Recommendations are well and good, but I can't see them having much if any impact on what people do. It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices. Especially those that target children.
Smartphones are banned at school in Aus, for a strong net positive. Kids still sneak them into toilets and so on (and vapes), but the overwhelming impact has been positive.
So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".
Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.
How do you know that it has had an overwhelmingly positive impact? Can we, for example, see a marked increase in PISA scores for Australia from after the ban?
Or is this one of those "I hate phones, therefore banning them must be good for kids" things?
Meet kids who have smartphones in school. A lot of them aren’t able to maintain eye contact in a conversation. It’s a remarkably jarring change that looks like it will wind up stunting the development of low-income kids for a generation.
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.
> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.
> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.
I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.
I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.
Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.
So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
Given that teachers are no longer competing for student attention in class, that is one single and quite important positive which doesn't require an academic study and referencing to demonstrate.
I'm not sure what you were hoping to achieve with the request for evidence, but what you're asking is not yet subject to a longitudinal study. The move has certainly been praised by educators, and that should be enough given it's the first or second year year of implementation in many cases, and what they are advocating for isn't a social taboo, nor draconian.
What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
If you want to measure something for this measure happiness or strength of social circles. Good luck with that.
>What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
That's not science, that's a demonstrably false assumption that everyone thinks smartphone usage is bad for kids.
In my experience with kids and smartphones, kids of the young generation (gen Z) are way better informed (and less brainwashed) than kids of their parents' generation were, whose only access to information about the world when growing up was through the captured, centralised legacy media.
It’s surprising that more schools haven’t done this. I suspect that we’ll look back in 10 years with it being common and ask ourselves what took so long.
In the US we've completely given up on stopping school shootings, and parents have instead decided that the better thing to fight for is their children having cell phones so they can hear the child's last words when the school shooting happens.
I think the phones are one thing. It was a bit distressing to hear that US schools have “school shooting drills” like Japan schools have “earthquake drills”.
Wait until you hear about how teachers started stocking emergency toilets because of those multi-hour drills, and the right wing in the US responded by using it to accuse schools of setting up litter boxes for self-identified 'furries' in the student body.
I am more worried about dogs in school. Many teacher are fine to blame 11 years old for "provoking" dog attack! It is ok to send a kid to hospital, for eating a sandwitch!
Teachers at my school do not believe allergies are real! If there is asthma attack, it is an uncorrelated event! School will stab my kid with epipen, call ambulance and send me hospital bill! Avoiding it is too much work!
Once school brought unrestrained police dogs to school for a demonstration! Those had a record of attacking and torturing suspects!
It’s not actually about school shootings in the US, as much as that might be cited as justification. Some parents just want to be able to text their kids all day.
All of these seem valid, too, but they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. I’m all for common sense recommendations - even if it only helps a relatively small percentage of families.
I look at it in a similar light to nutritional guidelines.
> It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices.
Once again, I must reiterate that parents choose the schools their children attend, and that means that they choose the solution. I argue strongly that we, as a society, should not impose arbitrary restrictions on parents and children. If we afford the freedom of letting parents be parents, there is no scientific basis for reallocating smartphone use responsibility to the state.
The state exists to protect the majority from the minority. If the majority believes phones are bad, then they’ll be banned in schools to prevent whatever effect having them would have.
Remember, in other countries, especially eastern ones, the recommendation of even your local city means allot. There is a deeper trust of government bodies so this will likely have an impact.
And starting small is probably good, lets the idea iterate before rolling it out wider and this often comes down to making a choice, this city just thought this would be best and I suspect unless this goes horribly wrong it will help
Having a base level of trust in your government can have incredibly positive effects on society. In the US, I dream of the day where government could try out ideas without the pitchforks coming out. Sure, some ideas will be terrible and that’s OK as long as we throw them in the trash can.
In China, parents track their kids with ‘gps smart watches’. Oh yeah there is also a gamified social network for kids only, giving credit for the schools stationairy shop based on likes/popularity. What could go wrong? [0]
You do realize those GPS smart watches are everywhere in the US as well right? Some parents opt for the less invasive tool of air tags hidden in clothing or backpacks, same idea though.
