2y ago

‘Put learners first’: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

www.theguardian.com ‘Put learners first’: Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools

Major UN report issues warning over excessive use, with one in six countries already banning the devices

I personally think that responsible smartphone use should be learned and practiced, rather than outright banning them.

I think this shows that adults are terribly addicted to their devices and think if they can't stop using them, children won't either. They certainly can't teach how to use phones responsibly if they can't do it themselves. Unfortunately for children the result is an outright ban.

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Like it or not, smartphones and the internet are now a part of everyday life. Digital literacy is now as important as traditional literacy. Pretending that this shift has not happened, because education systems cannot adapt to it, is absurd.
The problems that are claimed to be caused by smartphones in class seem to be more down to to a lack of discipline and engagement. I went to school before any kind of mobile phone was a thing. There were still plenty of potential ways for students to goof off, yet teachers by and large managed to keep us focused and behaving.
- Smartphones are a different league of distracting. Apps like social media are literally tuned to be as psychologically distracting as possible.
- Smartphones are orders of magnitude more distracting than whatever existed before. Also, you can teach digital literacy all the while forbidding smartphone use outside of class, there is no real opposition there.
- Anyone else remember doodling, passing notes, or talking in class? I grew up with smartphones becoming popular and such things were extremely common both before and after smart phones. If anything, some of them were more common. Teachers would take away phones but they didn't do anything about doodling and couldn't do much against talking in class.
- There are plenty of hours outside of classroom instruction in a day where kids can (and already do) build all the digital literacy they like, so I don't really see how that's a meaningful argument.

26 comments