Maybe I'm out of the loop... smartphones are allowed in the first place? When did that happen? In my high school, cell phones and ipods (at the time) were to be in lockers and turned off during the day. It was an insta-detention if you were seen using one.
This is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw sweeping generalizations here.
I have one part approval for this (back in my day, off my lawn, etc). But I also think about how many general tools cell phones replace, and the sudden added cost is a concern.<p>Flashlight. Probably not necessary 99% of the time at a school, until it is valuable.<p>Calculator. "Approved" graphing calculator replacements are stupid expensive, in many cases more expensive than the phone they're replacing.<p>Camera. We didn't have a ton of these at schools in the 80's, but they weren't entirely absent either. Useful for documenting (and yes, perpetuating) bullying.<p>Music. Even in the stone ages, we had music and headphones. Great for study hall and general focus.<p>Dictionary/Encyclopedia. Sure, folks can use bound volumes, but that's not a skill they'll use. Searching for things on the internet at large, is absolutely a skill they need.<p>Anyways, mixed thoughts. I'd say I turned out fine, but I had to re-learn a lot of mis-information innocently passed on by my peers and teachers.
In talking to my teacher friends, one thing that I hadn't understood is how being the parent of a child has changed due to mobile devices since I was a child.<p>Parents obviously worry about their children. Parents exist in a community of other parents that uses phones belonging to children to keep track of their children. It was very hard for me to wrap my head around how strongly parents expect to be able to reach their children at any point in time. Most solutions (e.g. Yonder Pouches) end up shutting down location services not to mention the ability of students to say "yes I'm find". This leads to way more resistance to these policies that I ever would have expected!
I mean, I agree that cell phones can cause interruptions in schools, but doing this at a place like Buxton compared to some of the public schools I’ve taught in, well, that’s a whole different story.<p>“Buxton School is a private, coeducational, college preparatory, boarding and day school for grades 9–12 located in Williamstown, Massachusetts.“<p>I mean, it’s one thing to take away a kid, cell phone and offer them nothing and then another thing to take away their cell phone and offer them<p>“When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.”
Similar phone ban in Minnesota discussed last year (221 comments): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522142">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38522142</a>
I guess I date myself, but cell phones were banned in my high school because of a strong association at the time with drug dealers. A teacher seeing one was equivalent to seeing contraband.
Related from a few months ago:<p><i>Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here's What Happened</i><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/technology/florida-school-cellphone-tiktok-ban.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/technology/florida-school...</a>
France banned mobile phone use in Primary and Middle school in 2018 - anyone have data on the impact on educational performance? China followed suit in 2021. I think that is it though for state wide suppression of mobile phone use in the classroom
Can you not "lock down" a smart phone to emergency calls + whitelist of numbers (mom, dad, etc)?<p>I'd prefer my kids to keep their phone, but only able to contact me during school hours (otherwise the device is as useful as a brick).
We learned during the COVID school shutdowns that schools would really prefer parents not be aware of what actually goes on during a typical schoolday.
Great, but this is a private boarding school. I'm more concerned about the (over) use of Chromebooks in public schools. It's trivial for kids to tab over to Youtube or a gaming site in the middle of class. I would've done the same thing if I'd been given a laptop for 6 hours a day in school. When I see my kids trying to write math equations or use a virtual ruler/compass to do math homework, it really pains me. Let's go back to writing things by hand.
Those phones contain all the knowledge the school pretends to teach the students. Techers are worried because they see telephones as competition.<p>This would be a nice experiment: Divide the students into two groups and let one group come to school without phones and let the other group stay home and learn the same material from their phones. If the material to be learned is well-defined I believe that students staying at home with their phones will learn the material much faster.<p>The only good thing about the school is that you get to hang out with your peers. The education system is not good for teaching.