(they also dunk on her for a take she apparently had about kids needing their phones in school — assuming they’re not misrepresenting her, I guess that is a pretty bad take)
there are lots of good reasons for kids to have access to phones in school where it’s completely reasonable. access to medical devices, being able to communicate emergencies, record harm being done to themselves or another. just because being on tiktok precludes being educated in that moment doesn’t mean being a cop is more reasonable.
What is true, and what we know for sure, is the capitalist wants the phone and tablet in a child’s hand as early as possible. Google wants Chromebooks in schools to make students dependent on their tools. Apple wants the same and are less successful at it. Meta wants a comprehensive psychological profile of the child to hyper target products and reproduce capitalist social values in the minds of children. They want to be the 3rd and most permissive parent in the home. They want your child engaging with AI so they can use it as a wedge in the privatization of education. They undoubtedly see the phone, the tablet, and the internet at large as the single most influential and powerful tool for mass production and reproduction of culture. They want to read your inbox, your text messages, your voice calls, and mine them all for every ounce of insight into their psychological operations effectiveness.
I think it is completely reasonable to be of the position that less phone/tablet access is good. Especially since it would seem media consumption at a young age backdoors capitalist ideology into kids and shapes the way they understands the world. Considering that there has been a seriously uncritical implementation of technology in education, which I think is only now starting to change, I believe parents should petition their schools to take a more critical and proactive approach to device use, and that these prohibitions are actually not enough and parents should be demanding more oversight on the topic.
I’ve talked in the past about the fact that students live most of their academic life inside a panopticon, and in many ways I think this primes students to be uncritical and even embrace the surveillance state that we find ourselves in now. All of these forms of technology, under capitalist control, are part of the effort to shape and steer culture. There should be demands for schools to implement digital literacy programs coupled with a reduction in technology use, not just for students, but also for staff, administration, and faculty. One that recognizes technology as a potential tool, but that also highlights it’s corrupting influence.
I can’t give a lot of details without doxing myself, but I went to a school that restricted mobile phone usage a lot after an incident that students recorded and attracted a lot of negative attention from parents. After the crackdown, bad stuff kept happening (girls getting beaten by boyfriends, cruel bullying, kids yelling slurs and whatnot) but it just wasn’t recorded and publicized. The school’s security personnel would act like cops and confiscate your phone if you tried to record something like that.
On the other hand, you’re totally right about capital wanting better access to children’s data. And my anecdotal experience from going to university and using my phone during some lectures is that it definitely is an impediment to learning, I shouldn’t do that stuff (obviously there is no reasonable argument for regulating this on an organizational basis since university students are adults).
I don’t know if I have a firm position, yet, honestly.
After the crackdown, bad stuff kept happening (girls getting beaten by boyfriends, cruel bullying, kids yelling slurs and whatnot) but it just wasn’t recorded and publicized.
This thing of being able to easily record incidents of violence is provocative because it lends a lot of credibility and stability to an individual or small group account of specific events. 1 video is worth 1000 witness narratives, especially if the witnesses are devalued and mistrusted in their social context.
We’ve all felt protected in a dangerous situation because the phone was with us. Even in the dark, out of earshot, it tethers us. “I am not alone.” I am connected to my friends, family, the community at large. Whatever happens, there can be witnesses. Contrasting to CCTVs, you feel empowered because the device is physically in your hand, and under your control, rather than being an intrusive spy to catch you doing something wrong. It films from your point of view, not like god above.
But phones aren’t going to solve partner violence or racism or bullying. They often facilitate. If people are routinely getting beat up in public and the only thing that tips to any sort of action is a video, I have to wonder what sort of action comes of it and how helpful it was. Since your description is that everything was focused on not getting negative attention to the staff rather than helping the students.
