I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.
Phones with SMS and voice call functionality only, for safety purposes.<p>Good!<p>I'm hard pressed to enunciate an argument for why having social media during a school day, at school, is beneficial to early childhood development.<p>>> <i>“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” [New York governor, Kathy Hochul] said.</i><p>>> <i>“These addictive algorithms have been used against young people since 2011,” Hochul said. “If [social media companies] were going to self-police and manage this themselves, what has stopped them thus far? Clearly as a government, we need to step in.”</i>
It's been implemented recently in New Zealand and has been pretty successful.<p><a href="https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cellphones/" rel="nofollow">https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cell...</a>
This needs to happen on a country-wide scale.<p>Our children are getting destroyed by the attention economy. I tried to setup a mobile game the other day and I immediately deleted it because every single popup was a psychologist-optimized addiction machine designed to suck every bit of dopamine from undeveloped children.<p>This is the #1 issue plaguing children in my opinion and it will only get worse without regulation.
Good, I don't see any good reason for kids to have smartphones in school. If someone needs to get a hold of the kid, the old fashioned way of just calling the school still works just fine.
They ripped out home economics, Wood, metal and auto shop. They ripped out the computer labs (hey, many of you HAD vocational training and didn't know it). Gym, Art, Music... all persist.<p>Schools in the US have become some sort of retrograde distopian bubble of a time that never existed.<p>Now you're going to remove the one check that kids had vs this system? Cause we haven't seen videos of teachers being awful, stupid or misinformed, we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot?<p>If you think that cell phones harm kids, or social media harms kids, this bill does fuck all to change that. IT does remove the one context where an internet connection and camera might be useful to how the kids deal with the world going forward.<p>Fund schools year round, with smaller classes, better teacher pay and 8 hour fucking days with meals provided to kids. These are the things that will change outcomes, not cell phones bans.
If schools had the resources and personell necessary to engage the students then there would be no need to ban mobiles because the students would be more interested in the work at hand. Banning them will not magically make the lessons more engaging or more relevant.
or maybe the thing ruining kids is<p>1) That their freerange land has been wiped out and replaced with narrow strips of moving vehicles. Kids have ~no alternatives to being cooped up in adult-filled buildings.<p>2) False stranger danger alarms have wiped out peer time and 20k years of adultfree self-sufficiency training.<p>3) Wiping out multi-generational households and walkable communities. Kids used to have many parenting adults but have two. Or one. Or none.<p>4) Besides needing the wisdom of 100, parents now need to parent 24/7, every day of every week of every year. It's massively more time than the last x0000 years.<p>Maybe what is ruining kids are adults who've eliminated kids' natural growth builders and now are hell bent on sabotaging their last peer connector.
Our central government banned all phones in schools here in New Zealand at the start of this school year. It's early days yet, but so far so good.
I think the focus on age is perhaps outsized especially in that child protection act described in the article.<p>Forcing social media companies to collect a bunch of personal info for age verification is bad for privacy and doesn’t solve the problem of companies being legally allowed to build dopamine casinos.<p>I like smartphone bans for school, though.
This is wonderful. Make it National. Then collective elderly Us can rest assured the generation that's running the country received a "proper" education closer to what many of us experienced since we were in school before smartphones were everywhere.
So wait, I’m supposed to just let my kids go to school, where there are how many shootings a year, with no way to contact them?<p>Not an icebergs chance in hell I’d let that happen.
So just yesterday I'm reading here about the Google "Kids Watch" and how its benefit it that kids "don't need a phone anymore".<p>Now I see this and I can't help but think some Google lobbyist authored a bill (this absolutely does happen), handed it to a staffer in New York and now we're getting a bill that says parents have to buy their kid a Google Kids Watch (since you want your kids location but they cant have a "smart phone").<p>I didn't get why Google would make such a product and why in the world parents would ever trust Google with a kids product.. but seeing this article it all makes sense. I knew it had to be some kind of gambit but I didn't immediately see how. Now I think I do.<p>"Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’"<p>Of course the governor of NY is basically wrapping herself in the American flag, putting her hand on a bible and protecting our children ...<p>Now with this, kiddos are gong to cut their teeth using the Android ecosystem. When it does come time to get them a smart phone, what kind do you think its going to be? Of course the kids watch is going to have some kind of ecosystem the parents will get deeper in with pic storage, calendars, location tracking etc.<p>First, buy a law that says kids cant have iPhones. Second, produce a watch that placates the parents/politicians thats not a smart phone. Third, sleep walk the kids and family into a new ecosystem. Fourth, in a few years as the kid matures you get to sell them Google Phones in the Google Ecosystem. Fifth, cast yourself as a concerned company with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of America's Children.<p>I don't know whether I want to go buy Alphabet shares or go outside and yell at the sky about what a corrupt world we live in.<p>$10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow. Who doesn't want a more fun way to play hide-and-go-seek? Gotta know who your friends are so we can invite them to the game etc.
This just feels like more social panic pandering from Hochul. I sincerely doubt this will have any appreciable affect on kids well-being. My older kid's high school just leans way in. They use phones in class for tasks. They watch videos, do research, use calculator aops, Google Classroom. The teachers who won't answer email are the ones who are just being stubborn.