Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.
Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...
Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.
I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.
In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).
As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.
In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.
In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.
So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.
> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves
That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.
> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.
Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.
There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed.
The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.
They weren't always. In fact it took many centuries for this to happen. The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody. Factory owners were giving it to their laborers to increase productivity, it was used in endless tonics, medicines, and drinks (most famously now Coca-Cola = cocaine + kola nut), and so on. You had everybody from Thomas Edison to popes to Ulysses S Grant and endles others testify to the benefits of Vin Mariani [1] which was a wine loaded with cocaine, that served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola.
So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds, so it all seemed normal. And I think the exact same is true of phones today. Watch a session of Congress or anything and half the guys there are playing on their phones; more than a few have been caught watching porn during session, to say nothing of the endless amount that haven't been caught! I can't help but find it hilarious, but objectively it's extremely inappropriate behavior, probably driven by addiction and impaired impulse controls which phones (and other digital tech) are certainly contributing heavily to.
I find it difficult to imagine a world in the future in which phones and similar tech aren't treated somewhat similarly to controlled substances. You can already see the makings of that happening today with ever more regions moving to age restrict social media.
> The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody.
Be careful with that comparison. The cocaine infused drinks of the past are not comparable to modern cocaine use for several reasons.
The route of administration and dose matter a lot. Oral bioavailability is low and peak concentrations are much lower when drinking it in a liquid as opposed to someone insufflating (snorting) 50mg or more of powder.
You could give a modern cocaine user a glass of Vin Mariani and they probably would not believe you that it had any cocaine in it. The amount, absorption, and onset are so extremely different.
> So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds
That’s an exaggeration. To be “coked out” in the modern sense they’d have to be consuming an insane amount of alcohol as well. We’re talking bottle after bottle of the wine.
Be careful with these old anecdotes. Yes, it was weird and there were stimulant effects, but it’s not comparable to modern ideas of the drug abuse. It’s like comparing someone taking the lowest dose of Adderall by mouth to someone who crushes up a dozen pills and snorts them. Entirely different outcomes.
Vin Mariani was 7+mg/oz with a relatively low alcohol content which would have been further mitigated by the stimulant effect of the cocaine in any case. And then of course other concotions (including Coca-Cola) had no alcohol at all - Vin Mariani is just a fun example because of the endless famous names attached to it.
Obviously you're right that the absorption is going to be different and a modern coke head with high tolerance likely wouldn't even notice it had anything in it. But give it to a normal person, and they're indeed going to be coked out - in very much the same way that small doses of adderall to non-users can have a very significant effect. The obvious example there being college kids buying pills around around finals.
> it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".
From my experience it is often too late at that point. And actually hitting rock bottom is difficult and destructive, and leaves scars. As they say, preventing is better than curing.
[...] the majority of research in the field declares that smartphones are addictive
Though that section continues on to disagree with that majority, "the majority" declaring smartphones are addictive is certainly supportive of them being so.
There are a lot of reasons for distraction while driving, but we don’t call all of them addiction on that premise. If a driver was not looking at his phone - maybe he’d be looking at something else. The phone is not the reason - it’s just a very suitable object.
this is thoroughly debunked with hard data from distracted driving laws that focus on phone use while driving. We have the luxury of both before and after data and across different jurisidictions.
The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.
The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.
> The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.
This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth.
Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control.
18-25 year olds are not children and are fully capable of having impulse control. That can continue to develop as they age, but it doesn’t mean age 25 is when it happens.
I would agree that actual children need some more explicit boundaries, which is also why we don’t allow children to do a lot of things that people over 18 can do.
I owned a string of fast food restaurants. I had the ability to not hire anyone under age 20 if I didn't have to. When I did, the requirement was that they be in college but, in every case, I found that these kids, who returned for summer work every year, did a lot of growing up between the ages of 18 and 20.
I think this persists because in most studies, 25 - and other specific ages for further stages - comes from plotting a distribution of the traits being analyzed and pulling averages from that. We like precision and fixate on the numbers but they really mean "the majority of the observed change under study appears to occurr within a specific range" but that does not make catchy headlines for the public.
I don't think anyone is saying impulse control goes from 0% to 100% on everyone's 25th birthday, like flicking a switch. But is it not reasonable to say that a 25-year-old will have significantly better impulse control than they had when they were 18? (And that their 30-year-old self probably has a similar level of impulse control as when they were 25?)
As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.
I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.
I think the problem is that most students, (as this study shows) are not figuring it out on their own, at least not in high school. It feels like you're one of the outliers, not the common case.
Having rules about what you can and can't bring into school is nothing new. I went to high school in the 90s, and there were plenty of things we weren't allowed to bring with us into class; back then, the closest analogue to smartphones would have been pagers, probably.
It seems entirely reasonable to ban smartphones (and dumb phones, even) from schools. Frankly, I think it's absolutely insane that they were ever allowed.
And sure, maybe these students who go to high schools where smartphones are banned will get to university and go nuts, sitting in lecture halls with their phones out all the time. They'll learn very quickly that their grades will suffer, and will clean up their acts or fail out of school. But this is like everything else: the first year of university is the big year of independence, of being away from parents for the first time, and college students do plenty of dumb things in the name of that independence. That's always been the case; I'm no stranger to that phenomenon myself. They either work it out on their own, or they fail out.
> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…
Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.
Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.
Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.
I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.
My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.
I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).
Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).
YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.
* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.
The first step is to understand why you can't disconnect. Ways to handle it will be different based on that.
One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.
Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee
I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.
And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.
I work in construction saas of a certain kind, and when I visit customers there is a very very clear difference in quality/size/revenue in companies that allow headphones and those that don't.
I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.
The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.
They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.
> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed
This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.
This definitely is the way to do it. I have started keeping my phone in my living room at night instead of my bedroom, but am still bad about doing this every night. Phones are addictive and it is mentally hard to break out of the addiction. It is essentially a "you just have to do it" situation, but "just do it", while technically simple, is still difficult if you're addicted.
I've made my peace with the tiny, tiny chance that I might miss my father's last moments because I didn't hear about his heart attack til the morning, for example.
Living as if it might happen any time and I must be available for it is not healthy IMO.
I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was intoxicating. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.
You could even argue that society is incapable of not running into these cycles of building wisdom and losing it. Our minds are differential.. things that are here have less value, we seek newness no matter what.
Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here.
The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.
Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.
The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.
Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.
Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here, individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy. People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path. Good for capitalism. And good for lots of things, really, a lot of America's success can be traced back to it.
But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealthy and unproductive point.
I remember going to college for the first time in 2000, and having an absolute blast meeting the people I was by circumstance forced to be around. Went back in 2004 and it was completely different, everyone was on their phone, maintaining their personal bubble in what should have been an age of exploration. That made me rather sad.
Today it's even worse, but at the risk of being an old man yelling at clouds, I won't drone on. I mostly wish my own children could experience the upbringing I had, as I find this one rather dystopian and depressing.
> Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here
I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.
The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.
> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy
I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.
I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.
> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.
I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.
And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.
> rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors
This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.
I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.
We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)
I think of it as "introducing friction". There's a lot things that we do now which is largely as a result of frictionless ease of doing it. Smartphones and social media are the obvious one, but it applies to many technology/digital driven behaviour (pay with face id/touch and people end up consuming more for instance). And it's no surprise to me that what works for a lot of people is putting their phone somewhere else in their house. Essentially introducing artificial friction.
My slightly cynical view is for many of us we're more often lazy than not and default to doing the most frictionless thing. Introduce friction and very quickly I find it forces you to think about what you're actually doing
I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.
I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.
I don't think this is something just for elites at all, because so much of this happens at the home. So for instance I completely agree on the boredom and have factored into how I raise my children. Similarly, I also agree on the importance of not having answers simply handed to you. Another one as well is realizing that not everything you're told is true, which is a big part of the reason that I ultimately decided that Santa exists for them. And it makes me wonder if that wasn't the point all along, because it doesn't feel right to lie to your kids for years.
For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.
I've always had a TV or screen of some sort, devoted to background music or light films, just to fill in the void between lines of code. For some, having such light stuff going on is a productivity booster. I once got a dev team that had been struggling to get things finished, well and truly over the finish line, by putting a fat TV in the room, and giving folks the ability to line up their playlists for the day, as long as it wasn't too violent/inappropriate for the workplace.
We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.
I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school.
Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.
When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons.
One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.
Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.
Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.
Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.
But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.
If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.
If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves.
For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?
Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.
We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.
(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)
> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"
That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.
This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.
There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime?
Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration.
So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.
A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...
Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.
What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.
It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.
Software is a bit isolated from this (there's computers for "research" regardless, after all). But phone policies can be very strict in most other sectors of work. Seen as a dostraction at worst and unprofessional at best. A teacher wouldn't be able to just get away with having their phone out during class unless there's an emergency.
Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.
Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.
Parents really like the convenience and the feeling of safety they get when their kid has a phone. If they have to change school pickup plans they'd much rather text their kid than call and leave a message with the school office and then hope that the office gets the message to their kid.
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.
In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.
It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)
(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.
I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.
Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.
This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.
Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...)
It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
This criticism would be valid if the researchers had studied just one group of schools, and their methodology was just comparing before and after. But that's not all they did. They had two groups of schools, with low/high cell phone use before the ban. Their hypothesis was that the schools with high cell phone use would see a larger change in test scores (as they would have the largest drop in mobile phone usage).
We then turn to our causal analysis comparing schools with different degrees of apparent pre-ban student cellphone use, after vs. before Florida’s cellphone ban. We show that the ban increased disciplinary incidents and suspensions significantly in the first year, immediately after the district started referring students for disciplinary action for cellphone use infractions. In particular, our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that the ban increased suspension rates by 12 percent (relative to the comparison group mean) and in-school suspension rates by roughly 20 percent in the first year.
There may be other reasons to criticize the paper, of course.
Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material?
One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.
That also depends on how the tests work. If each test covers both the new material since the previous test, as well as older material, then that would require students retain all the material, not just the recent stuff.
Or maybe the last test of the semester covers the entire semester's material, while the earlier tests only cover new material since the previous test.
A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little.
For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
> if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives
The thing I find interesting is that when most people talk about standardised tests, they are talking about assessments that benchmark how much trivial knowledge about a given subject one has, and this has been the standard for most of the history of the American education system. I would argue that this is a flawed way to measure a student's literacy–in any subject for that matter.
