Technology

Kids don’t need cell phone

It looks like the ban isn't on all cell phones. Dumb phones are permitted; it's phones capable of Internet use:

Hochul said she would launch the bill later this year and take it up in New York’s next legislative session, which begins in January 2025. If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts, which has been a sticking point for parents. She did not offer specifics on enforcing the prohibition.

Do kids need them? I mean, they obviously don't need them. I didn't have a cell phone when I was in school.

And they certainly can be a distraction.

But...the flip side of that is that they can also be a pretty important tool.

I use my smartphone as a reference, to reach Wikipedia, etymonline, various dictionaries, to get translations.

I use it as a tool. I have maxima on it, an open-source computer algebra system; think Mathematica. It's a lot more useful than something like a TI calculator. I think I touched my graphing calculator about once after school. I have a unit converter on it. I have a weather program on it. I take notes, can search through them. Those are tools that I have with me all the time in life. If kids can't have a smartphone at school -- which is a mandatory part of a lot of the youth and teenage parts of their lives -- that's stripping them of access to a lot of important stuff.

At one point, I worked at a research lab that didn't permit devices with cameras inside, a much lesser restriction. It was a pain in the butt, and that was a long time ago, before devices were as prevalent and important as they are today. I wouldn't wish that on kids.

Part of functioning in the modern world is living in a world that has devices like smartphones. If a student literally cannot function in the presence of a smartphone, that seems like a much larger problem to me than anything else; employers are not going to cut them off from phones. I don't think that this solution is a reasonable approach to "student is being distracted". Like, part of socializing people for being able to function in society has gotta be to get them in a situation where they can function later in life, and if anyone should do that, it's the school.