A new UN report raised concerns on Wednesday about the excessive use of smartphones, calling for them to be banned in schools worldwide. According to the UN's education, science and culture agency UNESCO, the over-use of mobile phones impacts learning.

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.

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.

Let’s review the available options here:

  1. Allow phones in school. This partially mitigates the problem by allowing neglected children to call for help.
  2. 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.

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.

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.

Create a post

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 1 user online
  • 61 users / day
  • 171 users / week
  • 620 users / month
  • 2.31K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.28K Posts
  • 67K Comments
  • Modlog