I would actually frame "learn and forget" as "learn and adapt" because I would much rather a student forget a piece of trivial knowledge, but still have the ability to figure it out on their own with the right resources than a student who can tell you the colour Benjamin Franklin wore on his 15th birthday, but couldn't explain the effects of imperialism on societies.
For much of history, we have incentivised rote memorisation of trivial knowledge and accidentally de-valued critical thinking and problem solving skills. Do you remember the backlash that schools got from _parents_ when schools started implementing Common Core in an attempt to get students to think more abstractly? While I scoff at them, I genuinely don't blame parents for coming to the conclusion that we should just do math "the way we used to do it", but I can't help but point out that this is leading to the exact decline in general literacy that we have seen in public schools over the years. Now when you start comparing the educational attainment of students in public schools vs. private schools this becomes a who other conversation that cell phones can't even begin to explain.
This is also very closely following the pandemic. I'd imagine that massively pollutes their data. I didn't see a comparison to comparable districts that didn't implement a ban.
Just from anecdata of my own kids, enforcement is nearly impossible. Phones are banned citywide as of this year but it sounds like they are still being used pretty openly.
To expect children/teens to outsmart big tech companies putting billions of dollars into getting us all addicted to our phone seems... naive. Removing availability to a vice has always been a somewhat effective strategy to mitigate temptation, i.e. food, drugs, etc.
If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant.
I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.
My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.
Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.
I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.
In our local schools, they don't make *teachers* responsible for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the administration will give also give additional consequences such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities like Prom.
My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.
If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.
Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating)
There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
My phrasing suggests that. I was having trouble thinking of a non-offensive way to say, "I don't think the kids can possibly be learning much if the teachers and administration are incapable of implementing a phone ban."
Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.
A lot of schools implement this by having the students put their phones in a locked pouch when they enter the building in the morning. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch
This generally takes it out of the hands of individual classroom teachers.
My son's school had the kids all put their phone in a "phone hotel" in the admin's office in the morning, and pick them up in the afternoon. This was fine, except, 1) a lot of kids just put a burner phone in and kept their actual phone hidden in their bag, and 2) the kids were all required to use laptops for class, which could do everything their phones could do.
Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is finally banning phones.
There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388).
You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate phone use:
> Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.
This seems like the single worst way to measure this because by looking at chronological data you get all kinds of temporal effects. A better baseline would be to look at the difference between pre-cell phone ban scores and post cell-hone ban scores compared to other districts where the cell phone ban didn't occur.
I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.
iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.
It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of humanity.
This is actually very sad. Finally every child had a computer in their pocket, but it turned out to be a locked down attention exploitation machine. I sincerely wish it wasn't.
That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced.
Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them.
Are there people already working on this?
(I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation)
I'm thinking of this as I read this thread. How do you solve the problem of social media firehoses while still allowing kids to have access to the vast wealth of information and advice that the internet provides? It hasn't been so many years since many were predicting that the internet will make schools themselves obsolete.
Also it's important to note the topic is during school hours. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn at school, and there's also a wealth to learn outside of school. Knowledge about the world can, and will, happen in both. Many hours outside of school to 'grow your knowledge' through your phone.
> For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed
You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.
Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games.
My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.
We definitely did. You should have gone to a library. I got my first Prolog compiler, C++ compiler, and microcontroller programming manual from Salvation Army thrift stores. There were like a million magazines you could buy.
edit: I forgot the Standard ML book, also from some thrift store. All circa late-80s, early-90s. I still have them all.
Yes, but I didn't know the word "assembler". I was completely bewildered about why BASIC produced clunky results and I could barely phrase the question about how proper games were made. Local libraries didn't have relevant books. I didn't know there was help in magazines. The most clued-up adults wouldn't know either, and would be trying to get me interested in programming turtle bots with LOGO. What I needed was to ask the internet (which didn't exist yet).
Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?
Since a study is needed to determine if anything is true. Sometimes the study is simple: look out the window and see if it's raining. But this is not one of those.
Only slightly tengential, but am so happy to have invested in a remarkable and ony taking (most of) my notes during classes with it (when I dont break the tip and forgetting the replacement ones at home)
The discussion here is so misdirected - It's not the device that's addictive or destructive, it's the exposure of young developing minds to endless, pointless advertising/sponsorship.
Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless
Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out.
But also, complete inability of schools to adapt.
Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success.
Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced.
There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school.
Math class with this kid was:
1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user.
2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone.
Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.
Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.)
Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.
Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world.
> he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately.
> Teachers are inherently lazy.
I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.
I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.
And on top of that, I expect most of the complaints about all these studies are made by people who have never designed or run a study or research program of any kind in their entire life.
It's that common phenomenon where people think they can use general logic (which they generally are good at) to draw strong conclusions about something that isn't in their wheelhouse. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, sometimes.
It makes much more sense if you think of these threads as nerdsniping to support a preconcieved personal biases and addictions. Not very related to finding the truth.
No study is perfect – research is and has always been expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of reading and doing research.
No study should be good enough for HN. If a single non-obviously-flawed study is enough to convince you to something, then you can be convinced of anything and everything under the sun.
One study can find any effect it's looking for.
A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.
Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.
And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:
> Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban took effect), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_t are the parameters of interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with the period before the ban serving as the omitted category, holding grade level constant.
