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‘Close to zero impact’: US study casts doubt on effect of phone ban in schools
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Technology
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When did schools start allowing phones?
When the excuse “but what if my mom needs to call me” started working.
Mom can call the school. It worked for 70 years.
I distinctly remember my elementary school not being able to call my parents because their area code wasn't the local area code but okay.
Phones should be allowed in schools, just take them before class starts and hand them back after.
Why does the school have to be the middle-man? Just ban phones during actual classes and let them use it during free periods.
In practice that doesn't work, for the same reasons education hasn't been either. Too few teachers to students, plus the things (phones) are greasily addictive. And we're talking about the youths, lol, dumb-kid brain, most exemplified by teenagers of course. The phase of life that specifically combines "rules are actually just stupid, did you ever notice that?" with "so anyway (I forgot what we were talking about [or any other thing])".
It's really just placing an extremely addictive thing in the pocket of anyone prone to addiction. Kiddos are very naturally weak to resisting those "reward now, consequences later" qualities that drive addiction in the first place. And just like any drug that sells, phones have been engineered (legally, lauded in many ways for doing so) to be super-duper addictive.
"Why don't the children simply smoke the crack pipe in the hallways, between classes, forbidden to do so in class? Why must the school be the middle-man?"
Shallow take homie.
but all smartphones have parental controls which is never talked about, but we keep blaming violent media and addictive technology while offering terrible solutions like ID verification and yondr pouches. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-free-schools This whole thing is a scam on our society with a private company getting taxpayer's money while not actually solving the problem.
these solutions do not teach self-regulation, does not fix algorithmic feeds, does not address home use, does not solve violent or addictive content exposure
Kids not having phones at school (or not having access to them or similar) does address huge problems with phones at schools.
I'm not advocating anything like ID verification and have no idea what the pouches are about.
Self regulation is great and the only true solution. But roughly no kid can self regulate under current conditions, as we see. They need an environment conducive to learning those crucial skills.
And I hate the retreat to "well the parents should do more!" which is just an unsympathetic blamey way to say "what we have is as good as it gets I guess" because if it's largely the parents needing to do more, that's what we have. The status quo. Not a great recommendation.
If parents doing more was a viable strategy would we need to regulate use of car seats? Would we have seatbelts at all if some flavor of "people making important but annoying decisions correctly all the time" was a good way to achieve healthy societal outcomes?
"Kids probably shouldn't have cell phones in schools" does not seem controversial, given the evidence, the specific nature of school and kids and those devices, and the blatant obvious evidence we see everywhere we look.