It's also frustrating for teachers when bullying is happening online, outside of school hours but it still takes place between students in the classroom. It should not be the teacher's business but it obviously impacts schoolwork in the classroom.
I think this is a smart move unless someone can show a study that's showing positive impact from using smartphones in schools.
Just crowd-sourced, Internet scale bullying.
Ever had your photo released mockingly, and been laughed at by an entire school? Or even millions?
This is why kids initial exposure to porn is 8 in the US and 10 when kids are getting addicted. This is all happening prior to puberty.
I still remember working with children and teens and found out, through the police and parents, that a few of the kids 11 to 15 were using their webcams to get people to buy them stuff online. This was in the late 90s.
I am a dad of 5 now. I don't own desktop computers and they are in common areas. When my oldest were teens they were their phones but they are in my room after 9 PM. Saved the drama of messaging fights and drama. No phones at dinner, no phones on family events unless it was end of the visit. My job as a parent is to help them become awesome adult selves and learning not to be addicted to anything from drugs, alcohol, laziness or phones is part of being a parent.
On the one hand, I view the early internet as saving me/raising me. I detested school, still do. Sure there were dangers back then too, but that's why we learnt to be skeptics, anonymous, question people's motives, and actually understand the technology.
On the other hand, social networks weren't around, videos weren't really around, advertising wasn't around, nothing was monetized, there was no such thing as a Webcam, no such thing as a mobile. By the stage of the internet, I was well and truly addicted to reading.
If I had children, I'd probably want to restrict them from phones and social media, at least until they learnt to love reading, learnt to concentrate without distractions, and skepticism/pushing back against social messages.
Simultaneously, I feel my current life would have been worse off without early access to the internet...
Edit: in case it's not clear, I think this is generally a good thing. It may do us good to remember this isn't the first time technology has tried to insert itself into the classroom. Television was supposed to revolutionize teaching, but most of us now would be hard pressed to believe that TV in the classroom is generally a good thing (the teacher generally used them when they were lazy or needed some time off). Let's not kid ourselves, the MAIN purpose/use, like TV, of phones and tablets are currently media consumption and social communication, not learning.
To me after all these years the "new" internet got a dystopian image.
If I had a child, I'd provide them unsupervised access to the internet I remember, but certainly not to the one from today.
Long story short the FBI worked with my Uncle within a week and they arrested 13 predators in one night. My Uncle was on Nightline and every major TV national network that year.
EVEN Longer story Steve Case (Founder of AOL) banned my Uncle for life from AOL. Steve Case is scum.
Here is a Senate Bill with the story in Congressional Records.
"On-line services are an easy way for pedophiles to meet children anonymously, noted Dyanne Greer, a senior lawyer with the National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse. ``Many cases are not reported, so I'm not sure anybody is really aware how much this is going on,'' she said. A Post probe uncovered these on-line horror stories: Westchester computer expert George Telesha pretended to be a 14-year-old girl on America Online and was quickly besieged by perverts sending dirty pictures.
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1995/1/18/sena...
THE PREVENTION OF SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN ACT
I think you stilldo. Chatroulette and similar services were besieged by them a few years ago.
"Users are swarming young girls and asking them to do inappropriate things. And the live-streaming app hasn't been able to stop them."
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/12/...
And don't get me started on all the scummy people and sites online.
Why?
> People freak out if a predator lives int heir neighborhood but they let their child be accessible to millions of predators via their phone or table.
Well advise the kids of the dangers. I and most of my friends had unsupervised internet access. We are all doing fine.
> This is why kids initial exposure to porn is 8 in the US and 10 when kids are getting addicted.
Every kid is getting "addicted"?
> I still remember working with children and teens and found out, through the police and parents, that a few of the kids 11 to 15 were using their webcams to get people to buy them stuff online. This was in the late 90s.
And guess what? 99.99% of 90s kids didn't use webcams.
> My job as a parent is to help them become awesome adult selves and learning not to be addicted to anything from drugs, alcohol, laziness or phones is part of being a parent.
No offense, but your kids aren't prepared for the real world. What will they do now that they are adults with no parental supervision. Also, no parent with 5 kids is "responsible".
Most people who ride in car don't get into an accident. We still wear seatbelts.
> Every kid is getting "addicted"?
Perhaps not the best choice of words from the OP, but look up premature sexualization and psychological trauma.
> No offense, but your kids aren't prepared for the real world. What will they do now that they are adults with no parental supervision. Also, no parent with 5 kids is "responsible".
A comment like that to a stranger can be nothing but offensive. For lack of space or time to use anything more nuanced than crude Freudian terms, the role of the parent is to model the superego for the child while he's too young to understand the consequences of his actions and the dangers of the world.
Existence of it is hardly grounds for mass hysteria - this smacks of 'will somebody please think of the children'.
OP
What is that age? I don't know.
I don't know how old you are, but personally (in my early 30s) the internet of my youth was pretty vastly different than the internet of today, i.e. as you say:
> And guess what? 99.99% of 90s kids didn't use webcams.
