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UNESCO calls for global ban on smartphones in schools (news.un.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Emergencies and early pickups should be the responsibility of the adults i.e. teachers and administrative staff. They are responsible for you while in school so they need to be informed either way.

Learning tool for people with disabilities? No they should get real/proper tools and help/assistance.

The real world doesn't work that way. Horror stories abound of school staff blatantly ignoring students' special needs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And that problem is of infinitely higher priority than banning phones in school 100%. Allowing phones is not a solution to that very real problem.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Let's review the available options here:

Allow phones in school. This partially mitigates the problem by allowing neglected children to call for help.
Don't allow phones in school. This does not at all mitigate the problem; neglected children remain helpless.

There is no third option of solving the problem of children being neglected in schools. That would require people who don't care to magically start caring, which obviously isn't going to happen.

Therefore, the greatest harm reduction is achieved through option 1.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I strongly disagree. Option one is just giving up on trying to improve the situation in our schools. You're not listening here. "Not caring" as you put it either is or should be neglect in terms of performing their job and thus grounds for dismissal. Then you'll say "but no one wants to teach anyway, there's a shortage as is" and I'll say that yeah, that's another more important issue, that teachers need better working conditions and pay.

That there exists more important issues to fix doesn't mean that banning phones isn't a good idea, it just means that there are prerequisites before it would actually work "in the real world" as you put it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That there exists more important issues to fix doesn’t mean that banning phones isn’t a good idea, it just means that there are prerequisites before it would actually work “in the real world” as you put it.

You're willing to hold off on banning phones in the classroom until neglectful school staff are no longer an issue, then? Okay, that's fine with me, but from what I've seen and heard of our schools and our cultural values around education, you're going to be waiting a very long time.