Yeah you’re definitely right that letting students record the stuff wasn’t gonna solve the problem, if anything it might make a lot of those situations worse because it would add cyberbullying into the equation. But the school 100% didn’t care about the negative effects of phones on education, they just didn’t want the bad PR from incidents getting recorded and shared.
all in all, i disagree with nothing you’ve pointed out here. i think the issue becomes the assertion that varying forms of policing students mind and body is an appropriate and educationally productive way to engage the problem of student phone use. i think we’re way too willing to accept what amounts to violence towards children to keep them in line. we must build an education system that helps them put down the phone, makes them want to put down the phone. but as i pointed out, the issue here isn’t really the phone at all per se, not on its own. students that find themselves unable to detach from the phone but still desire to be educated are easily accommodated by giving them a place to put their phone during class with the teacher. when a student doesn’t want to engage with the class at a given time, this is not alleviated by taking away one object of concentration and substituting another (phone replaced by book/sleep/general dissociation). yet that is the result of the action. instead, we have to change society and education so that students actually desire to be educated, or can be motivated to be educated without explicit threat of force and violence, and can be allowed days off without being left behind.
when a student doesn’t want to engage with the class at a given time, this is not alleviated by taking away one object of concentration and substituting another (phone replaced by book/sleep/general dissociation). yet that is the result of the action.
Nah gimme a break. If a book is so easy to substitute for a phone, why don’t I see crowds of people hanging out all reading their books, showing each other their highlighted passages?
A phone isn’t “one object of concentration” it is 1 million objects.
instead, we have to change society and education so that students actually desire to be educated, or can be motivated to be educated without explicit threat of force and violence
Society is changed by changing society. This is what is means to change society. Collectively decide on a new norm and enforce it.
you are missing the entire point i’m making. the point is that if the student is not participating in education, they are not in that moment being educated. a phone is not a magic box that is inscrutable in its affect on human psychology and behavior. you can’t dismiss the reason that a student might want to escape schooling in a given moment just because the medium of choice is now the phone.
Yeah, I agree, they’re almost definitely misrepresenting how she phrased her argument in that thread because they’re talking about it like she said that kids should be allowed to spend all class on their phones if they feel like it. I don’t know what she originally said, maybe I just shouldn’t comment on it at all because I CBA to go to twitter or whatever to find it.
if my memory serves, not that long ago she did a piece that in part debunks Jonathan Haidt’s panic mongering about kids on phones, and i believe makes several points about why a student might have valid reason to use their phone during school hours, and that it doesn’t make sense to just short-circuit your brain and start doing police actions at the kids.
you are being reactionary. asserting that “people did school just fine before phones. emergency is the only reason i can think of or know about and therefore the only actual reason,” does not essentially differ from any other argument of the form “X was fine before the advent of techology Y, therefore technology Y is at best redundant and probably harmful.” that’s not even an argument, it’s just the form of a thought-terminating cliche. there are even kids now running their diabetes pump off their phone. it’s also the case that a small minority of young people are legitimately “addicted” to their phones. when a student recedes from the educational setting, it does not differ whether it’s into tiktok or a book. and they’re doing that for psychological reasons that need to be addressed at the root, not by furthering controlling and mandating the body and mind. you are advocating for a blanket application of discipline and punishment solely on the grounds that you are unimaginative and ignorant.
I get that you’re trying to make a point but if you ever say reading a book and watching TikTok is the same thing again I’ll use your email address to donate to Kamala Harris.
it’s less different for more reasons than you’d probably like to think. but yeah, i do think reading is much preferable, and was making the point that when it comes to being distracted from education, it doesn’t really matter via interaction with what medium.
I totally understand and see the contours of your point I just want you to know that I swear to fucking God I’ll make the DNC think you’re the world’s biggest liberal if you ever do it again.
the worst part is that my partner is an educator and this was a genuine example she gave when describing to me the conversation her colleagues had about their upcoming no-tolerance cell phone policy and exceptions they’d need to generally try to abide by to not overpolice the kids.
It doesn’t, especially. The phone is a bridge between the continuous glucose monitor and the pump. Pairing two devices to a common piece of technology is easier to troubleshoot and less error-prone than trying to make the two devices talk to each other directly, and allows some of the work to be offloaded to a general purpose computer rather than having to build all of that into the devices themselves. These are things that have to work, so reducing the number of things they have to do is a safety feature. The phone can also share data from the monitor whenever it’s online, versus the old situation where you’d have to bring your monitor in and hope your care team remembers to download the results.
Some pumps do pair directly to the monitors, but that often locks you into a specific configuration of monitor and pump and often costs more.
