[RhetoricThug]

France has banned all children under 15 from using their phones in school

French students returning from the summer break will no longer be able to use their phones during the school day.

Earlier this summer France banned all students under 15 from using all cellphones, tablets, and smartwatches at any point during the day.

That includes mealtimes.

The government is concerned that students are becoming too dependent on and distracted by their phones.

Monday is the first day that French schoolchildren under 15 cannot use their cellphones at any point during the school day, thanks to a new nationwide law.

The ban, passed in July following a campaign pledge made by French President Emmanuel Macron, will affect elementary and junior high schools across the country as they return from the summer break.

The new law, which went into effect on August 5, bans all types of cellphones, as well as tablets and smartwatches.

While a ban on cellphones during class hours was already in place since 2010, the new law extends to breaks and mealtimes.

Schools are free to choose themselves if they will implement the ban for students over 15. There are also some exceptions to the ban, such as for students with disabilities.

Under the new law, students have to turn their phones off during the day or put them in lockers, the Associated Press reported. Schools will independently deal with the logistics of how students will be kept away from their phones, the news agency said.

The law was introduced amid fears that students were becoming too dependent on and distracted by their smartphones.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer in June hailed the legislation as "a law for the 21st century," and said it would improve discipline among France's 12 million schoolchildren, Agence France-Presse reported.

"Being open to technologies of the future doesn't mean we have to accept all their uses," he said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/france- ... ool-2018-9

'We don’t really need phones’: the French school that banned mobiles

It’s breaktime at a middle school in rural Brittany, and huddles of teenagers are chatting in the playground. Two 15-year-olds sit reading novels, while others kick footballs or play chase. One boy does some press-ups.

The hum of conversation and flurry of movement contrasts with most other French secondary schools, where playgrounds can be eerily silent as pupils stare at their mobile phones. In La Gautrais, no one looks at Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube. Here mobile phones have been banned. Few seem to miss them.

“I do have a phone, but I leave it at home and don’t really think about it much,” shrugged one 14-year-old girl in a denim jacket. “I don’t rush to check it after school. When I get home, first I’ll have a snack, I’ll chat to my mum, do some homework, then I might look at my phone. But only if I’m waiting for an important message.”

Two of her friends don’t have mobile phones at all. “We don’t really need phones because we’re always chatting to each other in person, we chat the whole time – too much probably – and we’re really good friends,” one said.

La Gautrais middle school in the village of Plouasne banned the use of mobile phone on its grounds four years ago, long before the French president, Emmanuel Macron, made an election promise to outlaw children’s phones in schools in an attempt to “detox” teenagers increasingly addicted to screens.

From September, all nursery, primary and middle schools will ban mobile phone use. More than 90% of 12- to 17-year-olds are believed to own a mobile phone in France, and children were already banned from unauthorised use in class. But , as in the UK, it was left to headteachers to decide whether to limit phones in breaktime.

La Gautrais’s 290 pupils between the ages of 12 and 16 come from surrounding villages in this farming area. Since the ban, staff have noticed more social interaction between children, more empathy and a readiness to learn at the start of lessons. There is less “switching-off anger” at having to move from breaktime gaming on smartphones to focusing in class.
“No phone use at school gives pupils a moment’s peace from social networks and some children tell us they appreciate that,” said the headteacher, Yves Koziel. “On social networks there’s an acceleration and extreme simplification of group relationships which can create conflict, even bullying. We’re freeing them from that – at least during the day. We’re cutting the umbilical cord and offering some respite from it.”

Koziel said he was pleased to see children returning to “ordinary things”, such as chatting, games and breaktime clubs and activities including dance and knitting. “I think children are more available for social interaction when they’re obliged to really speak to each other,” he said.

Policing the ban has not been difficult. Pupils switch off phones and leave them in schoolbags and there are fewer than 10 confiscations a year.

“At my previous schools, sometimes phones were in pencil cases and pupils were checking them or writing messages on phones on their laps,” Laura Floch, an English teacher, said. “Here, phones aren’t an issue.”

In March, Floch took a group of 15-year-old pupils to London for a five-day trip, visiting sights including the British Museum and the Museum of London. The teenagers were not allowed to use their phones during the day or during excursions, except when asking to take photographs of sights, but they could use them in evening free time.

She said: “They knew it was fair and they accepted it. But I could see other groups of children from France on similar trips at the same museums just sitting on benches and staring at their phones during the whole museum visit instead of taking part.”

Sitting with his friends at breaktime, Anatole Desriac, who recently got his first mobile phone at the age of 15, said he approved of the ban.

“When I’m with my friends I prefer a proper conversation,” he said. “If you’re all standing around with phones, you talk about what’s on the screen rather than really listening to each other.”

He and his friends use their phones to listen to French rap on the long bus journey. At home, playing Fortnite on PlayStation was just as enticing as a phone, but all their parents limited screen use.

“Knowing how to use phones in moderation is just part of life for us,” Christian-Steven Kitoko, 16, said.

