Mobile phones get stolen and can take pictures/videos that can then be used for bullying others, it's quite different from a book. I don't have an opinion regarding this new law but those are the arguments I heard in the news.

It will still be allowed to use mobile phones for "emergencies" from what I read, i.e. a teacher is not here and a child wants to contact a parent regarding that.

> It will still be allowed to use mobile phones for "emergencies" from what I read, i.e. a teacher is not here and a child wants to contact a parent regarding that.

If that happened in my son's school (he's 5) I would expect one of the pupils to simply wander into another classroom, or reception. Given the number of parents who work full time I'm not sure what good a child phoning their parent is going to be.

In the highly unlikely event I need to contact my child, I will phone the school and they will pass on a message.

It may not hurt their studies, but perhaps their social skills. I recently stayed at a hostel, and when I first walked in I noticed how in the common area almost every single person was alone on their phone. It made me long for the pre-smartphone days in which I imagine travelers were forced to socialize with each other.

While school lunch is a slightly different situation, I think it still applies that without phones kids will be forced to communicate more directly with each other.

"It made me long for the pre-smartphone days in which I imagine travelers were forced to socialize with each other."

Having lived through the horrors of the pre-smartphone days, I can tell you that this wasn't the case. See, for instance: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/1a/a1/7b/1aa17b28aad6df78a2e1d2016... or https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/540/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4M...

No, he's right. Until about 10 years ago, meeting people was an integral part of travel.

You'd be essentially cut off from your friends back home (apart from maybe a daily email session), so you made new friends wherever you went. You'd go down to the common area of the hostel (or the beach bar near your bungalow in SE Asia), and strike up a conversation with pretty much anybody, since everybody there was traveling as well.

Now I can, sadly, verify that backpackers spend their common-area time on their phones, going about their usual business with their normal "friends". With the only difference being that they're now trying to upload photos that will make those friends jealous enough to leave a like.

I think I liked it better before.

> You'd go down to the common area of the hostel [] and strike up a conversation with pretty much anybody

Don't conflate what you would do with the general case - I, for one, -might- venture to a common area but it's extremely unlikely I'd ever consider trying to strike up a conversation.

Apologies if I was not clear. That was what I observed other people doing. Lots of talking, lots of "new best friends", nobody sitting alone pretty much anywhere.

Worldwide, as observed during 15 years of ~6months/year traveling. Most travelers during that period were, in fact, open to speaking to one another.

And again, in the last 5 years of doing trips on several continents, people you see at "the bar down at the beach" are usually looking at their phone, even when seated at the same table as other travelers.

That never used to happen. And I bet if we crossed paths back then and I asked you where you were from, you would have replied. And we may have even had a conversation.

> That was what I observed other people doing. Lots of talking, lots of "new best friends", nobody sitting alone pretty much anywhere.

But isn't this subject to mild confirmation bias? Because you won't have seen the people who aren't in the common room.

"You'd go down to the common area of the hostel (or the beach bar near your bungalow in SE Asia), and strike up a conversation with pretty much anybody, since everybody there was traveling as well."

Never ever done that and I did travelled alone a bit. I know one person pulling this off, all other people I know would not have done so. Once someone tried to befriend me too much, but I found that uncomfortable (personality mismatch mostly).

For that matter, most people travelled with friends or friends groups and not alone.

It is cool that you was such person, but most people were not.

Hmm, that's not the comparison here. Wanderers, travellers (especially those in youth hostels) were often doing that activity in part to meet a wide variety of people, something they were less able to do staying in one place at that time.

(Edit: I should mention that I'm citing my Dad in my head here, who is an embarrassingly social creature in situations where I would never strike up a conversation. He spent a lot of time travelling around Europe in the 70s staying at youth hostels, e.g. in his university vacations.)

I believe this need is fulfilled by things like Tumblr now, where there are close nit communities centred around specific (often odd) interests and identities, who are vastly geographically spread. The same could be said to an extent for other social networks too, of course, including this website :)

I don't think socialization is a big issue - in fact, I think it can help socialization because it gives kids something to talk about or do. Lunches were excruciatingly boring and often isolating when I was in middle school through high school. Having a phone would have made it so much less miserable.

I'm generally all for the ban, though. I think the bads of the phone outweigh the goods in a school setting.

They just read the newspaper before smartphone. Strangers don't magically socialize. At worst they stay there doing nothing.

> Imagine they banned books during breaks. That's how far this is.

I don't see the analogy really. A closer analogy would be 'imagine if they banned portable games consoles'.

Books are a means of entertainment. How is it any different than one class is electronic and another isn't?

'why ban them during breaks...'

School isn't just about academic study, it's also where you make friends and learn how to interact with others.

I think mobile phones get in the way of this by enabling kids to just communicate within already established cliques?

> by enabling kids to just communicate within already established cliques?

Trust me, they already do that for the most part.

Yeah, let's make it even harder for lonely kids. I mean seriosly, why do highly social people have so little empathy for introverted ones?

As a former introverted kid, I never liked being forced into situations where I might have to actually talk to some other person, especially of the opposite sex.

But, I can look back and be grateful there were no smartphones to hide behind, otherwise there are some hang-ups I might never have gotten over.

Honestly, I don't get where special hung on talking with opposite gender comes from. Never had that problem, maybe because I was never in strictly single sex peer group.

But something that would allow me to hide a bit in elementary scool would be welcome. I did not learned anything about communication when forced into those situations, I was just lonely and miserable.

'I don't get where special hung on talking with opposite gender comes from.'

Growing up with 3 sisters and learning at an early age what mental cruelty is.

When talking to the opposite gender some people worry they might be sending a wrong signal and imply a romantic or prurient interest when there might not be one, especially if they don't have a previous history of talking to the opposite gender very often.

As an introverted person, spending more time alone as a child was the last thing I needed. There were a lot of social skills that I didn't develop until my mid-to-late twenties that would have saved me a lot of grief if I had been pushed into developing them earlier in life.

Sorry but no. Even as an introvert, I can still recognize the problems that being able to escape into a smartphone during school would have caused me later in life.

>Why ban them during breaks

If it was me, I'd do it for practicality. It's easier for a wholesale ban than try to implement some system where you allow a forbidden item for some, but not all of the time.

Even keeping track of which phone belongs to who for every kid in a school would be more than I would be arsed to deal with.