This seem to fascinate the US as there are many more articles about it in American press than French press. In France it seems everybody finds this completely normal.
I'm not sure teachers who "question the merits of insulating children from the internet-dominated world they will face outside school" actually exist... I have yet to meet one.
In the US, the idea that the federal government could issue such a ban would be preposterous. It's a matter of principle. The state shouldn't be regulating these kinds of things, it only makes a mockery of itself.
> In the US, the idea that the federal government could issue such a ban would be preposterous.
Yes, but only because the US is a federal republic where the states, not the central government, have general police powers. That kind of blanket regulation would not be particularly out of line with the kind of thing state laws regulate in schools, however.
Banning them from use at any time would not be a great thing in my opinion, but banning them in class is quite normal.
We were never allowed our "dumbphones" in class either though, which made us try to 'sneakily' text. I think students will try this with their smartphones as well.
Smartphones at school are really, really bad idea and they should be banned, here are the reasons (real stuff I saw with my own eyes):
- Kids play games during the break and that really affects their ability to concentrate during the lesson - they think about how to "move to the next level" or "kill the enemy", not on the lesson subject
- Kids don't interact normally, they sit separately looking at their phones - funnily some teachers actually loved that aspect - kids were silent, not running, no shouting during the breaks. I believe that direct human-to-human contact is valuable and can't be replaced with chatting on some app or sharing pictures.
- School has no control over the content kids view on their smartphones, so if one kid views porn and shows it to others, the school can be on fire as exposing kids to porn is a crime (at least in some countries) and school stuff is responsible for what is happening at school.
- Various "minor" nasty behaviors, for instance kids whose parents can't afford smartphone have to pay those who has smartphones to play games (one can say that it is nothing bad, but I don't like that).
I'm not sure about you, but there were no cellphones in my school days, so we got our distractions by chatting or doodling or doing virtually anything else except focusing on class. Kids don't concentrate during lessons, they never have.
Well, maybe today things are different when kids are all drugged up with Adderal and Ritalin, and any minor disturbance causes a SWAT team to show up.
Well, they've been banned "during all teaching activity" since 2010 according to multiple news sites. This new law makes it cover all of the school hours
There are 2 things apart from the studies themselves, that schools play a vital part in. One is learning to focus on one thing without distractions for hours at a stretch. The other is learning to socialize.
Phones inhibit the development of both aspects of young children.
Those are the two things I wish that schools played any part in whatsoever.
From my time at school, the two things they actually succeed at is killing your desire to learn and know (by way of many things), and instilling distrust of and disgust for your peers (again, many ways of doing this).
Oh, and they keep you there. So you're not out somewhere, actually interacting with the world and the people in it.
No. This won't fix anything. It is flying in the face of social norms and basic, narcissistic inclination. What is verboten will become desirable, and circumvention will be lauded by peers.
We live in a digital world. That isn't going away and will only become more pervasive.
Teach responsible usage. Make it like BYOB in enterprise. Require device enrollment. Block access to unproductive sites within a campus environment. Channel the compulsion to check/update/respond into something positive.
This is basic human psychology. We can't afford to be so blindly granular and willfully devoid of historical context and the obvious implications.
Am french, and can tell you that the only reason I managed to get up to the baccalaureate was an iPod Touch I had on me at every, single, exam I ever took since I was about 10.
I managed to pass the baccalaureate entirely because of a TI Nspire on which I preloaded every single possible program I could need ever for the exams, maths, biology, physics and chemistry. Formulas, step by step solving and all the jazz. They banned in the year after I passed.
The reason is simple. I have never been able to memorize anything or learn anything "by heart" in my entire life. I recently discovered that this is because I am dyslexic. The problem with that is that I spent my entire life in the french education system being treated as if I was lazy, dumb and whatnot. The amount of stress I endured and the amount of meetings I had with profs and principals all over my "motivation" and why my work level is "never constant". I'm actually so mad over this if I saw some of these people in the street I would probably punch them in the face and run away.
I keep saying this over and over again, but in a world where knowledge is at the tip of your fingers, why in the name of f#ck do we still actually need to learn anything. Knowledge is not sufficient itself, you need practice, and not simply "do exercises and you'll get it". I'm talking about real world applications, something that is completely inexistent in the current system. We don't go to school to learn what we want to do later in life, we go to school to go to school, much like in America you go to prison because the prison wants its money per head.
