Posted on 11/20/2022 8:00:12 AM PST by Conservat1
Guests on "Real Time with Bill Maher" called for parents to ask middle school principals to effectively ban kids from having their phones Friday. “What we need to do as a starting move – this is something we all can do – is get the phones and social media the hell out of middle school,” NYU professor Jonathan Haidt said. “Let’s just protect middle school, OK?” Haidt called for requiring students to put their phones in a locker or Yonder pouch, and to not have access to them for the school day, and compared letting kids keep their smartphones to allowing a heroin addict have the materials needed to “shoot up.”
“Talk to the principal … and say, ‘Can you help us?’” Haidt said, saying he was told teachers and administrators hated the presence of phones in class.
Haidt’s comments came in response to CNN host Laura Coates describing how she did not allow her elementary-school-age children to have smartphones, drawing praise from Haidt. “Don’t your kids complain to you that the other kids have this and we don’t?” Maher asked. “For me, no,” Coates responded, laughing, adding that she tells her kids that the prohibition can be “added to the bill for their therapy in 20 years.”
A National Institute of Health (NIH) study released in 2018 discovered that 9 and 10-year-old children who started at smartphone screens for more than two hours a day had a thinning of the cortex and scored lower when tested on language and thinking. Fox News host Tucker Carlson called on Congress to raise the age to use smartphones like the Apple iPhone to 18 in 2019, saying that taking an iPhone from a teenager was a way to discover “what addiction means.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
I don’t know how in the world I survived all of my education, including college, without a cellphone and the internet...rolling my eyes.
I’m really conflicted on this.
Would it be best for all of civilization if no one under 18 had smart phones, most certainly.
I can’t justify it on any rational legal basis, and of course is far beyond the legitimate authority of the government, and would be a first step to far greater infringements on our rights.
It should be left to the parents to decide, despite the disastrous results.
My own children had simple, dumb phones before they were 18, and the only computer in the house connected to the internet was in the Livingroom, where anyone could see what was on.
I remember walking through the wood 1/4 mile, knocking on the door and asking my friend’s mom if Tommy could come out and play. If he couldn’t or they weren’t home, I might wander around in the woods for a few hours to kill time before going home. Ate a lot of wild blueberries and if thirsty, would get a drink from the spring fed creek.
When older, I would ride my bike to various friends’ houses up to a few miles away to see if they wanted to hang out. We all knew how to fix a flat tire or adjust the chain on our bicycles which morphed into mixing and matching parts of various bikes to make our own custom.
That would be a great idea, but there must be a contingent plan in how to deal with PHONE-ADDICTED teens.
I would expect some of these already rowdy teens to go double barrel ballistic when their precious phones are taken away.
Picture a Coke addict being denied his next fix and the teacher walking off with some of those little baggies full of
‘snow’.
There may even need to be six week clinics set up to help that student break the habit. Whole families may need the same help.
But I was lost without my slide rule and then my hp12. Yes I was and am a nerd.
Sure, but the genie is out of the bottle now. Good luck enforcing any sort of comprehensive phone ban in any school other than a “home school.” The utility of a kid being able to call/text when soccer practice is over, where at the mall she needs to be picked up at, etc., will be appealing to some families and will outweigh the social media collateral damage.
Yes, those of us older than, say, ~38 got by in our youth without cell phones. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Sure, a family here and there will opt out of the phone thing for their teen, and good for them, but a whole school? Good luck.
Better would be to get them out of public skools
Absolutely agree and are frustrated by the school board and school administration refusal to limit students access to and use of their cellphones.
It has seriously undermined education and made children essentially electronic addicts.
As a kid on Guam, my friends and I were our own bicycle gang. We jumped our bikes on ramps, had rock fights, made rubber band guns, sharpened sticks into spears and stomped the boonies looking for Japanese soldiers hiding out (a few years previous, a Japanese soldier had been in fact found on the island, 1973 or so). We cooked the C rations we swiped from our parents’ typhoon emergency stash over open flames in the jungle. We wore no bicycle helmets or other protective gear, and the only rule I had was to be home when the street lights came on.
Sex reassignment surgery okay.
CRT - the new “religion” .
They might be tempted to drop in a non-working phone, I guess. But if you are caught with a phone during class; automatic 3 day suspension.
“My own children had simple, dumb phones before they were 18, and the only computer in the house connected to the internet was in the Livingroom, where anyone could see what was on.”
Same
No kid can learn to socialize properly without learning how to speak to others face to face.
This is most easily done at a school other a govt school where parents have more
Cash on hand than tuition payers. Kids cannot manage the peer pressure in govt schools where every kid has everything.
Bonus- None of mine have any problems applying for and getting opportunities as they hav no ridiculous social media profile set into permanency from immaturity
No kid should use social media at an age younger than the legal age for smoking, drinking, the draft, etc. And for the same reasons.
The legal basis is, confiscate all devices brought to school. Keep them until the day school is over in June. Children do not have a right to disrupt learning. Jacks and balls, baseball trading cards, pokemon cards and marbles. All things that were commonly filling a drawer in a teachers room.
You proved a working mind is superior.
Exactly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.