To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm not an economist and could not do better.
what it means is that this paper shows probable causality and models a lot of interesting features. it is most definitely not flawed.
i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain for the average student is quite small. it's actually less than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h of studying). that is to say, if students studied one fucking hour for the FAST, they would probably get a bigger benefit on it than all the time they get back not looking at their phones throughout two years of school.
so whatever cell phone use (1) in school (2) causes, it causes a small effect on test scores.
you would have to pick some other objective criteria, for example mental health assessment, for maybe a larger effect, or seek a larger treatment, perhaps a complete ban of cell phones period, to observe a larger effect.
The lack of control and cohort following are legitimate criticisms. The effect size is not. Even a single-digit percentage increase over a single year from policy treatment is incredibly impressive when we open the door to cumulative effects.
> Yet the data fits people's biases
It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen documented when it comes to teens and social media.
I know that it's important to look at data and not rely on our own assumptions and "common sense" about things (as reality can often be surprising).
But.
Based on how kids seem to actually use their phones in class (that is, not all that much for educational things related to the coursework at hand), and based on what we know (conclusive study after conclusive study) about how by-design addictive social media and smartphone games are, it's honestly hard to take seriously the idea that smartphone use in class hasn't hurt education and test scores.
There is another major factor that could cause scores to rise globally: ChatGPT. It is now good enough that it can explain topics to students at home, like a private tutor.
I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:
1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.
Not as tuned for engagement as now, but we had to have yellow journalism laws for a reason too. There's always been lots of propaganda and manipulation and bad actors in journalism.
I don't think you are being totally fair to the paper, but you do point out something that drives me crazy: local freakouts about year-to-year changes in math tests scores. It's like people don't realize that these 8th grade students are not the same as those.
Yea, it's strange that the line didn't move quickly. I would give grace for a couple weeks to a few months, but next year? The timing feels really disconnected.
The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points.
My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
Where did you get 1.1 percentage point? The paper uses percentiles.
"Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. These positive test score effects are larger for male students (an effect of 1.4 percentiles on the spring test in the second year) and for students in middle and high
schools (1.3 percentiles)."
I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.
I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic.
Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.
Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.
I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written:
> Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels.
> Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect.
Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph.
But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.
When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over time.
There are of course bigger problems, but it seems like phones are one of those "attainable" problems for a school to fix.
Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.
Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.
Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...
Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.
I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.
In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).
As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules.
In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.
In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.
So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.
> I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves
That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.
What makes you think this is different?
> That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.
Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.
There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed.
The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.
I suspect that's not so much a confounder as one of the mechanisms.
That approach works more often than it doesn’t — outside of certain spiraling situations most people don’t became alcoholics and drug addicts.
Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.
They weren't always. In fact it took many centuries for this to happen. The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody. Factory owners were giving it to their laborers to increase productivity, it was used in endless tonics, medicines, and drinks (most famously now Coca-Cola = cocaine + kola nut), and so on. You had everybody from Thomas Edison to popes to Ulysses S Grant and endles others testify to the benefits of Vin Mariani [1] which was a wine loaded with cocaine, that served as the inspiration for Coca-Cola.
So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds, so it all seemed normal. And I think the exact same is true of phones today. Watch a session of Congress or anything and half the guys there are playing on their phones; more than a few have been caught watching porn during session, to say nothing of the endless amount that haven't been caught! I can't help but find it hilarious, but objectively it's extremely inappropriate behavior, probably driven by addiction and impaired impulse controls which phones (and other digital tech) are certainly contributing heavily to.
I find it difficult to imagine a world in the future in which phones and similar tech aren't treated somewhat similarly to controlled substances. You can already see the makings of that happening today with ever more regions moving to age restrict social media.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani
> The history of cocaine in the US is quite interesting. It was being used everywhere and by everybody.
Be careful with that comparison. The cocaine infused drinks of the past are not comparable to modern cocaine use for several reasons.
The route of administration and dose matter a lot. Oral bioavailability is low and peak concentrations are much lower when drinking it in a liquid as opposed to someone insufflating (snorting) 50mg or more of powder.
You could give a modern cocaine user a glass of Vin Mariani and they probably would not believe you that it had any cocaine in it. The amount, absorption, and onset are so extremely different.
> So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds
That’s an exaggeration. To be “coked out” in the modern sense they’d have to be consuming an insane amount of alcohol as well. We’re talking bottle after bottle of the wine.
Be careful with these old anecdotes. Yes, it was weird and there were stimulant effects, but it’s not comparable to modern ideas of the drug abuse. It’s like comparing someone taking the lowest dose of Adderall by mouth to someone who crushes up a dozen pills and snorts them. Entirely different outcomes.
Vin Mariani was 7+mg/oz with a relatively low alcohol content which would have been further mitigated by the stimulant effect of the cocaine in any case. And then of course other concotions (including Coca-Cola) had no alcohol at all - Vin Mariani is just a fun example because of the endless famous names attached to it.
Obviously you're right that the absorption is going to be different and a modern coke head with high tolerance likely wouldn't even notice it had anything in it. But give it to a normal person, and they're indeed going to be coked out - in very much the same way that small doses of adderall to non-users can have a very significant effect. The obvious example there being college kids buying pills around around finals.
> Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.
Following your argument shouldn't anything that can induce addiction be controlled? Seems that is not the case e.g. looking at sugar.
