjects so you can express an idea in a way that is mentally stimulating to a potential reader'.
Neither takes 12 years to learn. The first, we teach within a year, at most. The second we do not teach at all, and the best 'writers' often are those who were challenged outside of school, by parents who gave them a rich, intellectually interesting environment, not within it.
Just because you, and other's, did not pay attention or were not good writers, does not mean we don't teach that. We do, for years.
I understand Spanish only goes up to a 5th grade level while Japanese to 9th. This is a reflection on how complex the writing systems are, and not the kids, intelligence, or school systems.
The years after you have your basic reading down are used to learn other skills that are of general use in life for everyone.
I am saying that language arts can be, and often are, taught beyond basic proficiency.
You keep saying this but I have a hard time believing this is true; in fact I'm not even sure what "more" means (objectively) in this context.
Let's see, in the 12 years of schooling you've learned at the very least: how to read and write, how to interpret texts, how to read literature, how to compose an essay, how to speak, read, and write a second language, a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths, several topics of physics and chemistry, biology, geology, and other natural sciences (in more or less detail), several years of history, and mandatory physical exercise to top it off. What magical university did you go to that in a single semester you learned more than that :D Unless I'm missing something.
In university I actually had to study, take notes, research the subject, study for many hours, etc.
>a ton of mathematics from basic arithmetic to I guess something like calculus and trigonometry and algebra and some discrete maths
Hilarious to say this. As it turned out, my first semester of university mathematics was spent on learning everything I did not learn in school. And it made it extremely clear to me how badly school had prepared me.
You would think that school would put me in a position where university mathematics were just a continuation. Nothing further could be from the truth, nearly everything taught in school was taught in a way which made it useless for actual mathematics.
In school we learned nothing about: Sets, logic, deductions, Axioms or Proofs (which turn out to be really important!), we did however spend years solving integrals, which turned out extremely unhelpful for actual mathematics.
Really unnecessary snark, I'm trying to understand your position (unless you're just doing justice to your username!).
Two things:
1. You're not the only person in school. I sympathise that you understood the material quickly and wish you had been presented more advanced stuff (I do so too, it's a valid criticism!). But at least around me I noticed that most people were just barely catching it or even actively struggling. So yes, perhaps more "adept" students should be given more challenging material and students that struggle should be given more support so they're not left behind (interesting discussion to have; this has been touched on elsewhere in this thread), but it's important to realise that unless education is based around a 1:1 teacher–student ratio (unrealistic), this will always be a problem that is hard to work around.
2. You conveniently left out the parts where I mentioned subjects other than maths (I assume you studied maths in uni or an adjacent discipline). School is not just there to teach you whatever you end up needing in your academic or professional life when you're 18 years old. I'm glad I was forced to study history, and read literature, and learn a 2nd and 3rd language, and do physical exercise at least 2× a week, because while I might be curious and study science on my own I sure as shit wouldn't do any of these of my own volition as a kid.
Do you honestly believe that is you were sent to University (or some other educational institution) with absolutely zero school knowledge, not even literacy and grade school math, you would be able to learn everything you learned at school in less than one semester?
Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?
Also, I'd find it surprising if you really learned nothing. From what I know of German schooling from people who went through it, you certainly learned at least a bit about the depths to which humans can go to and how to prevent them (Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities). Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world and various things you might encounter. I don't recall much from my biology or chemistry classes, but I recall vague outlines, which is enough.
It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.
Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.
>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world
None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.
School is about more than the part where you sit in class. The social skills, time and project management navigation etc. is all stuff you learn and do because of school but outside of class.
See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.
Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!
Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.
Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium
Not my experience.
>But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.
I was a good student though and did really well. I never learned for anything though and was bored in basically every subject.
There never were any expectations on me which I didn't trivially meet.
Overwhelming majority of people is not like that, they do not get highest grades, they do not get into gymnasium without effort, don't pass tests without effort.
- learned something -- aced the tests
- had the opportunity to learn something -- didn't ace the tests but somewhy you still claim that you were bored
Of course I did actually learn the material of the tests, but the actual learning outcome of my schooling is far worse then it could have been, given the 12 years invested.
No? I obviously had to put in a lot of work in university, but during school I never did, which was quite common, at least among my friends.
Even for the semi-standardized test at the end of school I tried learning, but I didn't know what to do, so I gave up.