It just seems to me like adding the phone and an app is adding an extra failure point and that having a dedicated device would be more reliable. Take out the general computer entirely and just have a box with a display and a knob. But then again I am not a glucose pump designer.
That is largely what most of the pumps are, but it’s basically a device that’s constantly embedded in your body and drip-feeding you insulin (and a button for dumping a larger amount when you’re eating). Mechanically, it is very much as simple as it gets: insulin storage, delivery system, and a little computer controlling a valve.
Generally, the spots where you can reliably measure your glucose and the places where you can stick the pump for weeks at a time are not especially close. Continuous monitoring means the pump can adjust the dosage (and shut off when you’re in range) without your input, which prevents tons of complications.
The pumps already require a tube between the actual device and the needle that goes into your body, and they’re compact but by no means form-fitting. Adding sensors, displays, and other functionality there means more bulk, worse quality of life, and if the sensor fails that’s the whole device dead. Separate sensors mean if you brush your shoulder against a door a little too hard, you just replace the relatively cheap monitor instead of the whole system.
Phones are built to talk to shit over Bluetooth and have lots of extra space to build in fault tolerance and fancy graphs and whatever other garbage, leaving the little miracle tech alone to do one thing really well. A Bluetooth radio is really small, but the little computer that needs to live next to it to do anything with the signals adds bulk that’s hard to balance with quality of life.
It is such a marginal use case it is irrelevant. 2024 JAMA says “Among youths, the reported prevalence of type 1 diabetes (per 1000) was 3.5 (95% CI, 2.8-4.4)”. And not all of those have fancy insulin pumps.
As an accommodation, it would be plausible to lock down a phone to do whatever the minimum required is for this and nothing else. No social apps, no telephony, no camera. Networking disabled or severely restricted.
I find the deployment of people with chronic health conditions as a gimmick to win a badly constructed arguments very distasteful.
I find the deployment of people with chronic health conditions as a gimmick to win a badly constructed arguments very distasteful.
people with disabilities that impact blanket policies when children get faced with ignorant teachers or administrators are not a gimmick. they’re people whose existence highlights that you’re just being reactive instead of actually wanting to solve underlying issues of western schooling.
As an accommodation, it would be plausible to lock down a phone to do whatever the minimum required is for this and nothing else. No social apps, no telephony, no camera. Networking disabled or severely restricted.
pointless, ludicrous, silly, puritanical. you’re worried about the very possibility of a type 1 diabetic with a fancy insulin pump sneaking tiktoks in algebra that they need a dedicated piece of specially locked down technology for it.
Your argument in favor of disallowing kids from using cell phones in school is “ask folks who went to school before cellphones were ubiquitous, how crucial they actually are”
I don’t really have a dog in this race because I’m unconvinced of either side, but that’s a poor argument. You should actually present a response to how each of the problems that are currently solved by phones would otherwise be addressed.
Would have been interesting to have video evidence of bullying to take to teachers and parents instead of being shut down with “don’t be a tattle-tale”.
Cellphone bans in school are about one thing and one thing only: eliminating, or at least significantly reducing the number of, recordings of 911 calls made by children during the next school shooting. Look at how hard they are still trying to cover up Uvalde.
There are also cell phone bans coming into place in places that don’t have a culture of school shootings. My understanding is that they are generally considered disruptive. I was surprised to learn that they had ever been allowed; when I was in school there was a blanket ban on electronic devices regardless of whether or not they could communicate or record audio-video.
That’s silly. The reason behind these bans is because teachers currently need to fight the phones for the student’s attention. The machines designed to be as addictive and distracting as possible are derailing education and keeping kids from paying attention. Secondly, doing that is a move for public opinion which does not matter at all. There are countless policies that are incredibly unpopular that won’t change because the American political system is designed to resist grassroots pressure.
“ban phones in school” means a ton of different things. Nobody serious is advocating for kids to have their phones in class, which is an absurd idea. The debate is whether kids should have their phones at lunch and between classes and if their phones should be physically accessible in class. I can see plenty of good reasons to allow phones in passing periods and lunch, but I also understand just how disruptive they are in class and how enforcement could be toothless without physical backing.
