Should Smart Phones be Banned from School Campuses?

[Gaius46]

What legitimate reasons are there for a student to talk to anyone but their teacher during class?

I said "during the day" not "during class." But to answer your question, none. But there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a parent and child might need to talk during the day.

 

[RobertU]

I pay the tuition. My opinion matters a great deal.

He forgot his lunch.

And what happened to kids who forgot their lunch before there were cell phones? Did they starve to death?

 

[Felis Leo]

One school in the State of Massachusetts thinks so and the ban it adopted has produced excellent results after being one year in place. The students are given dumb phones with very limited capabilities but are not allowed to bring their smart phones onto the campus. Is this a way forward in a world where Chat GPT and other AI are replacing human thinking and reasoning skills in primary and secondary educations?

What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation

Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them

www.theguardian.com

It's worth a read!

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

Cell phones used to be banned where I live when I and my wife went to high school. I do not feel we were any worse for it.

 

[samiam5211]

Presumably the teacher isn't asleep at the wheel and would actually see cell phone usage in the class and deal with it on a case by case basis. Or am I missing something here.

Parent's opinion do matter. And there are all kinds of legitimate reasons why a child and parent may need to talk during the day. Once a technology comes into widespread use people find all kinds of ways to use it to make life easier/better. That horse it out of the barn, banning isn't happening in the vast majority of schools. Best to find ways to accommodate it

yea, teachers need more things to babysit during class.

 

[Gaius46]

And what happened to kids who forgot their lunch before there were cell phones? Did they starve to death?

That's a common argument. I used to hear it a lot when we went skiing with our kids and we outfitted them and us with walkie talkies - this was in the 90s when lots of ski resorts didn't have blanket cell phone coverage. What I realized then is that technology changes the way we live our lives. Asking "what did they do before cell phones" isn't a valid question because today we live differently because of cell phones. In the skiing case it allowed our kids to ski ahead of us - or vice versa - or even different trails, something that just didn't happen when we didn't have 2-way communication. And once you start that doing that it becomes normal.

In the lunch example maybe the kid is on a restricted diet or maybe the parents just don't want the kid to cafeteria food. Or maybe a working parent is going to be late and pick up the kid after school and has had to make alternative arrangements, or won't be home on time and made arrangements for the child to stay with her friend Jane down the street. There are literally hundreds of plausible scenarios that one can dream up where parent-child communication during the day makes life easier for all concerned.

 

[BirdinHand]

And what happened to kids who forgot their lunch before there were cell phones? Did they starve to death?

Kids today have smart watches, phones, iPads, etc.

Technology and being able to communicate is the norm.

We did not have that when we were kids.

And our teachers didn’t have technology either.

I can send a message and it instantly pings on his teacher’s phone. Yesterday I pinged her to check in on him during the course of the day because we changed his ADHD medication dosage. She got back to me right away.

Technology is a tool and a way of life now.

It’s easy to tell kids to simply keep phones in backpacks during lessons.

 

[ElChupacabra]

ChatGPT is not replacing human thinking. WaPO did an interesting experiment recently where they sent a bunch of ChatGPT written college entrance essays mixed in with ones written by humans to Harvard admissions people. None of the ones written by ChatGPT were acceptable.

ChatGPT is the equivalent of paint by numbers. Once you get past the gree whiz factor it writes like shit.

I agree. ChatGPT and other LLM apps are more like tools to build drafts from rather than replacing the creative process when writing something. It's more of a template generator based on the criteria you give it, which is then modified by the user. The thing to remember is it will get better at this though, and I suspect it will have the same impact to writing as the calculator had on mental math; to some degree at least.

 

[Evilroddy]

Fair enough. So it will relieve us of unimaginative grunt work. I can easily agree with that and don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Disruptive to be sure but whether it's good or bad depends on how we deal with it.

Guias46:

As long as income is tied to work, grunt work will be necessary to allow those who cannot excel in an information-based economy to subsist outside of it. Thus what you're perhaps inadvertently saying is that AI and AI-mediated robots will relieve employers from having to pay human workers to do unimaginative grunt work and to externalise that lost wage-paid labour force's support to the public sector and an already over-burdened tax-base. To me that's a very bad thing. Without income more and more of the labour force will not be able to be effective consumers and thus aggregate demand will decline or stagnate and the economy and the material well-being of societies will degrade, perhaps rapidly and certainly dramatically. Therein lay the seeds of civil unrest, revolution and upheaval, I think.

In the past there have always been productive and economic bottle-necks which previous human technology revolutions have not been able to manage and bypass because while the technology has been more efficient, it has still been dumb and non-adaptive. AI and machine learning threatens to sweep away many of those traditional limiting bottle-necks and to cause much more structural unemployment and widescale disruption of labour than any human society has had to deal with in times of peace in our past. The only way to mitigate that prospect somewhat is to improve education means and standards dramatically in order to lift as many people as possible into a condition where they can contribute value-added inputs on a very large demographic scale to any future creative economy. That means they must learn to think critically, analyze and synthesize, not to out-source that to their digital devices. Well that's my informed position anyway. I don't have a crystal ball but I see metaphorical writing on metaphorical walls.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

It will be undeniably bad for the generation that lives through the disruption.

It is little solice to someone to say that it will be better after they are dead.

We have to get over the notion that people need to work for a living.

samain5211:

The "We" you mention includes powerful elites and their allies in positions of political power who do not want to decouple income from work. I think they would prefer to move to an authoritarian societal structure and manage the poverty spiral rather than moving to a social economy where means are severed from work. Capitalism and consumerism have teeth and rapacious appetites and the history of colonialism, both past and near-present, show that such interests are not averse to killing millions to achieve the preservation and expansion of their predatory interests and policies.