Not necessarily causative, but we'd want to be very sure the educational fence isn't contributory before we tear it down.
Really doesn’t help you make a point.
I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.
I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.
That is not childcare.
edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.
Yes. Former teacher here to tell you I cared about the children. :)
But seriously, in the United States teachers are considered "In loco parentis" which "refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. "
As a "smart kid" it sometimes felt like waiting for everyone in class to grok something before moving on was a waste of time and that personally I'd learn very little, but ultimately I think it worked very well to ensure that everyone was on common ground.
At some point it was deemed that the current system wasn't inclusive enough so the special education for the troublemakers was gutted and they were put back into regular classrooms. At the same time, due to lack of funding and lack of teachers, class sizes ballooned from <15 to up to 30 or even 40 students per class in larger cities. I think there's some critical point where that system breaks down and now we're past it. The teacher has too many students to make sure everyone is up to speed, and giving too much individual attention in such a large class wastes everyone else's time.
Immigration has also played a role I think. Finland used to be quite monocultural, but that has changed. There are now more and more students who speak Finnish as their second or third language and as such have trouble keeping up. I don't think the solution is to stuff them into their own schools either as that promotes segregation and makes integrating into the society as an immigrant harder, and I don't pretend to know the perfect solution (if one even exists), but one thing's for sure: the Finnish school system was 100% unprepared for it.
A class of five can handle darn near anything; a class of fifty needs everyone to be as nearly identical as possible.
You can artificially increase the number of “teachers” by combining classes of different grades sometimes. 12 year olds can do great assisting 6 year olds.
* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.
* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.
* The amount of immigration and share of children speaking Finnish as a second language is rising and they are statistically more likely to perform worse (https://yle.fi/a/74-20018233, https://yle.fi/a/74-20016772).
In EU only greeks are less satisfied with the availability of healthcare. Our unemployment rate is pretty similar to Greece and Spain as well. This is what right wing governments want I guess.
https://yle-fi.translate.goog/a/74-20158685?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x...
It's usual in Finland to let babies sleep outside in the strollers (even when it's cold) but in this case no one checked how the child was doing for 3 hours.
In the news he/she was called a baby.
Politically, isn't this the ultimate fate of most developed nations? I haven't yet see an answer to this. How do you deal financially with this? The obvious answer is for people to be in charge of their own late stage health but is that possible for the average minimum wage worker?
Most school days are way shorter than that. The curriculum seems to keep my kids intellectually engaged. Commenting as a finn.
In Finland 16 olds are not allowed to drink and access to alcohol is state controlled.
IMHO learning foreign languages, math, history, biology and physics is not child care.
This is in preparation to getting access to upper secondary education (vocational or academic). Usually you start this at 16.
This is not a simple question but one part of the answer is that students are a) ready for upper secondary education b) their grades can be used to grade access to schools with top upper secondary schools being extremely hard to get into.
Ofc if you ask “why would a society do this” I guess the reason is that an educated population is expected to be more productive AND because the law requires schooling up to 18 it also implies all students must have access to free schools with close to zero material costs. So it’s intended also to level the playing field for all social classes.
Is this worse or better than germanys system is impossible for me to tell.
By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.
At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.
After 10 years of mandatory school most states have what is called "Berufsschulpflicht" until you are at least 18 years old.
That means you have to learn a job, which is not the same as working full-time and still considered education.
Claiming that 16 year olds "can not work because they have mandatory school" is false.
Where us the drinking age 16?
Trust is a privilege that must be earned not given. Prove to me you're trustworthy and I'll give you trust.
One untrustworthy 16 year old can cause hell chaos in a group of trustworthy teenagers. I've seen it when I was a youth worker.
> Depends on what. I can't even trust the 40 year developers in my team at work. "Hacky if foreach loop will fix later"
Whenever people make statements like this, I always wonder what their peers think of them. This dismissive attitude is so off-putting.
I really don't have time to care about what my peers think of me. It's work. I don't want to communicate with them outside work. Work is just another mind space that stays at work. I am strict when it comes to code, I expect the same.
I want working maintainable code to enable me to do my job. If people dread submitting a PR because they can't write code with effort, good. I like my ships built strong not weak.
If they fix their problem, good. Trust given, more than happy to salute however time and time they've proven to me they don't.