(they also dunk on her for a take she apparently had about kids needing their phones in school — assuming they’re not misrepresenting her, I guess that is a pretty bad take)
there are lots of good reasons for kids to have access to phones in school where it’s completely reasonable. access to medical devices, being able to communicate emergencies, record harm being done to themselves or another. just because being on tiktok precludes being educated in that moment doesn’t mean being a cop is more reasonable.
There is not yet a body of research that supports either side of this argument, and there might not be, since much of the research this professor was conducting is now dead due to Trump DEI policy.
What is true, and what we know for sure, is the capitalist wants the phone and tablet in a child’s hand as early as possible. Google wants Chromebooks in schools to make students dependent on their tools. Apple wants the same and are less successful at it. Meta wants a comprehensive psychological profile of the child to hyper target products and reproduce capitalist social values in the minds of children. They want to be the 3rd and most permissive parent in the home. They want your child engaging with AI so they can use it as a wedge in the privatization of education. They undoubtedly see the phone, the tablet, and the internet at large as the single most influential and powerful tool for mass production and reproduction of culture. They want to read your inbox, your text messages, your voice calls, and mine them all for every ounce of insight into their psychological operations effectiveness.
I think it is completely reasonable to be of the position that less phone/tablet access is good. Especially since it would seem media consumption at a young age backdoors capitalist ideology into kids and shapes the way they understands the world. Considering that there has been a seriously uncritical implementation of technology in education, which I think is only now starting to change, I believe parents should petition their schools to take a more critical and proactive approach to device use, and that these prohibitions are actually not enough and parents should be demanding more oversight on the topic.
I’ve talked in the past about the fact that students live most of their academic life inside a panopticon, and in many ways I think this primes students to be uncritical and even embrace the surveillance state that we find ourselves in now. All of these forms of technology, under capitalist control, are part of the effort to shape and steer culture. There should be demands for schools to implement digital literacy programs coupled with a reduction in technology use, not just for students, but also for staff, administration, and faculty. One that recognizes technology as a potential tool, but that also highlights it’s corrupting influence.
I can’t give a lot of details without doxing myself, but I went to a school that restricted mobile phone usage a lot after an incident that students recorded and attracted a lot of negative attention from parents. After the crackdown, bad stuff kept happening (girls getting beaten by boyfriends, cruel bullying, kids yelling slurs and whatnot) but it just wasn’t recorded and publicized. The school’s security personnel would act like cops and confiscate your phone if you tried to record something like that.
On the other hand, you’re totally right about capital wanting better access to children’s data. And my anecdotal experience from going to university and using my phone during some lectures is that it definitely is an impediment to learning, I shouldn’t do that stuff (obviously there is no reasonable argument for regulating this on an organizational basis since university students are adults).
This thing of being able to easily record incidents of violence is provocative because it lends a lot of credibility and stability to an individual or small group account of specific events. 1 video is worth 1000 witness narratives, especially if the witnesses are devalued and mistrusted in their social context.
We’ve all felt protected in a dangerous situation because the phone was with us. Even in the dark, out of earshot, it tethers us. “I am not alone.” I am connected to my friends, family, the community at large. Whatever happens, there can be witnesses. Contrasting to CCTVs, you feel empowered because the device is physically in your hand, and under your control, rather than being an intrusive spy to catch you doing something wrong. It films from your point of view, not like god above.
But phones aren’t going to solve partner violence or racism or bullying. They often facilitate. If people are routinely getting beat up in public and the only thing that tips to any sort of action is a video, I have to wonder what sort of action comes of it and how helpful it was. Since your description is that everything was focused on not getting negative attention to the staff rather than helping the students.
Yeah you’re definitely right that letting students record the stuff wasn’t gonna solve the problem, if anything it might make a lot of those situations worse because it would add cyberbullying into the equation. But the school 100% didn’t care about the negative effects of phones on education, they just didn’t want the bad PR from incidents getting recorded and shared.
all in all, i disagree with nothing you’ve pointed out here. i think the issue becomes the assertion that varying forms of policing students mind and body is an appropriate and educationally productive way to engage the problem of student phone use. i think we’re way too willing to accept what amounts to violence towards children to keep them in line. we must build an education system that helps them put down the phone, makes them want to put down the phone. but as i pointed out, the issue here isn’t really the phone at all per se, not on its own. students that find themselves unable to detach from the phone but still desire to be educated are easily accommodated by giving them a place to put their phone during class with the teacher. when a student doesn’t want to engage with the class at a given time, this is not alleviated by taking away one object of concentration and substituting another (phone replaced by book/sleep/general dissociation). yet that is the result of the action. instead, we have to change society and education so that students actually desire to be educated, or can be motivated to be educated without explicit threat of force and violence, and can be allowed days off without being left behind.