Smart watches are actually super useful for kids, it lets them still talk to their parents (or other trusted people) w/o the distraction of smart phones. Plenty of kids age 7-12 or so have them and they are basically used to call kids home for dinner at the end of the day.
Not the first time Japan has done something like this[1] and I honestly welcome it. It's not a strict rule, gives people flexibility to at least talk about it and disagree with little consequence. Another severely online commenter mentions protecting peoples privacy and exploitative practices but we're wayyy beyond those types of conversations. Limiting online-ness in a gentle way that's not gonna piss off a bunch of people and get the feels for it seems to be a very Japanese thing to do.
Isn't it the job of a public health agency? Like, at a national or even international level?
Or of a scientific body?
What legitimacy has an administrative, and often political, structure, to make a non-binding health recommandation (thus, an advice), with a scope limited to the city, even though the matter has nothing to nor specific to this city?
It looks like a political stunt, not something initiated by health specialists.
Why aren't they issuing ordinances for people to switch to electric cars?
To learn foreign languages?
To study sciences?
I really don't know what to think.
Like, if they think that the bottleneck, the motivation source, to get people to improve their lifestyle, is to have an ordinance issued, then they really need to study the basics of psychology and sociology. And of public communication.
Recommendations are well and good, but I can't see them having much if any impact on what people do. It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices. Especially those that target children.
Smartphones are banned at school in Aus, for a strong net positive. Kids still sneak them into toilets and so on (and vapes), but the overwhelming impact has been positive.
So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".
Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.
How do you know that it has had an overwhelmingly positive impact? Can we, for example, see a marked increase in PISA scores for Australia from after the ban?
Or is this one of those "I hate phones, therefore banning them must be good for kids" things?
Meet kids who have smartphones in school. A lot of them aren’t able to maintain eye contact in a conversation. It’s a remarkably jarring change that looks like it will wind up stunting the development of low-income kids for a generation.
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.
> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.
> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf
I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.
I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.
Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.
So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
6% of a standard deviation sounds like very little to me, but it's hard for me to grok what that actually means.
> I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is
"vocational school"
Given that teachers are no longer competing for student attention in class, that is one single and quite important positive which doesn't require an academic study and referencing to demonstrate.
I'm not sure what you were hoping to achieve with the request for evidence, but what you're asking is not yet subject to a longitudinal study. The move has certainly been praised by educators, and that should be enough given it's the first or second year year of implementation in many cases, and what they are advocating for isn't a social taboo, nor draconian.
What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
If you want to measure something for this measure happiness or strength of social circles. Good luck with that.
>What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
That's not science, that's a demonstrably false assumption that everyone thinks smartphone usage is bad for kids.
In my experience with kids and smartphones, kids of the young generation (gen Z) are way better informed (and less brainwashed) than kids of their parents' generation were, whose only access to information about the world when growing up was through the captured, centralised legacy media.
Using their phones while in class makes them more informed?
It’s surprising that more schools haven’t done this. I suspect that we’ll look back in 10 years with it being common and ask ourselves what took so long.
> surprising that more schools haven’t done this
We have a depressing state in America where you can predict the parents’ income based on whether their kids’ school bans smartphones.
In the US we've completely given up on stopping school shootings, and parents have instead decided that the better thing to fight for is their children having cell phones so they can hear the child's last words when the school shooting happens.
I think the phones are one thing. It was a bit distressing to hear that US schools have “school shooting drills” like Japan schools have “earthquake drills”.
Wait until you hear about how teachers started stocking emergency toilets because of those multi-hour drills, and the right wing in the US responded by using it to accuse schools of setting up litter boxes for self-identified 'furries' in the student body.
I am more worried about dogs in school. Many teacher are fine to blame 11 years old for "provoking" dog attack! It is ok to send a kid to hospital, for eating a sandwitch!
Teachers at my school do not believe allergies are real! If there is asthma attack, it is an uncorrelated event! School will stab my kid with epipen, call ambulance and send me hospital bill! Avoiding it is too much work!
Once school brought unrestrained police dogs to school for a demonstration! Those had a record of attacking and torturing suspects!
