A new UN report raised concerns on Wednesday about the excessive use of smartphones, calling for them to be banned in schools worldwide. According to the UN's education, science and culture agency UNESCO, the over-use of mobile phones impacts learning.
Surface level I agreed but thinking more on it I don’t.
Emergencies and early pickups should be the responsibility of the adults i.e. teachers and administrative staff. They are responsible for you while in school so they need to be informed either way.
Late pickups can be discovered when the school day is over and they get their phone back / access to it.
Learning tool for people with disabilities? No they should get real/proper tools and help/assistance. Not just a free pass to use their own smartphone. Not everyone can afford one good enough to be of much help.
Photos of the whiteboard sure but I think that falls on the teacher that they need to have that and being able to hand it out. They could of course take a picture themself and print it/photocopy.
As for laws for if they can take them that is of course needed if they are to be banned properly.
I don’t think it creates and us vs them if it’s not on the teachers to enforce it. Place the task on non-teacher staff and have reasonable punishments for trying to avoid the ban and it will work to ban them.
The real world doesn’t work that way. Horror stories abound of school staff blatantly ignoring students’ special needs.
And that problem is of infinitely higher priority than banning phones in school 100%. Allowing phones is not a solution to that very real problem.
Let’s review the available options here:
There is no third option of solving the problem of children being neglected in schools. That would require people who don’t care to magically start caring, which obviously isn’t going to happen.
Therefore, the greatest harm reduction is achieved through option 1.
I strongly disagree. Option one is just giving up on trying to improve the situation in our schools. You’re not listening here. “Not caring” as you put it either is or should be neglect in terms of performing their job and thus grounds for dismissal. Then you’ll say “but no one wants to teach anyway, there’s a shortage as is” and I’ll say that yeah, that’s another more important issue, that teachers need better working conditions and pay.
That there exists more important issues to fix doesn’t mean that banning phones isn’t a good idea, it just means that there are prerequisites before it would actually work “in the real world” as you put it.
You’re willing to hold off on banning phones in the classroom until neglectful school staff are no longer an issue, then? Okay, that’s fine with me, but from what I’ve seen and heard of our schools and our cultural values around education, you’re going to be waiting a very long time.