Nah gimme a break. If a book is so easy to substitute for a phone, why don’t I see crowds of people hanging out all reading their books, showing each other their highlighted passages?
A phone isn’t “one object of concentration” it is 1 million objects.
Society is changed by changing society. This is what is means to change society. Collectively decide on a new norm and enforce it.
you are missing the entire point i’m making. the point is that if the student is not participating in education, they are not in that moment being educated. a phone is not a magic box that is inscrutable in its affect on human psychology and behavior. you can’t dismiss the reason that a student might want to escape schooling in a given moment just because the medium of choice is now the phone.
Yeah, I agree, they’re almost definitely misrepresenting how she phrased her argument in that thread because they’re talking about it like she said that kids should be allowed to spend all class on their phones if they feel like it. I don’t know what she originally said, maybe I just shouldn’t comment on it at all because I CBA to go to twitter or whatever to find it.
if my memory serves, not that long ago she did a piece that in part debunks Jonathan Haidt’s panic mongering about kids on phones, and i believe makes several points about why a student might have valid reason to use their phone during school hours, and that it doesn’t make sense to just short-circuit your brain and start doing police actions at the kids.
edit: found the video she did about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBLX3fzNIrE
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
There really aren’t lot of good reasons, actually. Ask folks who went to school before cellphones were ubiquitous, how crucial they actually are.
Emergency is the only reason, and even then the argument stands that there are responsible adults abound, sorta negating a cellphone for an emergency.
you are being reactionary. asserting that “people did school just fine before phones. emergency is the only reason i can think of or know about and therefore the only actual reason,” does not essentially differ from any other argument of the form “X was fine before the advent of techology Y, therefore technology Y is at best redundant and probably harmful.” that’s not even an argument, it’s just the form of a thought-terminating cliche. there are even kids now running their diabetes pump off their phone. it’s also the case that a small minority of young people are legitimately “addicted” to their phones. when a student recedes from the educational setting, it does not differ whether it’s into tiktok or a book. and they’re doing that for psychological reasons that need to be addressed at the root, not by furthering controlling and mandating the body and mind. you are advocating for a blanket application of discipline and punishment solely on the grounds that you are unimaginative and ignorant.
I get that you’re trying to make a point but if you ever say reading a book and watching TikTok is the same thing again I’ll use your email address to donate to Kamala Harris.
it’s less different for more reasons than you’d probably like to think. but yeah, i do think reading is much preferable, and was making the point that when it comes to being distracted from education, it doesn’t really matter via interaction with what medium.
I totally understand and see the contours of your point I just want you to know that I swear to fucking God I’ll make the DNC think you’re the world’s biggest liberal if you ever do it again.
I’m also a nunchuck master and can mimic pretty much any animal. In case you weren’t scared enough already.
Ok, I got a good laugh out of this one.
I’m not denying that this is happening, but why oh god why does the diebetes pump require a cell phone to operate?
It doesn’t, especially. The phone is a bridge between the continuous glucose monitor and the pump. Pairing two devices to a common piece of technology is easier to troubleshoot and less error-prone than trying to make the two devices talk to each other directly, and allows some of the work to be offloaded to a general purpose computer rather than having to build all of that into the devices themselves. These are things that have to work, so reducing the number of things they have to do is a safety feature. The phone can also share data from the monitor whenever it’s online, versus the old situation where you’d have to bring your monitor in and hope your care team remembers to download the results.
Some pumps do pair directly to the monitors, but that often locks you into a specific configuration of monitor and pump and often costs more.
It just seems to me like adding the phone and an app is adding an extra failure point and that having a dedicated device would be more reliable. Take out the general computer entirely and just have a box with a display and a knob. But then again I am not a glucose pump designer.