These developers have proven to me they won't. These are developers who are those who do not fix the issuing code and will just move on to the next problem hacking it to make it work.
If you've never worked with such, then lucky. If this sting for you, time to put more effort in to your work.
Neither of these things was suggested or raised so this is quite a bizarre rant to go on.
Even if you care about neither of those things, what your peers think of you still matters because you must work with them.
Where I work in enterprise your peers change daily. With my role and importance to the company implementing hacky code puts me at risk and so I will of course push back. The people I knew last months may not even work in the company.
The view of I must be a horrible person comes from the Comment OP being angry at me for having a reasonable standards to an Enterprise standard of code. "It works im done. Next please"
If their code isn't up to scratch I will tell them and reject it. The issue I have is lazy developers who implement hacks and don't actually go and fix the code.
I am being made the bad person from someone's angry hospitality. All I was saying is that lazy developers are lazy developers and that I axe their work because it's sloppy and doesn't deserve to be on show.
Blag the senior with bullshite of: "I will fix this in the next revision, it works for now" and don't.
Even the people you consider peers will abhor that you think and speak like this about people.
Looking at your past comments: "Perhaps self-reflection is in order", I agree. You're very hostile, angry? You should look in to that.
I wish you the best in life, I truly do, you have some growing up to do.
Now your left with a code base forever with tech debt because of a hacky foreach if loop.
You're telling me you've never worked with anyone who does half arsed work? Where you need to pick up their slack? Lucky you.
Because if you can't do a proper job at least on elementary level then what do you do then when they refuse to fix their mess?
This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.
That's why I don't think banning smartphones is the best idea. It is probably better than unrestricted access, but I feel that school should teach how to use them well instead. It is a bit like with calculators, there are classes with calculators, classes without, and classes that teach how to work with them, their strengths and shortcomings.
I don't know how to do it in practice though. Airplane mode and offline educative apps may be a start.
I assume you are talking about North America here, because that is certainly not the case everywhere
Unlike modern education, which puts a massive emphasis on teaching how to do menial, useless things before going the sensible route [e.g. I remember vividly how we were tortured by doing table of values calculations in maths for what felt like weeks before we were allowed to use derivatives. I loved maths. Until that point. Then I hated the course (not the subject) with a passion.
Lo and behold, I enter university, and the first thing we do in Mathematics 101 is 'let's forget everything we have learned, we're going to start from the beginning'. Joy.]
I want to stress the point: Smartphones exist (and have existed for 15 years - a more modern 'scary new tech' would probably be LLMs). Banning these things from school will only keep teachers happy because they can keep their teaching methods from the 1890s alive for some more time, instead of using what is available to get kids educated better.
- Lessons about road safety (causes of accidents, number of deaths, etc...)
- In elementary school, navigating the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. Including going outside and crossing roads.
- In secondary school, basic information about traffic law, road signs, and information related to light motor vehicles (mopeds, ...)
- Though I didn't do it personally, some school had a class at a practice track, using pedal cars to learn about things like right of way
So while we didn't do actual driving, probably for economic and liability reasons, it is definitely part of the curriculum.
I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.
So social things, like communicating with people, happens on social apps.
Kids also would be better with map apps, GPS, electronic payments and auto-charging bus/train pass if you expect them to have any independence.
All in all, kids should be the last ones IMHO to get real dumb phones. We might as well give them pagers if that's what we're going for.
That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).
I mean, they COULD, but then they first have to develop an interest in science and technology.
The likelyhood of developing such an interest when hooked on tiktok videos of makeup influencers? 0%.
The middle and high schools here ban phone use during class, and the high school confiscates phones (and grants detentions) for students who flaunt the ban. In practice, it usually works with teachers using those door mounted phone holders as a way to take attendance. Put your phone in the pouch when you get to class, and grab it when you leave. Occasionally, a teacher will also ban smartwatches if they become too distracting, but this is not common.
That said, many teachers take advantage of their students having phones to augment their methods & curriculum, and afaik this is the teachers' prerogative.
And applied math on a PC would be great, but we barely have applied math on a calculator.
And kids love calculators: only digital numbers are numbers. 2/3 is cleary not a number to anyone below 20 years of age, that is two numbers, we have to write .6666666\dash_over{6} down as a solution instead.