I don't have time to search for a credible source, but it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".
There's obvious reasons why it's not encouraged to wait that long though.
> it is claimed addicts often seek treatment after hitting "rock bottom".
From my experience it is often too late at that point. And actually hitting rock bottom is difficult and destructive, and leaves scars. As they say, preventing is better than curing.
Maybe we can make school harder so they will go there earlier.
Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.
Citation needed
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6174603/
The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.
The first part of the Results section says:
Though that section continues on to disagree with that majority, "the majority" declaring smartphones are addictive is certainly supportive of them being so.I have no idea what you are talking about. It walks and quacks exactly like drugs and alcohol.
Thousands of deaths every year are caused by drivers on cell phones. You'd think they'd have a reason to put them away.
There are a lot of reasons for distraction while driving, but we don’t call all of them addiction on that premise. If a driver was not looking at his phone - maybe he’d be looking at something else. The phone is not the reason - it’s just a very suitable object.
this is thoroughly debunked with hard data from distracted driving laws that focus on phone use while driving. We have the luxury of both before and after data and across different jurisidictions.
I mean, it does work for most people. Most people can drink responsibly. The alcoholics are the ones who can’t do it on their own.
The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.
The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.
> The main challenge is that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control and other things, only fully develops around age 25.
This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth.
Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control.
18-25 year olds are not children and are fully capable of having impulse control. That can continue to develop as they age, but it doesn’t mean age 25 is when it happens.
I would agree that actual children need some more explicit boundaries, which is also why we don’t allow children to do a lot of things that people over 18 can do.
I owned a string of fast food restaurants. I had the ability to not hire anyone under age 20 if I didn't have to. When I did, the requirement was that they be in college but, in every case, I found that these kids, who returned for summer work every year, did a lot of growing up between the ages of 18 and 20.
I think this persists because in most studies, 25 - and other specific ages for further stages - comes from plotting a distribution of the traits being analyzed and pulling averages from that. We like precision and fixate on the numbers but they really mean "the majority of the observed change under study appears to occurr within a specific range" but that does not make catchy headlines for the public.
I don't think anyone is saying impulse control goes from 0% to 100% on everyone's 25th birthday, like flicking a switch. But is it not reasonable to say that a 25-year-old will have significantly better impulse control than they had when they were 18? (And that their 30-year-old self probably has a similar level of impulse control as when they were 25?)
As someone who graduated from high school in 2025 I completely agree with this. I am glad I had to work it out on my own, and I don't think this is a place that a school should take control. If I had to figure this out along with the stress of college, I don't know if I would be able to handle it. I also think that it has helped with my overall time management skills and prioritizing my time.
I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.
I think the problem is that most students, (as this study shows) are not figuring it out on their own, at least not in high school. It feels like you're one of the outliers, not the common case.
Having rules about what you can and can't bring into school is nothing new. I went to high school in the 90s, and there were plenty of things we weren't allowed to bring with us into class; back then, the closest analogue to smartphones would have been pagers, probably.
It seems entirely reasonable to ban smartphones (and dumb phones, even) from schools. Frankly, I think it's absolutely insane that they were ever allowed.
And sure, maybe these students who go to high schools where smartphones are banned will get to university and go nuts, sitting in lecture halls with their phones out all the time. They'll learn very quickly that their grades will suffer, and will clean up their acts or fail out of school. But this is like everything else: the first year of university is the big year of independence, of being away from parents for the first time, and college students do plenty of dumb things in the name of that independence. That's always been the case; I'm no stranger to that phenomenon myself. They either work it out on their own, or they fail out.
> As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually…
Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.
Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
> Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
You are misunderstanding the addiction part here. It's not about not having fun.
There are tech companies spending literally trillions of dollars on one goal: ensuring that kids keep looking at their phones.
Your framing this as a question of boredom is really naive.
I'm trying, but it's so hard!
I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.
Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.
How do you people handle it?
I also struggle with this, but I have found some metaphorical band-aids that help a bit.
My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.
I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).
Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).
YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.
* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.
The first step is to understand why you can't disconnect. Ways to handle it will be different based on that.
One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.
Honestly, I don't. I go through phases. I have a tampermonkey script that blank-screens sites and that's been very effective. Reddit is a tough one because there's a ton of useful information on there, but once you're on it it's easy to start scrolling. You could be extreme and get a device just for work, perhaps with google voice and wifi only to save on a membership fee
Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...
I learned to hate smartphones, so I threw it literally away. People can write me an email or call me on my landline. On the desktop I am using Debian with WindowMaker. This is enjoyably distraction free. I am a free man.
We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.
And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.
I work in construction saas of a certain kind, and when I visit customers there is a very very clear difference in quality/size/revenue in companies that allow headphones and those that don't.
I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.
That is an amazingly vague post. You've convinced me!
The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.
They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.
> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed
This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.
This definitely is the way to do it. I have started keeping my phone in my living room at night instead of my bedroom, but am still bad about doing this every night. Phones are addictive and it is mentally hard to break out of the addiction. It is essentially a "you just have to do it" situation, but "just do it", while technically simple, is still difficult if you're addicted.
How can you be contacted in case of an emergency in the middle of the night?
I've made my peace with the tiny, tiny chance that I might miss my father's last moments because I didn't hear about his heart attack til the morning, for example.