So maybe before they crack down on "cheating" and whatnot, maybe they should take a long look at themselves. The devices they fight so hard to ban are (for me) actually the way of the future in terms of education, even if the kids using it don't have the maturity to know they should not be playing Candy Crush, it's not as if the current system mattered in any way for their future anyways, except if they were born to fit in it.
I recommend an article that was posted recently "College is Dying, Design Your Own Education.". It resonated so hard with me and every single flaw it points out is present in the french education system.
Dunno about you, but my brother with dyslexia managed to get his bac (STI path) without cheating; he then went to an engineering school. So dyslexia does not always prevent you to be successful in school.
> why in the name of f#ck do we still actually need to learn anything
Because if we don't, we'll never know that particular knowledge even exists. And it is easier to understand that knowledge while in school, than reading pages on internet after saying 'Let's Google it'.
Also regarding how high school does not cover any practical knowledge, it's true that general bac does cover few real-world application. But it covers the necessary information to follow higher studies. Without any maths or physics, no student would be able to study enginneering; without any biology, med school would waste a lot of time.
And if you want skills directly applicable after getting your bac, that's what the technical bac are for.
Then, I think you're getting sucked into bullshit. There is no single thing you could ban or a rule you could establish that moves the needle any. The environment is toxic to learning, and has been at least as far back as the 1990-ies, when I went. Your style of learning is not specific to dyslexic people, I did exactly what you did, and I'm just lightly on the spectrum, not dyslexic. Learn on my own time, get some friends to pass the time at school.
The consequences of getting caught are quite low, having no use of your phone for a day is not a big deal. You could even hide this loss of phone from your parents.
In the UK there was a little debate about kids and phones after a well known TV presenter tweeted about smashing her kids iPads to pieces as they were addicted to Fortnite. This was not universally deemed to be considered good parenting.
In defending her remarks the presenter said that if she caught kids smoking then the cigarettes would be destroyed, so why not destroy the iPads as they are equally addictive? Not everyone bought this, particularly those in a lower income bracket (and those not liking electronic waste).
For the teenage me I think that losing the use of a phone for the day would be a risk worth taking, it would be one of those things where you do it but don't get caught (unless you are stupid). The penalty would have to be harsher, e.g. losing the thing for the rest of term or the 'nuclear' option favoured by the aforementioned TV presenter, maybe with a 'three strikes' warning.
I found the article funny in that it is sort of necessary for American kids to have a phone just in case there is a crazy gunman at school. In the rest of the world we can actually provide security for our children when they are at school, it is de-facto as adults don't walk around with guns all day.
Good. Kids have enough time to use their phones during the rest of the day.
Students' performances -at least here- have been steadily declining, despite simplifying the teaching material. There's an astounding amount of young people who can't use their native language properly and fail at simple math. I refuse to believe that the distraction from smartphones and social media has nothing to do with that.
With these new GSM smartwatches, wouldn’t it make sense to give a kid a watch rather than a phone? He can initiate and receive calls from there (I’d switch off GPS tracking) but the display is too small to do much else I’m thinking. Sure, there’s a bunch of distracting apps installed, but so did we have on the old Casio calculator watches and that wore off quickly. Has anyone tried this here?
For a time when I did not have a home internet connection, I was browsing the web on an ancient eInk non-touchscreen Kindle. This was using its absolutely dire 'experimental' browser and the free 3G it had to communicate with Amazon.
This reminds me of those glorious days using the Original Nintendo DS, complete with Internet Browser, which you could only use via a cartridge no less! I expect I still had a better experience...
I spent plenty of time programming my calculator at school.
Had to spend quite some time convincing my mom that I needed the TI-84 Plus over the TI-83 Plus, which came with more memory and processing power, as they were the only accepted "advanced" calculators at my school.
Yes, and I have absolutely nothing against my son pushing against constraints with creativity. I just don't want him to serve the snapchats (or whatever kids are using these days) on a silver platter, no understanding of technology required.
A low-end but decent Android smartphone, like a Nokia 5, is still a lot cheaper than any connected smartwatch.
Plus, good luck making a kid agree with the idea in the first place :) Being able to make and receive phone calls is not really the reason they want a smartphone you know.
As a parent of kids in school, yes this is a good idea.
Teachers are constantly battling for attention with cell phones. Students are forever scrolling, sending texts, taking selfies, etc. It's a big part of the daily activities.
It'll allow the students to focus on other, more important things.
When I was in high school, if you used a cellphone in class it was confiscated for the rest of the semester. They had a box they would put it in. It was a pretty effective policy.
It should be enforced as an international law. (not just in France)
> French government believes that without minimizing distractions, children will never learn the basics.