I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement, but that seems like a problem worth correcting if true? They're going to need to understand fractions to do any math more advanced than elementary school level.
It's not 1995 anymore and we aren't walking in a line to the computer lab. These things are idiot-proof. You really don't need hours of practice everyday to learn how to use them.
So it's not that phones are easy enough to use that you don't need to teach them; it's that the thing you want to teach is the power of a general purpose computer, and phones try very hard to hide the fact that they are extremely powerful general purpose computers. You need to learn on a real computer to know what you even want the phone to be able to do.
1. Most people had access to computers.
2. Computers were difficult to use and required building skills.
2 is no longer true anymore, so those skills are getting lost. Try asking a 15 year old what a filesystem is.
Frankly, smartphones should be discussed in health class, much like drugs and alcohol, and in a similar tone.
Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.
Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.
But my concern is that actions like these teach students an additional lesson: That it's okay to coerce people into specific actions or forfeitures if it serves your purposes. Children and teens absorb a lot, and while they don't always absorb the contents of their lectures, they do typically absorb how they're treated and how that implies they can treat others.
The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.
Well, of course it is. Organized society largely rests upon this principle. In the oppressive ones coercion is exercised arbitrarily or by a select few, and in societies based on rule of law it is exercised, well, using law.
>The ultimate problem with education (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries) is that students are given very little motivation to participate in the educational process. Their participation is demanded and their disengagement is punished. There's little about the system that actually motivates and rewards their participation. If we really want students to spend less time on smartphones at schools, we should be looking at how we can restructure our approach to education so that students would actually feel encouraged to participate and ignore their smartphones.
Maybe. Or maybe the pesky slot machines and gossip aggregators are impossible to compete with, if you leave the adolescent attention economy in the hands of the almighty free market. Either way, banning cell phones certainly won't hurt efforts to engage students, if any.
It is acceptable for public schools, whose mandate is education of the youth, to enaxt restrictions on behavior to that end.
And smartphones are an addictive item. I want school to be fun and engaging. That doesn't mean every kid who's been raised on an iPad since age 0.5 will put down their phones if the teacher has rizz.
Is there any precedent for this that we can model / reproduce? Any country or region where students are considered academically successful, while having unrestricted access to the internet in their pocket?
If it exists, it would be very worthwhile to understand what gives those students such strong self control. Do they do it on their own? Are they somehow admonished/shunned publicly for that behavior?
Also, with regards to the motivational aspect, I would not expect a toddler to be able to make the appropriate choice between a healty meal and candy. I do not expect a teen to be able to restrain themselves from the pubescent games of social media prancing and paying attention to the class teaching.
When I was younger I imagined a world in which computing devices would be a boon to (young) people everywhere.
But many apps appear to be detrimental to people's mental health, both young and old.
Possibly this can be changed. Maybe separate app stores are a solution (think f-droid)? Or maybe we need to start looking a lot harder at apps that might actually be user hostile.
We were often encouraged to use them, in fact. If there was ever a question someone asked that the teachers couldn't answer, or they heard an argument between students about something that could be solved by looking up hard data, they would invite us to take out our phones and look it up. One of the teachers would occasionally make little websites and apps related to whatever we were learning at the time. Sometimes we were shown interesting blog posts, educational youtube videos (before it was an industry), personal sites from people who make things. It was reinforced again and again that they were for discovery first, creation second, and anything else third.
I feel very lucky for that to be how I learned to interact with them. The fact that we have magic machines that can answer any question in our pocket, that can take photos and connect us to people and teach us languages, yet we've corrupted them to the point that people are willingly giving them up and banning them from educational settings, is one of the greatest failings of modern society in my view. Or rather, an indication of even deeper and more troubling problems.
I don't remember anyone "misusing" their smartphones when I was in highschool because the fear of getting it taken away was massive.
It’s a horrible way to optimize technology for addictiveness.
Not sure if there is a fix for that.
Unfortunately when you buy a phone you don't get a link to libgen or a youtube account with DW Classical or Veritasium pre-installed on your phone screen. You get tiktok and instagram and similar slop. If even adults are vulnerable to these turbo-addictive attention harvesters, how can kids hope to escape?
They can call their parents if required from the main office.
This is fantastic and once again shows why Finland is a pioneer in childhood education and why Americans and other countries are so far behind.