Being able to call help is a basic human right!
It’s not actually about school shootings in the US, as much as that might be cited as justification. Some parents just want to be able to text their kids all day.
People who claim that as the reason they want to allow phones are simply lying.
You could give them a shitty flip phone for that.
[dead]
Ohhh I assumed all countries did that. Like common sense.
All of these seem valid, too, but they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. I’m all for common sense recommendations - even if it only helps a relatively small percentage of families.
I look at it in a similar light to nutritional guidelines.
> It would be better to ban the use of smart phones at schools (or at least in classrooms) entirely, pass laws to better protect people's privacy, and pass regulation to restrict the kinds of exploitative practices that are designed to drive up anxiety and addiction to these devices.
Once again, I must reiterate that parents choose the schools their children attend, and that means that they choose the solution. I argue strongly that we, as a society, should not impose arbitrary restrictions on parents and children. If we afford the freedom of letting parents be parents, there is no scientific basis for reallocating smartphone use responsibility to the state.
The state exists to protect the majority from the minority. If the majority believes phones are bad, then they’ll be banned in schools to prevent whatever effect having them would have.
9pm for elementary school children? What are they doing up so late to begin with?
Cram school.
Remember, in other countries, especially eastern ones, the recommendation of even your local city means allot. There is a deeper trust of government bodies so this will likely have an impact.
And starting small is probably good, lets the idea iterate before rolling it out wider and this often comes down to making a choice, this city just thought this would be best and I suspect unless this goes horribly wrong it will help
Having a base level of trust in your government can have incredibly positive effects on society. In the US, I dream of the day where government could try out ideas without the pitchforks coming out. Sure, some ideas will be terrible and that’s OK as long as we throw them in the trash can.
Is this recommandation backed by science? I suspect it is.
Then a public scientific body should come up with such a recommandation, right?
And then there would be no need for a mere city to issue one, am I correct?
So how will this work, are explosive ammunitions delivered to your device’s location if you exceed the day’s usage?
Maybe I missed something, but those are spelt "ordnance".
In China, parents track their kids with ‘gps smart watches’. Oh yeah there is also a gamified social network for kids only, giving credit for the schools stationairy shop based on likes/popularity. What could go wrong? [0]
[0] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017357
You do realize those GPS smart watches are everywhere in the US as well right? Some parents opt for the less invasive tool of air tags hidden in clothing or backpacks, same idea though.
Smart watches are actually super useful for kids, it lets them still talk to their parents (or other trusted people) w/o the distraction of smart phones. Plenty of kids age 7-12 or so have them and they are basically used to call kids home for dinner at the end of the day.
Just thinking about a mockable law may keep it in the collective consciousness for more people to independently choose to detox from their phone
Not the first time Japan has done something like this[1] and I honestly welcome it. It's not a strict rule, gives people flexibility to at least talk about it and disagree with little consequence. Another severely online commenter mentions protecting peoples privacy and exploitative practices but we're wayyy beyond those types of conversations. Limiting online-ness in a gentle way that's not gonna piss off a bunch of people and get the feels for it seems to be a very Japanese thing to do.
https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/17744?phrase=Onaga%...
Why is there a city doing this?
Isn't it the job of a public health agency? Like, at a national or even international level?
Or of a scientific body?
What legitimacy has an administrative, and often political, structure, to make a non-binding health recommandation (thus, an advice), with a scope limited to the city, even though the matter has nothing to nor specific to this city?
It looks like a political stunt, not something initiated by health specialists.
It is a political stunt. The city of Toyoake in question has a land area of 23sqkm(~9 sqmi) with population of 68k(density 3k/sqkm or 7.6k/sqmi).
> "We want the ordinance to provide an opportunity for people to think about how they use smartphones," an official said.
Why aren't they issuing ordinances for people to switch to electric cars?
To learn foreign languages?
To study sciences?
I really don't know what to think.
Like, if they think that the bottleneck, the motivation source, to get people to improve their lifestyle, is to have an ordinance issued, then they really need to study the basics of psychology and sociology. And of public communication.
I really hope that any city I live in will not try to use city ordinances for feel good things.
Too late.