Living as if it might happen any time and I must be available for it is not healthy IMO.
The phone is still close enough to hear if it rings.
https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_sa... outlines those "clear boundaries" in detail from a pre-medieval or early medieval perspective.
I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was intoxicating. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.
Ooh, I remember the Palm + modem + mail sync combination for sure. Was absolutely engrossing.
You could even argue that society is incapable of not running into these cycles of building wisdom and losing it. Our minds are differential.. things that are here have less value, we seek newness no matter what.
Part of the lesson is understanding how we got here.
The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.
Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.
The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.
Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.
Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here, individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy. People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path. Good for capitalism. And good for lots of things, really, a lot of America's success can be traced back to it.
But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealthy and unproductive point.
I remember going to college for the first time in 2000, and having an absolute blast meeting the people I was by circumstance forced to be around. Went back in 2004 and it was completely different, everyone was on their phone, maintaining their personal bubble in what should have been an age of exploration. That made me rather sad.
Today it's even worse, but at the risk of being an old man yelling at clouds, I won't drone on. I mostly wish my own children could experience the upbringing I had, as I find this one rather dystopian and depressing.
> Leaving out the word liberal as I don't really understand its context here
I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.
The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.
> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy
I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.
I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.
> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.
I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.
And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.
> rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors
This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.
I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.
We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)
I think of it as "introducing friction". There's a lot things that we do now which is largely as a result of frictionless ease of doing it. Smartphones and social media are the obvious one, but it applies to many technology/digital driven behaviour (pay with face id/touch and people end up consuming more for instance). And it's no surprise to me that what works for a lot of people is putting their phone somewhere else in their house. Essentially introducing artificial friction.
My slightly cynical view is for many of us we're more often lazy than not and default to doing the most frictionless thing. Introduce friction and very quickly I find it forces you to think about what you're actually doing
I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.
I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.
I don't think this is something just for elites at all, because so much of this happens at the home. So for instance I completely agree on the boredom and have factored into how I raise my children. Similarly, I also agree on the importance of not having answers simply handed to you. Another one as well is realizing that not everything you're told is true, which is a big part of the reason that I ultimately decided that Santa exists for them. And it makes me wonder if that wasn't the point all along, because it doesn't feel right to lie to your kids for years.
For certain tasks for me, having a movie running while I'm working is more productive. It gives something to take your attention when you have to wait for something without getting sucked in to endless scrolling.
Your Phone Isn't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659
Great article. Probably not cynical enough for this crowd though.
I've always had a TV or screen of some sort, devoted to background music or light films, just to fill in the void between lines of code. For some, having such light stuff going on is a productivity booster. I once got a dev team that had been struggling to get things finished, well and truly over the finish line, by putting a fat TV in the room, and giving folks the ability to line up their playlists for the day, as long as it wasn't too violent/inappropriate for the workplace.
We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.
"What if coworker I disapproved of but society"
Article about smartphones being bad? Right to the top.
Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.
I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.
I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school.
Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.
When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons.
One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.
Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.
Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.
Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.
But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.
Sure, and you can point out the stats all day long, but you're not going to defeat irrational parental concerns with this One Weird Trick.
So much of the way we treat education is based on vibes rather than reality.
> there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to.
A lot of parents are addicted to texting back and forth with their kids all day. I imagine many of the kids hate it.
If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.
If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
> what is texting their kid going to do?
Those parents don't realize it's going to get their kid shot when the kid is hiding and the gunman hears the ding or buzz of the notification.
Match what's been reported by some Bataclan attack survivors: not only you had to play dead, but your phone had to play dead too.
I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves.
For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?
Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.
We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.
(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)
> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"
That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.
When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.
This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception.
There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime?
Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration.
So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.
A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...
Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.
What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.
It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
>You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss
Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work.
I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar
This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.
Software is a bit isolated from this (there's computers for "research" regardless, after all). But phone policies can be very strict in most other sectors of work. Seen as a dostraction at worst and unprofessional at best. A teacher wouldn't be able to just get away with having their phone out during class unless there's an emergency.
Some parents message their kids all through the day, they treat it as some kind of social media. Making kids focus on school instead of immediately replying to text messages upsets the parents.
I know a bunch of teachers. This is true.
Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.
Parents really like the convenience and the feeling of safety they get when their kid has a phone. If they have to change school pickup plans they'd much rather text their kid than call and leave a message with the school office and then hope that the office gets the message to their kid.
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.
In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.
It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)
(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
> played games on our graphing calculators
Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.
I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.
Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.
This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
I think it's less about what's okay and more about enforcement. It does seem like post pandemic schools lost all their teeth.
In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.
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Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...)
It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
This criticism would be valid if the researchers had studied just one group of schools, and their methodology was just comparing before and after. But that's not all they did. They had two groups of schools, with low/high cell phone use before the ban. Their hypothesis was that the schools with high cell phone use would see a larger change in test scores (as they would have the largest drop in mobile phone usage).
There may be other reasons to criticize the paper, of course.This was controlled for in the study.
I swear sometimes people only exist to look for flaws in studies they didn't read.
> It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
Why do you think that's more likely?
Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material?
One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.
That also depends on how the tests work. If each test covers both the new material since the previous test, as well as older material, then that would require students retain all the material, not just the recent stuff.