Americans sure, but not all other countries e.g. in Singapore, many schools make the students put their smartphones in lockers and don't allow access at all during school hours. In case of emergency, they can call from the Main/General office.
* no phones during classes or during breaks (with the exception of lunch break, I think)
* phone can be allowed by teachers for a particular class and purpose
* if a student uses a phone while it's not allowed, the phone will be confiscated until the end of the school day
* (there might be a more severe rule for repeat offenders)
IMHO this strikes a pretty good balance between allowing phones for coordinating transit to school and back home, and no distraction in the class room.
Children are people, people have specific rights. A teacher is just a random person as far as the law is concerned and can't take someone's phone away any more than an usher in a movie theatre can take someone's phone for being disruptive.
If Finnish children have the same rights as adults, does that mean the children are also subject to the same legal punishment as adults? Can a Finnish child be jailed or fined for the likes of theft, assault, or battery?
Unfortunately that hasn't proven to be a reliable method here in the United States :(
> Also just because they can't take their phone or punish them, it doesn't mean that they can't suspend students or fail them.
I'm not a teacher but my wife is so I can only speak to what I've heard from her. And by her accounts, out-of-school suspention is ineffective because you're essentially rewarding misbehaving children with not having to come to school. She also isn't allowed to lower a student's grade for behavioral issues. Their grade is supposed to be purely a reflection of how well the know the material defined by the curriculum.
The amount of anxiety on show is really saddening.
Over here, at the other end of the Baltic sea, there's an ongoing debate about phones in the classroom and some schools have regulations in place regarding the use of electronic devices, but these are largely toothless as otherwise they would infringe on the right to property.
I graduated high school before the smartphone era, so I don't have much of a point of reference, but I'm leaning on disallowing at least Wi-Fi/mobile data - that's the largest source of distraction in my view.
Can children bring in portable hifi systems? What about those squeaky chicken toys? Or a water pistol?
My classmate brought a super-sized calculator to class for tests, as he had a medical condition which allowed him to bring "a calculator". The buttons made a lot of noise but, again, it was not confiscated.
The hot pockets "crisping sleeve" makes this possible.
In America they started off banned as soon as kids started getting them in the early 00s, but then some years later the bans became unenforced or even undone because, apparently, parents said that their kids needed phones because school shooters (which is a dumb argument.)
But that shouldn't apply in Finland at all.
It really is a dumb argument. Your primary concern in a school shooting should be getting out safely not messing around with your phone. One more 911 call won't make police any more effective. The phone isn't making you any safer. If anything, it's a distraction putting you in danger. Once you've made it to safety, you won't have any trouble contacting your parents whether or not you have a smartphone.
"There is substantial evidence to suggest that education influences intelligence.[3]" (From Wikipedia)
[3] Baltes, P., & Reinert, G. (1969). Cohort effects in cognitive development in children as revealed by cross sectional sequences. Developmental Psychology, 1, 169-177.
I am saying that school is terrible at teaching. If the goal of schooling is that students learn then the school system I was in was a total failure.
The moment I entered university I learned much more and much faster.
Is it not possible that schooling prepared you for this and enabled you to learn much more and faster?
Why couldn't the school have prepared me for that when I was 16? Why does preparation take precisely 12 years and only then I can really learn anything.
Surely you had peers at school that found mathematics to be challenging, or even struggled?
>Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?
I think that this is different between children.
Actually I think it could be extremely valuable to learn, but then the child's activities should actually focus on learning effectively. And sitting in a classroom with children not that interested in learning and a teacher trying to find some middle ground is not helping that.
Personally I believe that with a good school system I would have been perfectly fine doing university courses at 16 and a good school system would have encouraged me to accomplish exactly that.
Considering the US is a country where two dozen cops stay out of a school with an active school shooter until they have run out of bullets ... yeah, it is. No-one wants to hear the local TV station run the dying screams of their children. Better not give them phones so they can call for help (or give the cops information, which would be pointless to begin with).
So I fear if we do not want them to be addicted we have to prohibit things (it does not need to be smartphones, it could be mechanisms on these devices).
Why would you be expecting better results for this ?
There are no material stakes to the child other than losing their entertainment device. Might as well break the rules.
Yes!
> ...without banning stuff?
