If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own.

If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?

> what is texting their kid going to do?

Those parents don't realize it's going to get their kid shot when the kid is hiding and the gunman hears the ding or buzz of the notification.

Match what's been reported by some Bataclan attack survivors: not only you had to play dead, but your phone had to play dead too.

I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves.

For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?

Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.

I don't think those situations are comparable. Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc. If an employee doesn't do that, there are consequences, and we judge that adults can decide for themselves if they want to bear those consequences.

We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.

(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)

I think people put way too much weight in the distinction between kids and adults. Sure pre-schoolers will be in a very limited place bilologically, but if we're talking 9~10yo and later, the core difference will be social experience and overall knowledge.

To put it in perspective, some people will still live their all life in an institution dictating their life rhythm, potentially setting how they dress and where they live, what they eat. That's how working in a factory line and getting a place in a company dormitory will be like. We basically modeled school according to that model, not by first looking at kids and thinking long and hard at their biological needs and how to best match their needs. School uniforms looking like adult cosplay version is in line with this as well.

> Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc.

We expect kids to get their work down, pass the scheduled tests, act according to the ~company~school rules.

I'd argue generic schools have always tried to just mold kids into what society wants as adults, and only a few places genuinely focus on sheer education. But even under the "mold the kids" premise, expecting kids to deal with smartphones, digital communication and SNS all at once at 18 is just a recipe for disaster. Understanding how to do what they're expected to, while having access and properly using all of those is probably the most basic life skill they absolutely need in this day and age.

There have been 70 school shootings (not mass shootings) this year, including accidental discharges. Required caveat that any school gun deaths are too much, etc. etc.

But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.

Sure, and you can point out the stats all day long, but you're not going to defeat irrational parental concerns with this One Weird Trick.

So much of the way we treat education is based on vibes rather than reality.

> "In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue [...]"

That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.

> there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to.

A lot of parents are addicted to texting back and forth with their kids all day. I imagine many of the kids hate it.