Or maybe the last test of the semester covers the entire semester's material, while the earlier tests only cover new material since the previous test.
We can't say for sure without this information.
I still don't see where you're pulling the "more likely" from.
A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little.
For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
> if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives
The thing I find interesting is that when most people talk about standardised tests, they are talking about assessments that benchmark how much trivial knowledge about a given subject one has, and this has been the standard for most of the history of the American education system. I would argue that this is a flawed way to measure a student's literacy–in any subject for that matter.
I would actually frame "learn and forget" as "learn and adapt" because I would much rather a student forget a piece of trivial knowledge, but still have the ability to figure it out on their own with the right resources than a student who can tell you the colour Benjamin Franklin wore on his 15th birthday, but couldn't explain the effects of imperialism on societies.
For much of history, we have incentivised rote memorisation of trivial knowledge and accidentally de-valued critical thinking and problem solving skills. Do you remember the backlash that schools got from _parents_ when schools started implementing Common Core in an attempt to get students to think more abstractly? While I scoff at them, I genuinely don't blame parents for coming to the conclusion that we should just do math "the way we used to do it", but I can't help but point out that this is leading to the exact decline in general literacy that we have seen in public schools over the years. Now when you start comparing the educational attainment of students in public schools vs. private schools this becomes a who other conversation that cell phones can't even begin to explain.
This is also very closely following the pandemic. I'd imagine that massively pollutes their data. I didn't see a comparison to comparable districts that didn't implement a ban.
Just from anecdata of my own kids, enforcement is nearly impossible. Phones are banned citywide as of this year but it sounds like they are still being used pretty openly.
Since when are cities banning phones? And how?
Citywide bans for schools, not everyone.
In other words, correlation does not imply causation
And of course, sometimes a correlation does in fact imply a causation!
No, correlation does not imply causation. However, sometimes you find both correlation and causation, depending on the evidence you have.
To expect children/teens to outsmart big tech companies putting billions of dollars into getting us all addicted to our phone seems... naive. Removing availability to a vice has always been a somewhat effective strategy to mitigate temptation, i.e. food, drugs, etc.
If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant.
I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.
My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.
Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.
Too many unknowns and not enough signal.
I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.
In our local schools, they don't make *teachers* responsible for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the administration will give also give additional consequences such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities like Prom.
My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.
If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.
Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating)
There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
Are you saying that from a perspective where the purpose of schools is to offer an education, or to keep kids locked up and be cheaper than daycare?
My phrasing suggests that. I was having trouble thinking of a non-offensive way to say, "I don't think the kids can possibly be learning much if the teachers and administration are incapable of implementing a phone ban."
Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.
These sorts of schools already make kids pass through metal detectors on their way in so phones can just be confiscated at that point.
A lot of schools implement this by having the students put their phones in a locked pouch when they enter the building in the morning. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch
This generally takes it out of the hands of individual classroom teachers.
My son's school had the kids all put their phone in a "phone hotel" in the admin's office in the morning, and pick them up in the afternoon. This was fine, except, 1) a lot of kids just put a burner phone in and kept their actual phone hidden in their bag, and 2) the kids were all required to use laptops for class, which could do everything their phones could do.
Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is finally banning phones.
There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388).
Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388
You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate phone use:
> Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.
This seems like the single worst way to measure this because by looking at chronological data you get all kinds of temporal effects. A better baseline would be to look at the difference between pre-cell phone ban scores and post cell-hone ban scores compared to other districts where the cell phone ban didn't occur.
I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.
2021-2022 vs 2023-2024. Has anyone asked what Covid had to do with it?
Are students really allowed to be on their phones during class at a lot of schools?
When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games.
If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?
iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.
Apple's Classroom says it allows locking to a single app
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084
It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of humanity.
This is actually very sad. Finally every child had a computer in their pocket, but it turned out to be a locked down attention exploitation machine. I sincerely wish it wasn't.
That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced.
Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them.
Are there people already working on this?
(I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation)
edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
I'm thinking of this as I read this thread. How do you solve the problem of social media firehoses while still allowing kids to have access to the vast wealth of information and advice that the internet provides? It hasn't been so many years since many were predicting that the internet will make schools themselves obsolete.
"Differences in test scores"
Anyone know how to interpret that chart?
Test scores fell off cliff when covid hit, they've been slowly rising nationally since. Here's California.
https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores...
I am reasonably confident that Smart Phones will take the route of cigarettes.
Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.
And then progressively banned in public places.
Which won't work. The model isn't an exact match.
I'd rather see hard content filters in certain contexts than a complete ban.
No social media sites, games, or messaging would remove most of the problem.
But the ultimate driver of addiction is ad-tech, and all of these measures would cause a significant hit to the ad industries.
So in practice it's easier simply to ban phones.
If phones were totally banned for kids, where would the kid get to know the world?
TVs? Newspapers? Magazines?
Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?
For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed. I think younger people today will as well.
Also it's important to note the topic is during school hours. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn at school, and there's also a wealth to learn outside of school. Knowledge about the world can, and will, happen in both. Many hours outside of school to 'grow your knowledge' through your phone.
> For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed
You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.
Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games.
My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.
We definitely did. You should have gone to a library. I got my first Prolog compiler, C++ compiler, and microcontroller programming manual from Salvation Army thrift stores. There were like a million magazines you could buy.
edit: I forgot the Standard ML book, also from some thrift store. All circa late-80s, early-90s. I still have them all.