Well now most kids have a high quality webcam in their pocket at all times.
I too was a 90s kid. No. It really wasn't. The same dangers that existed back then existed today. There was threats of child predators, internet addiction, gambling, porn, etc. That's why we were taught to be anonymous on the internet. You could argue today's internet is a lot safer than it was in the 90s when most parents didn't even know what the internet was.
> Well now most kids have a high quality webcam in their pocket at all times.
And? 99.99% of them don't use them to sell their photos to pedophiles.
There are pedophiles lurking at libraries too. I guess we should stop kids from using the library. It's funny how people who want to control kids and who are so scared of everything find something to be scared of no matter what.
Just because 0.000001% of kids might do stupid stuff on the internet isn't a reason to monitor every kid or keep kids from the internet without supervision.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/12/...
> > Children given unsupervised access to the internet is ridiculous.
> Why?
Your reasoning with kids. Sure when they are teenagers that's great but children need more than a reasoning parent. Children need to be protected and above everything feel safe. The internet is not a safe place for children nor just YouTube for kids without someone keeping an eye out. Research absolutely proves that children need to feel safe. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/persistent-fea...
Now I am not talking about helicopter and babying children. I am saying all children need strong parents that will protect them and help them to make good meaningful decisions and have awesome experiences. They don't need parents saying hey 10 year old Susie there are guys that want to hurt you sexually for their own perverse desires so you need to .... No you tell them they are safe and you are their to help keep them safe. If they ever feel uncomfortable or someone is touching what a bathing suit covers to tell you. You also need to know that the vast majority of predators are family and friends.
If you aren't your children's protector your just throwing you responsibility and weight of parenting on to a child. Again I am not for helicopter and over protective, but all kids need to know that Mom and Dad will protect them (Even if we fail sometimes).
> Every kid is getting "addicted"?
Did I say every? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/technology/personaltech/w...
Yes when the 4th grade boy wrote down the url to where he saw a man having sex with a dog and gave it to my daughter, yeah that kid had some issues. He also had a tablet with Netflix when he was in Kindergarten and still has unlimited access to the internet. Sadly that kid ins't in school anymore due to his mother not protecting him physically or mentally.
> And guess what? 99.99% of 90s kids didn't use webcams.
And guess what kids are being exploited unbelievably now. The Children's Mental Hospital has many homes with just sexually exploited girls ages 11 to 15. There are dozens of them messed up. Most of them were exploited by people they met online.
> No offense, but your kids aren't prepared for the real world.
Hey buddy if I could swear at you I would. My two oldest that were abused for years. They both graduated from college (10% of former foster kids attempt college 50% don't make it past 1st semester) My son is being shipped out to Kuwait with the National Guard and he just got married last month. My daughter she now works full time with the girls who were sexually exploited. You are all focused on over babying children that you think negating a basic parental role of protector messes up kids. Please. They both lived on their own since 19 and when i can help them out I would, but my kids are the most tenacious hard working adults I know, because they knew the neglect they grew up with before my home was crap and that the love and protection they had when they moved in. It was hell for them and us both for the first year or two. In the end they are rocking. Also Mr No Offense I even got an award from the state of Pennsylvania and a bunch of congressional and state plaques for parenting these abused kids to where they aren't in the system anymore and are successful productive members of society.
The first step of parenting children is that you make them feel safe from day one till they are mostly adults. That's essential and you give kids internet with no filters? That's how we have Alex Jone's audience members.
It's against the rules here to get involved in flamewars and especially to get personal like this. I realize some topics are personally intense and one isn't always able to contain the intensity, but in such cases we need to take a step back and not contribute to the downward spiral.
The rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html are simple and not easy, and we need everyone to stick to them.
Oh god.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11637697/Catcal...
Yes. There are bad people everywhere. Did you lock your children in the basement? I'm not denying there are dangers in the world and on the internet. My point is that those threats are overblown.
And there have been clickbait fearmongering articles every decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/technology/personaltech/28...
> Research absolutely proves that children need to feel safe.
And you telling your kids that there are dangers everywhere must make them feel real safe.
> Again I am not for helicopter and over protective
Okay. But everything you've written and the "research" you've done says otherwise.
> Did I say every?
You kinda implied it.
> Yes when the 4th grade boy wrote down the url to where he saw a man having sex with a dog and gave it to my daughter, yeah that kid had some issues. He also had a tablet with Netflix when he was in Kindergarten and still has unlimited access to the internet. Sadly that kid ins't in school anymore due to his mother not protecting him physically or mentally.
Anecdotes?
> Hey buddy if I could swear at you I would.
No need for that.
> The first step of parenting children is that you make them feel safe from day one till they are mostly adults.
And I posit that you did just the opposite. I doubt there was a day in your kids life that they felt safe.
> That's how we have Alex Jone's audience members.
What? Oh my god. I now am very concerned for what you did to your kids, if you had any.
