Maine banned phones in schools to help teens focus and connect. It's working
apnews.com63 points by jethronethro 16 hours ago
63 points by jethronethro 16 hours ago
This is a great start, but there's so much more situation where phones should be banned, or at least we should take the initiative to not have your phone around (meetings, restaurants, a dinner table, and when you're with your kids, when doing focused work, etc).
They did this in Belgium as well, surveys noticed that the overall screentime is the same. They just use their phone more after school, and 62% still used phones secretly.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/2333030/despite-ban-at-school-...
Perth, Australia too: https://www.education.wa.edu.au/mobile-phones - phones are banned from the start to the end of school. Primary students cannot have them on them, secondary students can but they must be off and out of sight (even at break times).
#HappyNews - what an uplifting piece of news today!
I don't know if this falls under the category of "with age comes wisdom", but I don't exactly see this change as a bad thing.
If I'm remembering correctly (and this was a long time ago), when I was in school, the schools I went to had a sort-of zero tolerance policy for cell phones. Seemed a bit asinine at the time and the punishment for having one even more so. I believe it was taken for three months the first time, the entire school year on the second (the ethics of which are absolutely up for debate, but this was in the middle of redneck America so make of that what you will).
Of course as a kid I disagreed with it, but cell phones didn't offer a ubiquitous portal into all of the social ills of social media that they do today, nor do they provide an avenue to completely subvert human interaction at a stage where developing social calibration is taught as an unwritten and untaught subject.
I guess the backwards rednecks got this one right, all be it for the wrong reasons.
Don't they mean focus and disconnect?
> The new law, championed by Gov. Janet Mills, was meant to limit distractions and encourage real-life connections
Can the adults stop shitting on the young generation? There is no way in hell anyone in the workforce would agree to relinquishing their phone at the start of their shift so why should children? People lazy scroll YouTube and Facebook all the time at work yet kids can't. Hypocrites.
educate yourself a bit before calling others dumb. There is a LOT of evidence that (most) screen time, especially addictive tech like a smartphone, is bad for children. Especially their mental health.
I'm sure it's bad for adults as well, but school aged kids are in their formative years where learning how to talk to someone in real life is a skill that needs to be developed. Their brains are also not yet fully developed, so their time should be spent learning. Not fucking around in class on tiktok.
I was a student at one point myself and also wasn't able to use my phone in school. Boo-hoo? It's a bit like being a kid and complaining to the adults in the room that they don't let you smoke and drink.