Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...
Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.
I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.
I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.
In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).
As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.
This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.
I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.
We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)
I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.
When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games.
If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?
Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.
When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.
Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.
Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.
Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.
What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work.
I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar
It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
Why do you think that's more likely?
One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.
For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.
My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.
There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
> Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.
1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent)
2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects).
3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data.
Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.
I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.
One study can find any effect it's looking for.
A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.
Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.
And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:
> Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban took effect), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_t are the parameters of interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with the period before the ban serving as the omitted category, holding grade level constant.
To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm not an economist and could not do better.
i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain for the average student is quite small. it's actually less than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h of studying). that is to say, if students studied one fucking hour for the FAST, they would probably get a bigger benefit on it than all the time they get back not looking at their phones throughout two years of school.
so whatever cell phone use (1) in school (2) causes, it causes a small effect on test scores.
you would have to pick some other objective criteria, for example mental health assessment, for maybe a larger effect, or seek a larger treatment, perhaps a complete ban of cell phones period, to observe a larger effect.
> Yet the data fits people's biases
It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen documented when it comes to teens and social media.
1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.
I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.
Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.
> Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels.
> Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect.
Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph.
But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.