19
votes
Mobile phones to be banned in Victoria state schools from 'first to last bell
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- Title
- 'The right thing to do': Victoria's public schools to ban mobile phones from 2020
- Published
- Jun 25 2019
- Word count
- 540 words
It's like people never learn. Bans never work, I thought US tried that 20 years ago and failed. Even when I was a kid my school tried banning all tech - pagers, phones, consoles - teachers started confiscating all tech from kids before the lesson. But you can't just take someones property like that - kids started taking broken phones to school to then claim that the teacher broke it. Sometimes the parents were in on it, and after a few confrontations like these the school quckly backpedaled on the bad. And how would you ever enforce such a ban without violating every possible privacy a student can have? Not to mention that phones are helping to stop child abuse from teachers - it's like every few months there is a new controversy about a teacher overstepping all possible boundaries with kids and getting secretly recorded by one of them.
And to tie "cyberbullying" into that is even more shady and stupid - kids bully each other. I don't think there is a way to stop, it's just how kids work, and they'll find all possible ways to do it, with or without phones in their hands.
This guy knows what he's talking about, and the fact that private schools banned the phones doesn't matter - with private schools parents are usually on board, and people go to private ones by choice. But with public schools - you don't have a choice, especially if you are from a low income family. Way to antagonize the kids further.
Huh? Yes you can (in most places, even the US AFAIK) because of In loco parentis, so long as they give the confiscated item back at the end of the school day. And honestly, most of the "problems" you listed here seem to be ones rather specific to the US, because of the generally poor school administrations there and overall litigious society. But this article is about Australia, and phones were banned in my school for ages here in Canada (another Commonwealth country) and it worked just fine.
Lockers? Or, as I have seen in schools in The Netherlands (where there is no legal ban so perhaps for during certain classes or activities only), a grid of rf-blocking fabric pockets on the front wall of the classroom.
With phones and social media, there's lots of extra ways to keep it hidden from parents and teachers, though, and new ways of threatening victims into keeping it secret.
As a teacher (at university, although I've done a number of workshop type lessons with high school students), I would love a policy such as this. The things are just too damn distracting and addictive. Way too often, I have to decide whether to play police or let it go because it would ruin the flow of the session for other students. Screen use is damaging to others as well. Research has shown that the people behind people on phones or laptops in class concentrate/perform poorer.
Last year, France banned phones nationwide in primary, junior and middle schools. I can't find any articles reporting on the experience/results of that, though :-/
Unless you're suggesting all classes go back to pen and paper, kids are going to find a way to secretly chat up one another. Even if it's on school hardware.
That it's going to happen is not a reason not to make it more difficult. Or rather: easier to withstand for students. When I am sick of checking my phone every few minutes while trying to watch something, I put it away as well. A bit of friction can make a big difference.
And for lectures, yeah, pen and paper is better there, I believe. There's a number of studies that show performance is higher vs. on laptops, for instance. The theory is that it's to do with the fact that you can type at talk-speed, but not write so fast. That means pen-and-paper requires you to actually process what you're hearing and seeing, only writing down the gist of it/most important points. This helps recollection and understanding. Plus, again, paper is not disctracting for the people behind you, while screens are.
Of course you're going to need screens in a number of lessons. But they can be the exception, not the rule. I prefer defaulting to no electronics.
I actually banned phones and laptops once in a college course (which I taught only once). Lectures for a group of 60 and workshops in groups of 30. Students griped at first, but we had a conversation about my reasons, they grudingly accepted, and at the end of the course agreed it was a good experience.