Czechia moves to ban mobile phones in schools from September 2027

Stanford researchers studied the second assertion and found no change

https://ed.stanford.edu/news/national-study-school-cell-phon...

How is this effective at all? Every kid will continue to use them surreptitiously, as they always have.

Czechia had per school rules as well (my kids school bans them in school premises, which leads to groups of kids starting at phones in front of the school, sad sight), but as discussed yesterday by minister of education it's clearly not effective and still huge part of kids use them during school breaks despite more than 90% school officially banning them.

Czechia was one of the, if not the last country in EU without nationwide smartphone regulation

Btw I can't imagine putting my kids in education system in country where you don't have home schooling alternative to state indoctrination in case you need it. And German 2015 immigration crisis and green deal clearly show us your leaders can't be trusted at all.

My kids were basically required to have a phone for school. In theory they could use a laptop for everything but in practice it was assumed you had a phone.

They were supposed to use the calendar for assignments (and were given time to use the calendar), the teacher would tell them to take a picture of the white board with their homework assignment on it, and they used some private app (don't know the name of it) for messaging the teacher.

This was a few years ago though, so maybe now the tide has turned?

Edit: The rules have changed:

https://tea.texas.gov/taa-letters/implementation-texas-house...

that would be illegal right now, kid/parents can call police you stole their phone and you would be in trouble with police, any school rule isn't above the law, which is why there must be confiscation option clearly mentioned in the smartphone ban law

But if kids refuse to put their phones away during classes, teachers have no right to take them since they are the kids' personal property. And yes, it is in the school rules that you cannot use your phone during class.

My SO teaches English and struggles with it permanently. Kids are on their phones and not paying attention to the lecture. And no support from the headmaster. Other teachers claim they do not have the problem to save face, but then you talk to an expat teacher who was in their class for observation and hear something else.

I don't understand how people fail to understand how public policy works. You can tell people to do something and they may or may not ignore you depending on how you say it, and what incentives and penalties you provide.

Being a parent or a teacher puts you in a position of fighting multi-billion dollar corporate interests that are trying to capture your kids' attention. It's also fighting their very successful advertising campaigns that makes kids, just like adults, feel FOMO for not having the latest gadgets, or access to the same social media outlets as their peers.

Any public policy trying to counter this needs some weight behind it, and a strong consensus as to what we value as normative behavior in society.

Have you talked to a teacher lately?

Parents are responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of the notifications kids get at school

> Parents can also restrict usage or set rules for appropriate use. Many do.

If you talk with teachers, some of them complain that kids are on the phone with _parents_ during the class time. And that parents loudly complain to the headmaster if the teacher tries to prevent their child from speaking to them.

Yes, it sounds crazy, but it's true.

The ubiquitous availability of smartphones also limits kids freedom. It creates a very particular style of interaction with peers where quitting means you are left out. That means kids are subject to apps that prey on insecurities, have extremely addictive properties, force feed constant doomerism messaging on them, etc just to stay connected. Another way to look at it is it’s a tax on the joy and freedom of being a kid.

This is a freedom-from / freedom-to distinction. Once you look at kids as a social group rather than as a single individual I think you can come to very different conclusions about what is on balance healthier.

> You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms

Children’s freedoms ought to be limited, yes.

They’re limiting freedom of children in school, who already don’t have the freedom to ignore other school policies.

Studies show phone bans help school performance, albeit not by much immediately, but there’s not much upside.

If something is hard to measure, is it automatically bad in your eyes ?

There's been several pilots that prove this being very effective. Czechia is not first doing this.

I think it's more a mental health or social interaction thing rather than expecting improved school results, some studies even show no short term increase in results.

But you don't need study to know kids staring at phones instead of talking and playing together is improvement.

Forcing kids to go to school is already limiting their freedom

> You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms, so they need to provide measurable improvements

I think people like you are the reason I’m a strong supporter of the concept that people should pass an evaluation and get a permit to have a child.

Of course the freedom of choice for children is limited because their brains are not mature enough to make an educated decision and quite gullible. That’s why it’s illegal for them to drink alcohol, drive vehicles and smoke cigarettes.

ALL modern electronics should be banned from regular classrooms, up to and including projectors. We now have evidence that at _best_ it does not help. At worst it's actively harming students.

(yes, yes, with obvious exemptions for special needs, computer science classes and so on).

Actually, I benefited from a school-issued Chromebook. I mostly used it for note-taking (I'm bad at handwriting) and homework. Even though it allowed some simple browser games, I suspect it was less distracting, and the browser games could've been banned if the school used a whitelist to make it even less so. Even with paper students can be distracted by doodling and daydreaming.

But I wouldn't oppose banning those as long as the schools provided an AlphaSmart (because again, I'm really bad at handwriting). I think e-readers would be best but those are expensive.

I think banning tools for teachers, like projectors, is unnecessary. I suspect I learned easier from projected computer screens vs. staring at a whiteboard, but anything projected on the screen (e.g. powerpoint presentations) could be passed to students on paper, except movies but those may rarely be necessary.

Whether those things are distractions depends on what they're used for.

I'm fairly certain schools had projectors a few decades ago, and nothing bad came of it.

You don't really need to ban phones from schools; just ban them in class. I don't know why this stuff is treated as such a big deal. Students should pay attention in class, which means not using anything (not devices, paper, books, etc.) except as needed for instruction.

How would that be beneficial? We don't need to make teachers' jobs more difficult than they already are by removing all the aid brought by digitalization.

TVs are good when used appropriately. We watched Macbeth for the literature class.

I think you might need to narrow down what kind of workplaces... A taxi/bus driver, agreed. A an integration engineer, hard disagree.

Either way, when you're an adult, assuming you would be in a workplace, you're maturity should decide. If you want to be a distracted employee and risk termination, you're an adult.

Yeah, especially in Indian scam call centers.