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.
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.