That is largely what most of the pumps are, but it’s basically a device that’s constantly embedded in your body and drip-feeding you insulin (and a button for dumping a larger amount when you’re eating). Mechanically, it is very much as simple as it gets: insulin storage, delivery system, and a little computer controlling a valve.
Generally, the spots where you can reliably measure your glucose and the places where you can stick the pump for weeks at a time are not especially close. Continuous monitoring means the pump can adjust the dosage (and shut off when you’re in range) without your input, which prevents tons of complications.
The pumps already require a tube between the actual device and the needle that goes into your body, and they’re compact but by no means form-fitting. Adding sensors, displays, and other functionality there means more bulk, worse quality of life, and if the sensor fails that’s the whole device dead. Separate sensors mean if you brush your shoulder against a door a little too hard, you just replace the relatively cheap monitor instead of the whole system.
Phones are built to talk to shit over Bluetooth and have lots of extra space to build in fault tolerance and fancy graphs and whatever other garbage, leaving the little miracle tech alone to do one thing really well. A Bluetooth radio is really small, but the little computer that needs to live next to it to do anything with the signals adds bulk that’s hard to balance with quality of life.
It is such a marginal use case it is irrelevant. 2024 JAMA says “Among youths, the reported prevalence of type 1 diabetes (per 1000) was 3.5 (95% CI, 2.8-4.4)”. And not all of those have fancy insulin pumps.
As an accommodation, it would be plausible to lock down a phone to do whatever the minimum required is for this and nothing else. No social apps, no telephony, no camera. Networking disabled or severely restricted.
I find the deployment of people with chronic health conditions as a gimmick to win a badly constructed arguments very distasteful.
people with disabilities that impact blanket policies when children get faced with ignorant teachers or administrators are not a gimmick. they’re people whose existence highlights that you’re just being reactive instead of actually wanting to solve underlying issues of western schooling.
pointless, ludicrous, silly, puritanical. you’re worried about the very possibility of a type 1 diabetic with a fancy insulin pump sneaking tiktoks in algebra that they need a dedicated piece of specially locked down technology for it.
That was a whole bunch of nothing beyond calling me something I’m not. Very not worth engaging further.
you didn’t even make an argument man, you said some old man yells at cloud nonsense about how your experience means you’re right.
also i didn’t “call you” a reactionary. i said you are being reactionary. there’s a difference.
Thanks for proving you aren’t worth interacting with.
i hope you can at some point bring yourself to actually contemplate this matter.
Your argument in favor of disallowing kids from using cell phones in school is “ask folks who went to school before cellphones were ubiquitous, how crucial they actually are”
I don’t really have a dog in this race because I’m unconvinced of either side, but that’s a poor argument. You should actually present a response to how each of the problems that are currently solved by phones would otherwise be addressed.
🆗
Would have been interesting to have video evidence of bullying to take to teachers and parents instead of being shut down with “don’t be a tattle-tale”.
Cellphone bans in school are about one thing and one thing only: eliminating, or at least significantly reducing the number of, recordings of 911 calls made by children during the next school shooting. Look at how hard they are still trying to cover up Uvalde.
There are also cell phone bans coming into place in places that don’t have a culture of school shootings. My understanding is that they are generally considered disruptive. I was surprised to learn that they had ever been allowed; when I was in school there was a blanket ban on electronic devices regardless of whether or not they could communicate or record audio-video.
That’s silly. The reason behind these bans is because teachers currently need to fight the phones for the student’s attention. The machines designed to be as addictive and distracting as possible are derailing education and keeping kids from paying attention. Secondly, doing that is a move for public opinion which does not matter at all. There are countless policies that are incredibly unpopular that won’t change because the American political system is designed to resist grassroots pressure.
“ban phones in school” means a ton of different things. Nobody serious is advocating for kids to have their phones in class, which is an absurd idea. The debate is whether kids should have their phones at lunch and between classes and if their phones should be physically accessible in class. I can see plenty of good reasons to allow phones in passing periods and lunch, but I also understand just how disruptive they are in class and how enforcement could be toothless without physical backing.
I’m not for schools that use some stupid overpriced technology that is essentially a high tech plastic bag to keep the phones locked away all day.
Its a bad take made by someone who does ads for phones.