Desriac’s mother, Nicole Lefeuvre, a librarian, said: “Children and parents tend to agree that it’s a good thing not using phones at school. Parents of teenagers find it hard enough to be constantly negotiating screen time at home.”

Her rules include no phones before the age of 15, no phones in bedrooms, no screens at all on Thursdays and school-holiday reading time for novels, comics or magazines.

In the playground, many under-14s said their biggest worry was breaking their phones, smashing them or dropping them in water so they were happy to leave them at home for safety’s sake.

One 16-year-old girl said she did not mind keeping her phone switched off on though she felt attached to it. “I have to know it’s there and I keep it in my jacket pocket, touching it regularly. I feel a bit lost without it.”

In Bourges in central France, Jean-Claude Chevalier, the headteacher at Littré middle school, which has 600 pupils, introduced a ban on phone use at breaktimes this year because of what the playground had become.
“Staff were surprised to see hundreds of children simultaneously glued to their phones during break – all sitting down staring at a screen and not talking,” he said. “It brought a loss of empathy, because children can use much stronger language on a screen than they would use face to face.”

None of the fears about banning phones had materialised. “We thought there might be more playground violence and rowdiness but that wasn’t the case. Pupils talk more, the playground is livelier,” Chevalier said.

“We thought we’d have to confiscate dozens of phones a day, in fact the number of confiscations has gone down. We thought the toilets would be monopolised by children sneaking a look at their phones, but that hasn’t happened at all.

“What we have seen is that pupils seem less addicted to phones.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... school-ban

This is great news for education! What are your thoughts?

[Zagadka]

I think it is a good call. No pun intended. No one needs phones that much, especially teenagers.

Oh christ, I'm old now, complaining about these new kids...

[Victoribus Spolia]

I think it is a good call.

[Rancid]

Yea, this is probably a good thing.

But Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! The nanny state!!! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

[Decky]

I don't see why anyone aside from party members should need mobile phones in the first place.

[RhetoricThug]

I think it is a good call. No pun intended. No one needs phones that much, especially teenagers.

Oh christ, I'm old now, complaining about these new kids...

Honestly, it's not an "organic" trend. It's not like these kids got together and made cell phone use fashionable. Cell phone use is more indicative of how we surrender culture to technology.

Culture has been manufactured for centuries, but technology is a perfect tool for reshaping human relations. *Insert any Edward Bernays quote here*

Here's a great article:

Kids And Screen Time: What Does The Research Say?

Kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens, and it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions, according to new research out of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, found that sixth-graders who went five days without exposure to technology were significantly better at reading human emotions than kids who had regular access to phones, televisions and computers.

The UCLA researchers studied two groups of sixth-graders from a Southern California public school. One group was sent to the Pali Institute, an outdoor education camp in Running Springs, Calif., where the kids had no access to electronic devices. For the other group, it was life as usual.

At the beginning and end of the five-day study period, both groups of kids were shown images of nearly 50 faces and asked to identify the feelings being modeled. Researchers found that the students who went to camp scored significantly higher when it came to reading facial emotions or other nonverbal cues than the students who continued to have access to their media devices.

"We were pleased to get an effect after five days," says Patricia Greenfield, a senior author of the study and a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA. "We found that the kids who had been to camp without any screens but with lots of those opportunities and necessities for interacting with other people in person improved significantly more."

If the study were to be expanded, Greenfield says, she'd like to test the students at camp a third time — when they've been back at home with smartphones and tablets in their hands for five days.

"It might mean they would lose those skills if they weren't maintaining continual face-to-face interaction," she says.

A Wake-Up Call For Educators

There's a big takeaway for schools, Greenfield says.

"A lot of school systems are rushing to put iPads into the hands of students individually, and I don't think they've thought about the [social] cost," she explains. "This study should be, and we want it to be, a wake-up call to schools. They have to make sure their students are getting enough face-to-face social interaction. That might mean reducing screen time."

The results of the UCLA study seem to line up with prior research, says Marjorie Hogan, a pediatrician at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

"Common sense tells me that if a child's laying on his or her bed and texting friends instead of getting together and saying, 'Hey, what's up,' that there's a problem there," she says. "I want people interacting ... on a common-sense level, and an experiential level. It does concern [me]."

Hogan relates the UCLA study's findings back to research on infants.

"When babies are babies, they're learning about human interaction with face-to-face time and with speaking to parents and having things they say modeled back to them," she says. "That need doesn't go away."

How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?

For decades the AAP has warned that children need to cut back on their screen time. The group's latest prescription: Entertainment "screen time" should be limited to two hours a day for children ages 3-18. And, for 2-year-olds and younger, none at all.

The sixth-graders who made up the sample in the UCLA study self-reported that they spent an average of more than four hours on a typical school day texting, watching television and playing video games.

The San Francisco nonprofit Common Sense Media studies screen time from birth and, in 2013, found that children under 8 (a younger sample than the kids in the UCLA study) were spending roughly two hours a day in front of a screen.

"If used appropriately, it's wonderful," Hogan says of digital media. "We don't want to demonize media, because it's going to be a part of everybody's lives increasingly, and we have to teach children how to make good choices around it, how to limit it and how to make sure it's not going to take the place of all the other good stuff out there."

