If people get withdrawal symptoms, it means they have become addicted. Which means it is important to get them off the addiction ASAP.
Yeah. That’s even more proof that kids shouldn’t have them
I give absolutely zero fucks. Screens everywhere is the most developmentally impactful education policy I have seen in my lifetime. My local public school district (which my kids do not attend) has a 1:1 laptop policy, meaning each kid gets their own dedicated Chromebook. Under no circumstance will I send my children to schools that apparently think Google/Microsoft have the kids best interests at heart
You could give them a Linux laptop and it would do all of the same things.
Imagine the technological shift we could see if they were similarly powered linux laptops vs. Chromebooks. Get kids used to linux in school and I bet we’d start seeing Windows losing much more significant market share.
I can’t imagine the shift would be much bigger than the kids just browsing tiktok/insta during class hours on chromium or firefox instead of chrome.
I guess I’m suggesting that if you got kids used to using Linux, they’d be more likely to keep using Linux after graduating, on their personal computers. Nobody’s using ChromeOS for anything serious.
I mean, ChromeOS is a Gentoo-derivative, so they are Linux powered laptops. Though yes, it does not function the same way as other Linux distros, so I see your point, I’m merely being pedantic. My point is mostly that simply being Linux doesn’t make it better. It’s the spyware installed and the lockdown that is a problem. And for school laptops? I do believe there should be boundaries set up. For instance, my 8 year old neice was caught watching porn on her personal laptop (she managed to find a workaround to the parental controls), and then she proceeded to sexually assault her 2 other siblings for weeks before she was discovered.
Boundaries make sense, it’s simply the way we enforce them that matters. It is not impossible to maintain privacy while still regulating the content children are able to access (and don’t even get me started on people preventing their kids from learning about LGBTQ+ topics with parental controls), but the biggest issue is that people allow their children to have unsupervised access to devices. It’s my belief that parents should limit exposure to screen time, and enforce healthy boundaries. Parents should actually parent their children instead of letting them sit in front if a screen all day. As for school laptops, it’s my belief that they should be properly locked down without being a privacy nightmare. No data about the student’s activity should leave the device; all blocking should be done locally.
But of course, this is the product of late-stage capitalism and a surveillance state. I don’t see reform happening anytime soon.
Until there’s clear evidence that screens are advantageous to learning why in the world is the price tag for this justifiable and why aren’t we assuming a null hypothesis or that they are probably a detriment to learning?
I agree though, computers in n schools should default to FOSS for both cost saving and to protect children from the ill will of corporate tech.
GameBoy withdrawal symptom used to be a thing, too. We survived. They’ll be fine.
Instant Dopamine Machines cause withdrawal when taken away.
Wow. I’m shocked, I tell you. Absolutely shocked and stunned.
I’d be more curious if restricting students to using screens as actual tools - i.e., for specific purposes and tasks, not for broad entertainment - causes similar effects.
I feel like this says important things about how much they should have been allowed screens before this.
“Stanford study finds school heroin bans may trigger “withdrawal symptoms” in students” is a headline that does not suggest that stopping students from using the heroin they are accustomed to, is the point at which the problem needs to be attacked.
If I can quit smoking weed kids can quit being stupid.
Welp
Waiting for the “just a tool” crowd to emerge and complain that there’s basically no difference between cell phones with chatGPT, vs a calculator or dictionary.
The sad thing is something in education is fundamentally broken. The schools that have done the cellphone bans haven’t even seen academic improvements. Maybe we just need to go completely backwards in technology. Related meme…
I really don’t think the article makes a good case for why they are using “withdrawal symptoms” (which clearly evokes drugs) beyond being a nice quote. Could the behavioural issues be, say, kids figuring out what to do (or what they can get away with) now that what they used to do is no longer available? The article certainly doesn’t say so.
The other thing is that these are things that are taking years to play out, which suggests to me that there may be more than just cellphones in the classroom. There is certainly a point to be made that if the smartphone is still used at home, you may up in a wash anyway. A reductive scenario I could think of, for example, might be that a student may say they are more attentive, and they may look more attentive, but if they aren’t really engaging with because they will just go home and ask an LLM for the answers to the homework.
So what do parents say about their chidren doing drugs?
Seems like a good thing to shrface.
It seems like they are saying that having the phone taken away could be an even bigger distraction from learning than just having the phone.
