Schools should ban smartphones for the entire school day

my school never had signal in half the building. nobody planned it, the walls are just thick. can confirm you all survive. the freakout is about losing the option, not the thing itself

— wes_offgrid

Let me steelman bell-to-bell against the "lessons-only" compromise everyone finds reasonable: partial bans put the enforcement on each teacher, each hour — 150 tiny negotiations a day, and the study says exactly those schools saw the weakest effects. Full-day moves the fight to one door, once, in the morning. Sometimes the stricter rule is the gentler one, because nobody has to police it all day.

— steelman_sam

im at a ban school. honest review: the first two weeks i was mad, and lunch got SO loud, like we actually talk now and it was exhausting?? then it was fine. now when i visit my cousins school where phones are allowed the cafeteria is dead silent and it lowkey freaks me out

— SunnyKoala419

My girls hand their phones to the assistant coach before every practice. Took two weeks of complaints, then the bus rides got loud again — card games, trash talk, actual team. We tested both ways over twenty years. Guess which one wins. A school day is practice for life; same rule applies.

— Val Cortez

first time posting here so sorry if this is dumb, but reading this whole thread — AmberHeron's "character of the room" and PixelPatch's "the feed is the problem" don't actually contradict each other? Lessons bell-to-bell seems clearly right, but lunch is the one part of the day that belongs to us, and quiet_currents already showed the study mostly blurs that line. Maybe the honest answer is "yes to the ban, and it still doesn't fix the actual product"

— MistyFawn231

Watch how the ban is implemented, not what it promises. Magnetic pouches from a single vendor, confiscation policies, in some districts consent to device searches. We are teaching an entire generation that an institution may seize and inspect your primary computer as a condition of entry. That lesson will outlast their grades either way.

— kein_tracking

ok confession from the supply side: i make the thumbnails you can't not click. sorry about that, genuinely. but here's the thing — banning phones 8am-3pm doesn't beat me, it just moves the binge to 3:01. the problem is the design of the feed, not the location of the kid. school bans are treating the room while the product stays radioactive

— PixelPatch

if phones are so bad for learning why does my school make us do everything on chromebooks? same screen no? idk im just asking

— CuriousLynx88

as a father i have to be honest about the thing nobody has said yet, i live in a country where school emergencies are not hypothetical and when my daughter texted me "we are hiding, i love you" two years ago during a false alarm, that text was the worst and most important message of my life, you can tell me about front office protocols all day but you will not convince a parent that being unreachable during those forty minutes is acceptable, i am sorry, on everything else i am with the teachers but not this

— david.figueroa

small thing nobody mentions. my mom works shifts, the schedule changes day to day. who picks me up, whether i take the bus, whether i walk to my titas — that gets sorted in like 4 texts between classes. the office isnt going to relay my familys logistics every day. the phone isnt just brainrot, its how working families run

— AngeloM

Let's start with what the study actually found, because it's the largest we'll ever get: attention and classroom disruption improved, academic outcomes moved approximately zero. If the strongest intervention we have doesn't move the outcome we claim to care about, the honest conclusion is "bans change the vibe, not the learning." That's a weak basis for confiscating property all day.

— MarcusD