The UN agency said that even being close to a smartphone has been linked with students being distracted in the classroom, which in turn causes poorer student performances.
Just banning seems like an incomplete strategie and while i think a couple of hours of no usage doenst hurt (helps even), i think schools need to also teach kids to establish resonable and healthy behaviours with digital services and devices.
Sure, but then the teacher needs 110% support from both the administration and the parents when the time cost of teaching this particular behavior is significant. If the parents are uncooperative, then they can get fucked.
Teacher says no? End of story. The parents can take it up with their kid on their own time. The kids will learn healthy behavior more quickly once they see the policy has teeth.
We need to teach children to live both with and without technology; to take what they need from the abundance of information, but to ignore what is not necessary; to let technology support, but never supplant human interactions in teaching and learning.
And how are you going to do that if you collect their phones at the beginning of every day and only allow them to use it when you don't have any influence of their usage?
This seems like such a agist article, it would be immediately shot down if they wanted to collect university students' phones at the beginning of every day.
It's time to start giving children autonomy, respect, and not treating them like something to overprotect or be scared of.
Collecting personal phones and such makes sense if they have devices strictly for school. They could even benefit from having time set aside as they grow to learn how to program the tech themselves. Structure out time for group activities for younger ages, sharing one tablet between like 4 kids. Monitor how they're using the devices between the school days and make sure they aren't adding shit that's distracting from the lessons.
Ignoring the capabilities kids have by denying them lessons on technology could be a bit detrimental to their potential imo. There's a middle ground that I offered in a response below
Teaching a kid there is a time and place to use their devices is educational. Confiscating personal property to limit access is just creating problems.
Also, who is paying for the $2000 smart phone that got cracked/lost/stolen while confiscated?
As I said in a comment above, good luck not getting sued by the parents during a school shooting / emergency and their kid cannot contact them.
I was surprised to find a few years ago that phones were allowed in classes. It makes absolutely no sense to me. What is the positive side to letting them in?
So now that we have removed the distraction of cell phones, we can get kids to focus on - what exactly? A curriculum that favors rote memorization, where children cannot even relieve themselves without an authority figure allowing them to do so, where they are forced to sit still for hours to better prepare them for mind numbing, pointless office jobs, and where we can teach them skill that were obsolete 30 years ago, and will be even more once they hit the job market?
Everyone has short attention spans, not just children.
This is a systematic issue(and has been one for nearly 30 years) related to how people get their dopamine fixes.