I agree that in general the drive to "put a computer in every classroom" is absolutely moronic; in general, I think teachers don't adequately understand which technology is useful and cost-effective and which is not, and especially for teaching administrators, "technology" is just some nebulous black-box codeword for "expensive equipment." However, there is value in teaching children how to use technology effectively. For example, very few people know how to properly craft a google search, or how to discern a reliable source from a poor one. A lot of people, and especially children, can't even tell the difference between sponsored content and regular content. These are very important to teach children and I think this should be done in a scholastic context, as few parents would even have the skills to teach this. The problem is teaching kids these skills without distracting them - the secondary problem is that they're probably not learning from people who are very knowledgable themselves.
I think the ideal solution is some kind of locked-down, school-only (as in, it must physically stay within the school) tablet or laptop. It's probably counter-productive to spend too much time teaching children to write/read from physical media when >95% of a child's exposure to media from now to the foreseeable future will be digital. Ironically maybe our best bet is a "digital typewriter"
Also IMHO...
Critical thinking (it's a real philosophical discipline with textbooks and etc.) should be taught in every school.
Recognizing fallacies and bad claims is frankly much more useful to me everyday than almost everything else I learned.
School should help incorporate good habits into a child's routine, such as being outside, and nailing reliance on books into children is not something we want to be doing in schools.
Slightly paraphrased, same content. Care to elaborate what it is that makes phones more undesirable than books? At the moment this reads like an "in my times .." rant.
Stuff one can get on phones are however massive dopamine inducing machines.
I've had days where I didn't eat because I was immersed in a story, I will skip sleep, neglect my work, not shower when I'm inside a good novel. And, that behavior will continue until I've finished reading the entire series.
Are you running a flip phone? Because most smart phones I see these days have no less than 10 apps that can present ads or notifications at almost any given time.
That's what your comment will sound like in 100 years.
Indeed, the cave wall comparison highlights the difference between stimulation and distraction. Daydreaming while staring at the walls of Lascaux would be a significantly more useful activity than having your attention micro-partitioned by the demands of a Snap streak.
That's how the US education system works and why it is so shit.
We pay orbiters to prevent others from reaching orbit. It's quite crowded and no one wants the competition.
If heroin is providing adults with a better escape, real life should step up its game!
Or, maybe we should teach our children a modicum of discipline.
Kids are very easily distracted, and the current school systems are designed to deal with those by removing distractions and forcing a bit of discipline.
The alternative would be more personally optimized education, but that's a lot more expensive and harder to scale - and teachers are already an underpaid and overworked demographic.
Besides, kids that age use their phone more for social contacts and distractions than learning stuff.
The mammalian instinct for play is essentially a learning mechanism. All it takes to educate is to structure a game such that the lessons being learned are useful in the real world. We run around in open gaming worlds collecting tokens for no greater purpose than to make numbers bigger; we can easily adapt that to collecting knowledge for the purpose of getting smarter.
Imagine if the crafting system of an open-world game used actual chemistry and metallurgy. Kids could be trading tips on textiles and steel so that they can make non-anachronistic weapons and uniforms before doing a boss raid on Napoleon's army. Imagine if making a battle rifle with better stats in the game required you to know how real rifles work. Imagine the sort of teamwork that could take place if everyone in the clan/guild were required to be logged on in the same room at a specific time every weekday. The teacher turns into the quest-giver, and the reward is leveling up your brain, and maybe in-game currency that can be used to buy avatar prestige items.
Each state could certainly afford to hire a few developers, to make educational games that poke the very same skinnerbox dopamine buttons that the purely entertainment games poke. Each state could hire some video artists to produce educational content. I may have retained more from professional programs like "Connections" or amateur videos like "History of Japan" than I ever kept from my textbooks.
It has always been a mistake to make school boring. School is boring now because a boring school is cheap (relatively speaking), and it still works just well enough to keep civilization from collapsing. The curriculum/textbook/lecture model was necessary when education was limited by labor, such that every N students require 1 teacher, but now instead of compartmentalizing education into fixed classrooms with one specific teacher and N specific students at a time, we can have 10000 of the best teachers teaching 10 million students at once, such that they can each learn and demonstrate mastery at their own pace. And this move by France is one step away from that.
This!
There's a game my 7 year old couldn't put down until he finished it. It teaches the concepts of basic Euclidean geometry. There are similar ones for algebra and programming that is a little bit beyond him now, but I'll try him on them again in a few months/year.
He also has made these contraptions with random materials. A hammock out of a bit of surplus netting, for instance. I'm pretty sure hours of Minecraft helped with the desire to create things.
Now I do need to find a gamification of basic logic and critical thinking...
If I had to guess, probably 80% of my school time was idle time so boring it felt like sensual deprivation.
There was little else to do than bullying each other.
If phones would've been a thing back then I'd remember rich experiences instead of the destructive time sink I remember now.
(Germany, school from 1996 until 2009; currently working on econ PhD)
"Sensory deprivation".