What incentive do companies have to do this? It seems quite profitable for them?
I am quite strict here with my comment; but honestly, I can't see much reason other than making new products that are made as an "anti" movement, but companies will just find new ways to get people hooked -- because it is profitable for them to do so.
As much as we would like to tout some individualised solution for this, there's no way for all individuals to be trained to resist products designed for maximising its usage. There are armies of smart people being paid to think about ways that will make users be "engaged" with their products for as long as possible for it to be profitable, armies of experts in user behaviour, developers that can churn out good quality digital products, designers who can make the experience feel smooth. It's all geared to be addictive since the incentive is to capture as much attention as possible.
Is it possible to fight gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, drugs addiction, without banning them? Yup, it's costly, relies on a lot of regulation, control from the State on what kind of behaviour these companies can engage, and so on.
The addictive thing is not the smartphone but what it gives access to, without a conversation about what kind of regulations could curtail the addictive side of the real culprit, social media, there's no way out on an individual basis.
Banning smartphones in schools is akin to banning cigarettes' commercials, you aren't banning the stuff completely but at least trying to curtail its reach. We need more of this, social media has a lot of benefits so I don't think it should ever be outright banned, we do need more talk about its downsides and potential mitigations on a societal level.
But at the same time, I think banning smartphones is perfectly fine because you can still use computers and stuff. It's not like they're going back to quills and ink.
Smartphones fry your attention span and enable bullying. And if parents want to have emergency contact, you can always have a simple mobile phone with texting/calling.
They are failing spectacularly on that front anyways. You don't learn useful skills by being handed a remotely administered tablet or Chromebook, which is what schools provide.
Actually </s> they were learnig vital skills like Agile Sprint management! (I don't know if they ever physically met for standup meeetings)
Absolutely smartphones should be banned, at least during lessons, and at best during the whole time in the school, recess, etc.
Giving a child a dumb-phone in an environment where everybody else uses a smartphone doesn't work. If smarphones are not banned then _all_ will end up with a smartphone, and socialisation difficulties, etc...
This is a case where individual freedoms end up in collective damage. Maybe I'm an outlier here but I'd ban all kinds of social media all the time.
1. Educational is not vocational training. Schools should give kids skills and a foundation, not teach them how to use particular technology.
2. Not all jobs require much knowledge of how to use technology.
2. True, though less true over time. Even in the non-tech jobs you're now constantly using technology. In the trades, you need to know how to operate a CNC machine. As a nurse, you're operating medical devices that are getting more and more powered by technology.
You pose this as a question, but I find it's quite easy to say "we need to achieve this some other way" but then not having a concrete suggestion what that other way could be.
Now replace 'Smart Phone' with anything else that is addictive. It's not rocket science folks.
US teenagers are the ideal target market for TikTok, because they (get to) spend so much of their time on that app.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-bill-phones-schools-restri...
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-02-07/new-la...
There's seriously no alternative to banning them, and I don't even see the interest in trying.
The ~10% good that comes from keeping in touch with people, for example, is not really worth it especially for kids.
Whatever you do you are going to have to deal with the negative aspects of society in-person, and we've all kind of accepted that. Social media just doubles the problem.
When done from the safety of one's own couch at home, surrounded by family, there are no consequences to name-calling, cyber-stalking or spreading rumours about someone.
Pretty sure a lot of people would like to reduce the reach of brainrot-boxes on our society. This garbage is worse than cigarettes for kids.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/commission-cellphone...
No matter how you flip it, net result is negative. These apps are like crack, and it’s morally right to protect developing brains from that.
That's setting aside that "have access to all of humanity's knowledge, and learn any subject I'm interested in" could mean Wikipedia, or it could mean short-form, attention-wrecking candy on Tiktok.
Dutch Government research: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2024/07/12...
Total fuck up.
At grade school, the rest of us learned: to read and write, a little arithmetic, some biology, some physics, some history, maybe a second language, and much more.
What a blessing it would be, as an adult, to have free access to a tutor for such a variety of courses.
The point of school is to grow up not to be an ignoramus.
School is very inefficient in terms of the student time spent to learn. It optimises for minimising teacher time and other costs.
> What a blessing it would be, as an adult, to have free access to a tutor for such a variety of courses.
