Originally published at: 11-year-old expected to have smartphone in school - Boing Boing
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If that’s the official guidance, it’s the school’s responsibility to provide devices meeting a minimum performance spec that are specifically configured for the purpose to all students, for use only on school premises and only on the school’s Wifi network.
If parents are irresponsible enough to give an 11-year-old their own phone for use outside school, it should be stored in a faraday bag in the office during the school day.
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If the school’s goal is for the students to have internet access in class, they could just provide computers instead of requiring students to have smartphones.
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My kids’ school district hands out school-assigned laptops (which I’m frankly not wild about for use by 2nd graders; I’d rather wait until they’re a little older) so phones have never been encouraged or required in the classroom. However lack of phones turned into a big hassle when it came to coordinating group projects done outside of class. Students needed to communicate with each other and checking email apparently isn’t a thing that young folks do frequently these days, so it made things hard for my boys (age 14 and 16) who only just got their own phones this year.
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In MS, they handed out very basic calculators to show how they work, but you still had to learn some basic math without then (eg, divide large decimal numbers). Once you did chem/phy, you could use it in class, return after.
In STEM magnet HS, we were required to buy a certain type of fancy calculator for two years worth of classes. If you were lower income, they bought one for you.
In college, they handed out lower-end calculators during tests to make sure everyone had the same baseline machine and people didn’t cheat with the fancier ones. Return after exam.
For the cell phone thing - yeah, buy it for the kid or give a loaner during class. They can use mom’s or the family home machine for research off campus. Or give a “ipod touch”-like device instead of a more expensive cell.
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That’s a really weird ass take…
All of us, whether we have a background in computing or not, interact with computers every single day now. Saying only some group of people should have access to computers early in our education is like saying only some people should have access to learning how to read or anything else almost all of us now use in daily life, and that we need to understand from an early age. 
There is certainly a discussion to be had around the role of computers in modern life, and the problems they cause, plus the good they can/could do… but acting like it should be some elitist thing is just… weird at this point. It doesn’t matter if you think that the rest of us are idiots and should never touch the precious, the reality is that they are now ubiquitous in modern life, so we need to have a good foundation in computing.
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It sucked to be a poor kid in your school.
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So the poor kids really stood out.
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This is an interesting academic exploration of the effects of smartphones and other factors on child and adolescent development.
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