Some research suggests that screen time can have lots of negative effects on kids, ranging from childhood obesity and irregular sleep patterns to social and/or behavioral issues.

"We really need to be sure that children, and probably older people, are getting enough face-to-face interaction to be competent social beings," Greenfield says. "Our species evolved in an environment where there was only face-to face-interaction. Since we were adapted to that environment, it's likely that our skills depend on that environment. If we reduce face-to-face interaction drastically, it's not surprising that the social skills would also get reduced."

What About 'Educational Screen Time'?

Research out of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a nonprofit research and production institute affiliated with the Sesame Workshop, suggests that less than half the time kids between the ages of 2 and 10 spend in front of screens is spent consuming "educational" material.

The center also looked at family income as a determining factor of screen time. Lower-income families reported that their children spent more time engaging with educational screen activities than higher-income families did. Fifty-seven percent of screen time for families earning less than $25,000 was education-focused, compared with 38 percent for families earning between $50,000 to $99,000.

How To Limit Kids' Screen Time?

Of course, as media multiplies, it's increasingly difficult to manage kids' screen time. Where several decades ago, television was the only tech distraction, kids now have smartphones, tablets and laptops — not to mention electronic games.

"We need to make media a part of our lives, but in a planned, sensible way," Hogan says.

Her suggestion: Families should encourage a "healthy media diet" for their children. Parents and kids should work together to decide how much time to spend with media every day, and to make sure good choices are being made about what media to take in.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08 ... search-say

The last bit about what kind of media to take in, is really about our sensory diet. Cognitive liberty depends on our ability to structure our sensory diet. This is just like any other kind of diet... garbage in, garbage out. Social engineers understand how technology can literally rewire our brains.

Technology has altered human physiology. It makes us think differently, feel differently, even dream differently. It affects our memory, attention spans and sleep cycles. This is attributed to a scientific phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences. In this case, that's the wealth of information offered by the Internet and interactive technologies.

Some cognition experts have praised the effects of tech on the brain, lauding its ability to organize our lives and free our minds for deeper thinking. Others fear tech has crippled our attention spans and made us uncreative and impatient when it comes to anything analog.

https://mashable.com/2014/03/14/tech-br ... qz1C1ajgqa

I applaud France for taking action and saying no to technocratic encroachments on our culture and education.

[RhetoricThug]

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley

“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”

“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”

He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours.

“I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said.

“This is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about.”

His children attended private elementary school, where he saw the administration introduce iPads and smart whiteboards, only to “descend into chaos and then pull back from it all.”

This idea that Silicon Valley parents are wary about tech is not new. The godfathers of tech expressed these concerns years ago, and concern has been loudest from the top.

...

Those who have exposed their children to screens try to talk them out of addiction by explaining how the tech works.

John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.

“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”

And there are those in tech who disagree that screens are dangerous. Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”

Read full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/styl ... alley.html

[RhetoricThug]

Screen time inhibits toddler development, study finds

In news that will surprise few but still alarm many, a study has found that kids 2-5 years old who engage in more screen time received worse scores in developmental screening tests. The apparent explanation is simple: when a kid is in front of a screen, they’re not talking, walking or playing, the activities during which basic skills are cultivated.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/28/scree ... udy-finds/

[redcarpet]

I agree with it. Like in Japan phones are banned on trains! We need both bans in Australia!

[RhetoricThug]

I agree with it. Like in Japan phones are banned on trains! We need both bans in Australia!

I didn't know about Japan. Interesting. Glad you support the idea. I'm sure the French ban is extremely successful.

[RhetoricThug]

New Law Asks California Schools Ban Smartphones In Classrooms

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D- Torrance), said, “There is growing evidence that unrestricted use of smartphones by students in schools interferes with the educational mission of the school, lowers pupil performance, particularly among low-achieving pupils, promotes cyberbullying, and contributes to teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide. .”

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/07 ... phone-ban/

[BigSteve]

We didn't have cell phones when I was in school but, if we did, I can't imagine that we'd have been permitted to use them during the school day...

[Rancid]

We didn't have cell phones when I was in school but, if we did, I can't imagine that we'd have been permitted to use them during the school day...

I was in high school in the late 90s to early 2000s. I was one of the few kids that had a cell phone. THat said, cells phone were banned in the sense that we were required to keep them on silent, and never take them out. Otherwise they would be confiscated for 1-2 weeks.

[JohnRawls]

I was in high school in the late 90s to early 2000s. I was one of the few kids that had a cell phone. THat said, cells phone were banned in the sense that we were required to keep them on silent, and never take them out. Otherwise they would be confiscated for 1-2 weeks.

Pretty much same for us also. It is kinda ridiculousness to use phones in school during class. At least i do not remember anybody using phones but i remember playing gameboys or PSPs which was technically illegal

[Zionist Nationalist]

I was barely going to school in 12th grade and when I did come I was playing on my Iphone 3g and listening to the teacher at the same time and managed to pass all tests without studying at home anything (barely but passed)