Yes, but I didn't know the word "assembler". I was completely bewildered about why BASIC produced clunky results and I could barely phrase the question about how proper games were made. Local libraries didn't have relevant books. I didn't know there was help in magazines. The most clued-up adults wouldn't know either, and would be trying to get me interested in programming turtle bots with LOGO. What I needed was to ask the internet (which didn't exist yet).
Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?
Since a study is needed to determine if anything is true. Sometimes the study is simple: look out the window and see if it's raining. But this is not one of those.
A difference of 1-2%.
Not something particularly worth worrying about.
Only slightly tengential, but am so happy to have invested in a remarkable and ony taking (most of) my notes during classes with it (when I dont break the tip and forgetting the replacement ones at home)
I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P
> I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P
Work from ... Texas?
Ah yes, those years when we were all allowed to Work from Texas, and then all our bosses wanted us to Return to Ohio.
Learning requires focus; cell phones destroy focus.
The discussion here is so misdirected - It's not the device that's addictive or destructive, it's the exposure of young developing minds to endless, pointless advertising/sponsorship.
Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless
Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out.
But also, complete inability of schools to adapt.
Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success.
Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced.
There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school.
Math class with this kid was:
1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user.
2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone.
Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.
Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.)
Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.
Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world.
> he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately.
> Teachers are inherently lazy.
I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.
This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have:
1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent)
2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects).
3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data.
Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.
There's no study that's good enough for HN.
I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.
And they do all this by reading the abstract.
And on top of that, I expect most of the complaints about all these studies are made by people who have never designed or run a study or research program of any kind in their entire life.
It's that common phenomenon where people think they can use general logic (which they generally are good at) to draw strong conclusions about something that isn't in their wheelhouse. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, sometimes.
Maybe most studies actually are junk.
At least the ones with attention grabbing headlines
It makes much more sense if you think of these threads as nerdsniping to support a preconcieved personal biases and addictions. Not very related to finding the truth.
No study is perfect – research is and has always been expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of reading and doing research.
Playing a devils advocate in topics you're not versed in or know the context just makes you a timewasting arsehole most of the time.
Why not both? :)
No study should be good enough for HN. If a single non-obviously-flawed study is enough to convince you to something, then you can be convinced of anything and everything under the sun.
One study can find any effect it's looking for.
A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.
Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.
And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
Ok here is the crucial part of the paper:
It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:
> Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban took effect), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_t are the parameters of interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with the period before the ban serving as the omitted category, holding grade level constant.
To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm not an economist and could not do better.
what it means is that this paper shows probable causality and models a lot of interesting features. it is most definitely not flawed.
i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain for the average student is quite small. it's actually less than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h of studying). that is to say, if students studied one fucking hour for the FAST, they would probably get a bigger benefit on it than all the time they get back not looking at their phones throughout two years of school.
so whatever cell phone use (1) in school (2) causes, it causes a small effect on test scores.
you would have to pick some other objective criteria, for example mental health assessment, for maybe a larger effect, or seek a larger treatment, perhaps a complete ban of cell phones period, to observe a larger effect.
Thanks for the context!
To me this was the most informative comment in the thread because it offers some effect size comparison.
To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2 percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.
The chart is showing percentiles not percent. Put your smartphone away before posting on HN.
The lack of control and cohort following are legitimate criticisms. The effect size is not. Even a single-digit percentage increase over a single year from policy treatment is incredibly impressive when we open the door to cumulative effects.
> Yet the data fits people's biases
It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen documented when it comes to teens and social media.
> But it also fits priors
I know that it's important to look at data and not rely on our own assumptions and "common sense" about things (as reality can often be surprising).
But.
Based on how kids seem to actually use their phones in class (that is, not all that much for educational things related to the coursework at hand), and based on what we know (conclusive study after conclusive study) about how by-design addictive social media and smartphone games are, it's honestly hard to take seriously the idea that smartphone use in class hasn't hurt education and test scores.
Priors matter!
There is another major factor that could cause scores to rise globally: ChatGPT. It is now good enough that it can explain topics to students at home, like a private tutor.
I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:
1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.
We didn't always have bad actors directly injecting rage-bait into our blood streams.
Not as tuned for engagement as now, but we had to have yellow journalism laws for a reason too. There's always been lots of propaganda and manipulation and bad actors in journalism.
Sure we did. Or is that also just us conforming to our preferred worldview of the past?
I don't think you are being totally fair to the paper, but you do point out something that drives me crazy: local freakouts about year-to-year changes in math tests scores. It's like people don't realize that these 8th grade students are not the same as those.
Yea, it's strange that the line didn't move quickly. I would give grace for a couple weeks to a few months, but next year? The timing feels really disconnected.
Crazy we need studies for this
The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points.
My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
Where did you get 1.1 percentage point? The paper uses percentiles.
"Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. These positive test score effects are larger for male students (an effect of 1.4 percentiles on the spring test in the second year) and for students in middle and high schools (1.3 percentiles)."
I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.
I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic.
Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.
Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.
I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written:
> Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels.
> Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect.
Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph.
But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.
When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over time.
There are of course bigger problems, but it seems like phones are one of those "attainable" problems for a school to fix.
Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.