You have paid access. Do you value it enough to pay?
the modern public school system was designed during the height of the industrial revolution to pump out laborers. by adulthood it seems natural to show up in the morning, complete tasks assigned by authority figures, receive discipline or praise, then go home for dinner.
My school was an average school for students targeting a university degree and I did quite well compared to my peers.
Should schools be reformed to better align to contemporary ways of living? Of course, I'm all onboard to have a better education system, finding ways to foster kids inherent curiosities in a less strict and authoritarian way, finding new systems that are both scalable while being more free for kids to pursue their interests at their own rate, and finding a way where every kid might have a decent shared baseline of knowledge to go on into their adult lives.
It doesn't mean tearing down all education, or that current education is useless and teaches nothing. It's inadequate but it's the most valuable asset any society can have, finding better ways to do it is a natural progression to improve it.
I wish the education system had allowed me to not waste countless hours in classrooms listening to lectures that I either had already learned through autodidacticism, or that I wasn't interested in at that moment in time, I had to "re-learn" a bunch of material that was presented in classrooms but I was too uninterested to focus on it at that moment. Still, I don't think it was a total failure, just an education model with flaws that needs to be fixed.
To be clear, I am not against "learning", quite the opposite. I want children to learn effectively.
In other comments you've made the point that we could have children do something else other than 12 years of schooling. And so I want to turn the question to you instead. What would be an example of an alternative to schooling? What would you have preferred, especially since you seem to have gotten what you need from university education.
I guess you should first define which countrys curriculum in your opinion fails to deliver an education.
Are you implying we should school them the Spartan way rather then? Would that prepare them for life in a better way? Or, what do you think would be valuable then to do (purposely not saying learn) during those twelve years?
There are definitely better alternatives to the current school system.
I made a comment with more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846310
So that every kid has a uniform and common base of knowledge that helps them understand the world around them, and enables them to go further by learning more or starting to work.
With no mandatory schooling, most kids would be illiterate and ignorant. A lot of countries, even developed ones, already struggle with the second (antivaxers, flat earthers, voting for dumb populists, etc.). Which indicates the need to improve, not remove.
If there was no schooling, how would kids becoming young adults even know what they're interested in to do? Would they know that e.g. chemistry or physics are things that exist if nobody explained the basics to them? Or would they just continue doing what their parents did, condemning them to a vicious cycle and almost zero social mobility? From history, the latter.
Generally people who went to school.
> With no mandatory schooling, most kids would be illiterate and ignorant.
School is not mandatory in a lot of countries. In the UK education is mandatory but school is not and educating kids out of school leads to much better results in my experience.
I'm not in disagreement, I'm just curious, please elaborate.
I was no. My kids were home educated from about eight or nine to 16 (when they did GCSEs and IGCSE - British exams taken at that age). Overall I think they got a better education than I did (and I sent to a school that was one of the top 10 in the UK academically).
The older one is now an adult, will shortly finish a degree in electronic engineering and is working for jaguar Landrover. She thinks she benefited a lot. The younger one is at sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) as her older sister did, and I can compare them to the typical kid at that stage.
My older daughter puts her interest in engineering very much to home ed - more time with a dad with science and technology interests, and not picking up gender stereotypes from school about male and female jobs (she was the ONLY girl in her A level electronics class).
Other advantages:
1. study at your own pace - more time for something you are finding hard, can go fast through easy stuff without boredom 2. flexibility in how to study (self teaching, tutors, online courses, parental teaching for things I know well). 3. flexibility in what to study: my kids did subjects most schools do not offer. Both did Latin GCSE, and the younger one did astronomy, for example 4. more motivation, self discipline and study skills as a result of the above.= 5. more time for hobbies and interests 6. more time to spend in settings out for school so meeting a wider range of people (pursing 5, but also just meeting up with friends)
Oh, I must have missed that class.
I don't think phones are the problem. I think it's more social media. Schools find it less effort to ban phones vs how to work with them.
The nanny state is a troubling trend
I find it weird that all of these schools have contracts with https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch. It's one thing to discipline a student who has their phone out it's another thing to compel all students to give up their own devices or install managing software used to spy on kids.
This isn't really about helping them succeed. It's more about training them to accept being watched and controlled all the time. Instead of teaching kids how to manage their attention or use technology responsibly, we're teaching them that they don’t own their time, their devices, or even their personal space during the school day.