So how do we decouple income/means from work? How do we sell it to the powers that be? The best way is to have the best educated population of voters who are both aware and empowered to push such an agenda before the authoritarians can hobble democracy. Education and informed collective will are the means to what you seek and thus the derailing of quality public education and the fragmenting and atomising of broad-based political movements by PR firms, mass media and think-tanks are what we are seeing now. The clock is ticking!

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[samiam5211]

samain5211:

The "We" you mention includes powerful elites and their allies in positions of political power who do not want to decouple income from work. I think they would prefer to move to an authoritarian societal structure and manage the poverty spiral rather than moving to a social economy where means are severed from work. Capitalism and consumerism have teeth and rapacious appetites and the history of colonialism, both past and near-present, show that such interests are not averse to killing millions to achieve the preservation and expansion of their predatory interests and policies.

So how do we decouple income/means from work? How do we sell it to the powers that be? The best way is to have the best educated population of voters who are both aware and empowered to push such an agenda before the authoritarians can hobble democracy. Education and informed collective will are the means to what you seek and thus the derailing of quality public education and the fragmenting and atomising of broad-based political movements by PR firms, mass media and think-tanks are what we are seeing now. The clock is ticking!

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

I think it’s going to take everything being set on fire.

I hope I’m wrong.

 

[Evilroddy]

If manufacturers were just a wee-e-e-e-e-e-e bit more moral and responsible they would offer software that allows a smartphone to be put into "EDUCATIONAL" mode or...call it whatever you wish.

Schools would be able to load a software app that uses a profile that limits what a phone can and cannot do.
For instance, limit contacts to a group of five people who are close or immediate in the student's life, like parents or older siblings.
Limit internet connectivity to campus intranet instead of the public cellular network, or carve out a range of exclusive IP addresses and limit access to only those while on campus.
If a student's phone is discovered to not be running the prescribed campus app, it can be confiscated until the issue is rectified or otherwise dealt with.
Additionally, things like cameras and microphones would be limited or blocked unless the school permits it.

There is all kinds of ways you can regulate phone use on campus. It's not that difficult.

CBS:

Manufacturers and providers are answerable only to their shareholders so long as they stay within the confines of the law. Profits, not morals or ethics guide their decisions. They are imprinting youth to become better digital consumers and are not answerable to educational or moral/ethical authorities. That's good business policy and very bad education policy. If the providers were to install an App you could be pretty sure that they would be data mining through it and selling on that data about these students. When I was teaching in Quebec we ran into all sorts of road blocks with protective and constraining software. It got to the point that we had to disable the school's wireless system during mid-year and final exams. In classes kids would ignore lessons and labs unless the teacher watched them like hawks and constantly interdicted their drifts into cyber space.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

CBS:

Manufacturers and providers are answerable only to their shareholders so long as they stay within the confines of the law. Profits, not morals or ethics guide their decisions. They are imprinting youth to become better digital consumers and are not answerable to educational or moral/ethical authorities. That's good business policy and very bad education policy. If the providers were to install an App you could be pretty sure that they would be data mining through it and selling on that data about these students. When I was teaching in Quebec we ran into all sorts of road blocks with protective and constraining software. It got to the point that we had to disable the school's wireless system during mid-year and final exams. In classes kids would ignore lessons and labs unless the teacher watched them like hawks and constantly interdicted their drifts into cyber space.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
---Arthur C. Clarke

 

[mrjurrs]

ChatGPT and all "AI" lack human creativity. Even with more information the best it will ever do is still just mimicry.

Going further there's an interesting court case now wending it's way through the system. A journalist used ChatGPT to gather information about a court case that had to do with embezzlement of funds from a non-profit by one of its' officers. ChatGPT literally got every fact wrong - including the person who's the defendant. The guy named in the article as defendant is suing the journalist and OpenAI for defamation.

Most of human existence is mimicry.

 

[Gaius46]

Guias46:

As long as income is tied to work, grunt work will be necessary to allow those who cannot excel in an information-based economy to subsist outside of it. Thus what you're perhaps inadvertently saying is that AI and AI-mediated robots will relieve employers from having to pay human workers to do unimaginative grunt work and to externalise that lost wage-paid labour force's support to the public sector and an already over-burdened tax-base. To me that's a very bad thing. Without income more and more of the labour force will not be able to be effective consumers and thus aggregate demand will decline or stagnate and the economy and the material well-being of societies will degrade, perhaps rapidly and certainly dramatically. Therein lay the seeds of civil unrest, revolution and upheaval, I think.

In the past there have always been productive and economic bottle-necks which previous human technology revolutions have not been able to manage and bypass because while the technology has been more efficient, it has still been dumb and non-adaptive. AI and machine learning threatens to sweep away many of those traditional limiting bottle-necks and to cause much more structural unemployment and widescale disruption of labour than any human society has had to deal with in times of peace in our past. The only way to mitigate that prospect somewhat is to improve education means and standards dramatically in order to lift as many people as possible into a condition where they can contribute value-added inputs on a very large demographic scale to any future creative economy. That means they must learn to think critically, analyze and synthesize, not to out-source that to their digital devices. Well that's my informed position anyway. I don't have a crystal ball but I see metaphorical writing on metaphorical walls.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

Well yes that is the other side of the equation.

At the point where the labor market can no longer supply jobs enough jobs for the populace we have to fundamentally rethink how the economy works. The educational system already needs improvement because critical thinking is a requirement for an informed citizen/citizenry but that won't be enough. In an economy where manual work is all but eliminated there wouldn't likely be enough jobs for 330,000,000 create, intelligent, critically thinking people. Some form of UBI is pretty much a requirement, which is where I think you were going.

 

[stealthycat]

I'd be interested to see a school ban on cell phones - total ban during school hours and after 2 years what their overall test scores were compared to before