[KingMachiavelli]

A ban on cell phones would make doing homework a lot more difficult. It's far easier to have textbooks on your phone than carrying them around all day. Almost impossible to write any kind of paper without the internet.

[Aeolun]

I made it through most of my school career without the internet or a phone (only in uni). I’m sure others can do the same.

[KingMachiavelli]

No the resources you used would have degraded since you were in uni. Since people use the internet, less people are using the library so the library gets less funding, professors aren't checking if the library has enough copies of books, etc. But just culturally unless you've been primarily using non-electronic methods of education; then you are just always worse at doing so.

If I live my regular professional life using stackoverflow, man pages , Wikipedia, Google Scholar, etc. then I become very proficient using those. It doesn't make any sense forcing students to learn research methods they aren't going to use outside the classroom at least not at the expense of prohibiting the de-facto, gold standard of information sharing i.e the internet.

Saying you can learn without a phone/internet is like saying you can travel via horse or find a job via the classified section. Efficient research and learning is a network dependent skill; if other people use X then you need to know X not Y .

[Zenzero]

> Almost impossible to write any kind of paper without the internet.

Did we all forget about books?

[KingMachiavelli]

Sure but why would you want to? I can lookup 10x the number of sources just using LibGen and Google Scholar than I can in a real library.

[pezezin]

Seriously? What kind of textbook are you going to read on a tiny cellphone screen?

[KingMachiavelli]

It's actually quite convenient, school desks are quite small so trying to fit a textbook and your homework notebook is quite cramped. You can just put your phone directly next to the HW problem. High schoolers and college students still have good eyes lol.

[freilanzer]

What? Textbooks on a phone? This must be satire.