[aschla]

I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school.

Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.

When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?

[japhyr]

I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons.

One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.

Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.

Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.

Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?

[huhkerrf]

There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.

But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.

[Mistletoe]

If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.

If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?

[pessimizer]

> there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to.

A lot of parents are addicted to texting back and forth with their kids all day. I imagine many of the kids hate it.

[bborud]

> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"

That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.

[jdalgetty]

When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.

[kakacik]

This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.

There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?

[AAAAaccountAAAA]

I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.

[johnnyanmac]

no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime?

Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?

[phantasmish]

We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...

Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.

What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.

[johnnyanmac]

I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.

It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.

[_vqpz]

It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.

This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.

[kelnos]

I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)

(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)

[accrual]

> played games on our graphing calculators

Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.

[welcome_dragon]

I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.

I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.

Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?

[accrual]

In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.

[stonemetal12]

Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.

[ErroneousBosh]

> B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos.

A friend's kid got in a small amount of trouble for something along these lines. He was "present at but not involved in" a fight at school, where some of the other kids were shooting it on their phones.

Then one of the teachers came round the corner to break it up and take the guilty parties off to the headmaster's office.

My mate's son, kind of similar thinker to his dad, clever guy, bit of a windup merchant, sprung into action.

"OKAY, CUT! Right, you and you - " pointing at the antagonists " - reset please, everyone else places right now please, " and rounds on the teacher "... and you can be here but you have to be out of my shot."

There's no way to prove they weren't trying to make a film. There was a note home from the school that basically said "We know he's at it, we just can't prove he's at it, but we do know that he's not going to do that again, right?"

[johnnyanmac]

I think it's less about what's okay and more about enforcement. It does seem like post pandemic schools lost all their teeth.

[bluedino]

In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.