Liberties for kids in school are already pretty restricted. They have to attend classes whether they like them or not, they usually have to follow a dress code whether it suits their personal style or not, a lot of French schools (including the one my son attends) make it difficult for you to bring your own lunch from home so you either go home for lunch every day or are forced to eat in the cafeteria, with limited choices on offer...when it comes to restricting liberties, this is one of many and it seems to me pretty low on the totem pole of essential liberties.
It doesn't have anything to do with "disfranchised people". It imposes a single consistent rule across all french schools. Pupils are free to do whatever they want outside school. This isn't america. "fundamental liberties" has a very different meaning there.
I fail to understand why a national law was necessary.
Let schools set and enforce their own policies.
It seems to me that the main result of having an actual legal ban is that teachers are now prevented from using smartphones in class for teaching purpose if they wanted to.
It avoids having a million debates in a million schools, that's the rule and that's it. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing but it doesn't bother me that much.
I can imagine that you can use smartphones for teaching purposes but I'm also sure that in the vast majority of cases it's a huge distraction. If a teacher wants to punctually tell their students to bring their phone for a special lesson the GIGN won't send their snipers to stop them.
Furthermore using the student's own smartphones as a support for courses creates an other issue: what about students who don't own one, or only a crappy one? It's not like they're cheap.
Having checked it, it allows exceptions (e.g. teaching purposes or for disabled pupils) which schools are free to decide on and set in their own rules.
The 'issue' of debating schools rules in each school, which isn't an issue at all, is thus not even addressed.
I think you're looking at it from a programmer's point of view, not a lawmaker. This is not a smart contract, it's not supposed to handle every possible corner thrown at it, if there's a dispute a judge will weigh in. As such what matters most is that the intent of the law be clear. In this case it seems pretty clear what the intent is: as a rule smartphones have no place in French schools.
Arguing that a law is pointless because there are exceptions is like saying that red lights are pointless because ambulances are allowed to ignore them.
Of course if it turns out that most schools end up creating a huge number of exceptions which make it trivial for everybody to side-step the law then yes, it will end up being useless. It's a bit too early to tell though.
>I am countering your argument that this law is useful because it prevents arguments in schools. This is both incorrect and lazy.
Right, because there aren't any precedents with, say, banning smoking in schools. If you leave it entirely at the school level then a small number of motivated parents can harass the schools to get what they want. They did it with smoking[1] ("we don't want our children to leave the school grounds to smoke") and they did it with phones ("we want to be able to reach our children at any time"). Being able to stay "that's the law and that's it" is definitely a good way to avoid having this debate every year in September.
> This law is useless because schools can adequately set their own rules.
This is just a terrible argument. Just because a subset of people may be able to enact rules on their own does not mean
you shouldn't create consistency at a higher level.
Especially if you desire a specific outcome instead of having some groups come up with something completely different.
Also this law was one of Macron's campaign promises. People voted for this and people got what they voted for.
Apparently people didn't want schools to make up their own rules.
You seem to be arguing that an important number of teachers will want their pupils to use smartphones in class, and anybody could figure out that that is false.
That's not how France works ;-) Schools don't decide much, everything is decided by the central government in Paris and then implemented everywhere.
Also why would teachers need smartphones for teaching purposes. Most (all?) schools have proper desktop computers to learn things like Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) or Sketchup, etc.
> That's not how France works ;-) Schools don't decide much, everything is decided by the central government in Paris and then implemented everywhere.
Citation needed - that's not the case.
Schools are ran in a collegial manner (PTA + Teachers + Admin - I sit in my son's school board) What's imposed is pedagogical content (over a teaching cycle - three years long - kids should have learned this and that.) Then how it's done is really not the state's business. Schools implement it the way they want.
Yes, that is absolutely the case. Every detail of the curriculum is decided by the Ministère de l'Éducation, as well as, for example, holiday dates.
Other matters can be negotiated between the Ministry and the town council, like the number of teachers or number of classes.
What a school can decide, maybe (and provided the mayor of the town where it is located, agrees), are super trivial matters like the timing of recess, etc.
You've asked this several times and it will attract downvotes every time as it's against the guidelines. People have been worried about HN "becoming like Reddit" since soon after it launched over 10 years ago.
People generally downvote because they don't find the comment convincing or enlightening.
Downvotes are less likely when commenters explain their position with thoughtfulness and effort to help the community understand and learn things.
> It seems to me that the main result of having an actual legal ban is that teachers are now prevented from using smartphones in class for teaching purpose if they wanted to.
All middle schools and up in France will soon be equipped with tablets. There's one large pilot happening in my region: books, assignments, quizzes, homework, etc... lots of it is done (at the teacher's discretion) on the tablet. It's great.
Music classes for instance are producing homework using garage band, etc...
Schools can pick their tablet. My son's school went with Apple. The high-school next door went with Android.
In France, most schools are public, hence ruled by law. If you have several rules for different public, then things start being a mess. Private schools don’t have to follow this.
The fact that schools are state schools does not imply that headteachers cannot set some rules. Especially this new law does allow exceptions which schools can set in their own rules.
The fact that a law was passed means that this will apply to all schools, state and private. It's in fact explicit in the text of the law.
Private schools are also "ruled by law"...
Well, if banning smartphones in schools is a good thing, then it makes no sense to do it only in some schools and not others. If it's a bad thing, then it shouldn't be done in any school.
I cannot find a single reason to do it at any other level than national.
Because it's not completely clear. I absolutely agree with removing smartphones from children, and not just at school, so ostensibly I'd be happy about this. But I'm not. That smartphones are harmful to the development of children is my opinion. That opinion is substantiated by a good deal of research, but this is not the sort of thing you can impartially prove one way or the other. And thus I do not think it should be meted out at the federal level.
In my opinion the federal level government should mete out rules that are unquestionable. There's nobody of sound mind that would genuinely and rationally argue that stealing could be anything less than harmful to a society, and so it makes sense to lay out federal restrictions on such. But I am certain there are a good deal of people that would genuinely argue, with some evidence to support their cases, that smart phones are something less than harmful towards the development of children during school time.
To understand why I'd make this distinction, imagine this is something you would personally disagree with. Once something is federally banned it is quite difficult to unban it, and more importantly it also precludes any further studies of the effects of it on a large scale. By contrast imagine one region in France locally banned smartphones and another did not. And then after 20 years we see measurably different outcomes outside of these two regions previous trajectories. That would be quite informative and evidence that could help push more local regions to push for bans.
Local level bans allow citizens to choose to either opt-in or opt-out of certain rules and thus live in conditions that are closer to their ideal. Federal level bans, by contrast, are ultimate unless you choose to move to another country which is a much more substantial change than moving to another district/city/state/etc.
There is no federal government in France, by the way. Regions, départements or cities do not have any legislative power. National schools have little leeway in order to ensure an equal quality of education on the whole national territory.
Citizens are equal everywhere, therefore it makes little sense not to enact public health measures nationally.
It seems even more questionable, to me, to enable a measure for 20 years in one region using their children as guinea pigs, but that would most likely be unconstitutional anyway.
Don't you see that banning the devices from anothers perspective is now using the entire nation as a guinea pig? And even worse, since you have no control to test against you'll never really know whether you've failed or succeeded other than developmental intuition, which on social issues such as these tends to be basically worthless.
That's how it works. A law is debated, voted on and if accepted then enacted. Another way to call it is "progress". It works the same for... well mostly everything that becomes law.
But since you're not French, you can easily wait 20 years and then decide if it was a good thing or not. For now, France has debated the subject and taken a decision, and I don't think it needs advice on whether the political process should have been different or not.
I'm certain you realize how easy it would be to dismantle the argument suggestion that government's passing laws is inherently "progress"? I'm assuming you have some clever argument ready in response - please do share without the rhetorical games.
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And how would you propose measuring whether or not this experiment will be a success, lacking any control to measure it against? If it turns out French students are performing worse 20 years from now there will certainly have been countless other 'experiments' carried out since then, meaning any causality is going to be extremely difficult to trace. And similarly if they are performing better. By contrast when things are enacted locally we can often get samples of groups where things are very similar except for [x], which can help determine causality.
Instead it all turns into, as usual, retrospective confirmation bias. People take what they want to be true, and attribute positive results to that while taking what they don't want to be true and attribute negative results to that. It's hardly a logical way of trying to achieve genuine "progress."
Making laws for French citizens is the very job of the Parliament, so I wouldn't call that wasting time.
But the real question is why are you questioning the way the French are running their own country? I don't think they are really asking for guidance on how to use the French political structures.
Because we spend a lot of our taxpayers € on education (1st budget of France) and we'd rather not see a generation completely brainwashed by smartphones ? ;) I fail to see how this is a waste of time.
I'm not sure teachers who "question the merits of insulating children from the internet-dominated world they will face outside school" actually exist... I have yet to meet one.