France imposes "total ban" on mobile phones in schools

Pressey’s testing machine. Skinner’s Teaching Machine and Programmed Learning Theory. Language labs. Audiovisual learning aids. Set theory in primary schools. And so on an on.
May work for training.
Education starts with learning how to think and how to learn.

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The only phone in my daughter’s high school that students can use is in the main office. There are over 2000 students in her school. When her athletic practice is done, the office is closed and locked. No one is there. Her only reasonable option is her phone.

I forgot about that aspect. I taught our kids to use their calendar apps to manage their schedule. As a family, we maintain a master calendar go coordinate our (too-)busy schedule.

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I’d suggest “Restaurer la Grandeur de la France”. Very gaullian.

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Except that novels aren’t engineered to the same level with self reinforcing feedback loops precisely to keep you distracted.

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We don’t find those in the streets in France anymore.

I was educated in the French system (though in NYC; international Lycée), and they have a much better approach than in the US.

  1. It’s not financed by property taxes, so all schools can be more or less equally furnished. The US system is purely and obviously based on racism and the unwillingness to share opportunity with poors and browns; it’s fairly easy to keep undesirables out of a geographic area (just ask the late Fred Trump and his progeny).
  2. It’s based on a firm belief that culture is important, and that their job is to instill it in all citizens… and that there is a national culture, in the first place.
  3. The students are challenged to excel, not be edutained. It’s not the job of the school to be “engaging”, but the student’s job to study. This is taken seriously, and is of a piece with high ratings for TV shows about … books. Yes, they have idiotic TV too, but book shows are very popular. And,
  4. they take seriously the student’s ability to actually perform tasks on their own, with their brains and hands. You’re expected to memorize and recite passages of literature to the class, perform mental arithmetic, make a cogent argument from various points of view (both Christian and Marxist, for instance), and speak to a group with confidence.

As for a French version of MAGA, how about “Restaurer la Rayonnement de la Patrie!” Just a suggestion… it’s a little long.

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Those in glass houses…
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2003/12/26/world/french-born-arabs-perpetually-foreign-grow-bitter.html

“Portable supercomputer that gives instant access to the sum total of all human knowledge” is a rather romanticized description of the meme sharing machine. I know, I know… it’s much more than that. Kids also use it for gaming, youtube and porn.

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designed to be rectally smuggled into prisons, jails and courtrooms

Hmm. Okay, so now you’ve got the phone into the courtroom, but it’s still up your arse.

Now what?

teachers not as corrupt as prison guards…?

Well, most of schools in France still have one…Just like many working places, including mine… But hey, you know there’s still no color tv in France… :stuck_out_tongue:

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The small problem I see on this is that a simple phone that could be only be used to make calls could suffice for these communications. Nowadays we’re talking about smatphones, that are mainly used for application like facebook or twitter that are designet to collect people and sell them to advertisers, usig all the tricks possible to distract them from the external world and keep watching ads.

It’s true that a smartphone could be used as an educational tool, but I have to say that a Raspberry Pi is more suited for educational tasks, because is designed for it.

And costs less than a low-end smarthone…

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The bit that strikes me as weird is the lunch thing. I get not having phones in the classroom, but you can’t look at your phone during lunch? You’re not in class at lunch, who gives a fuck?

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I am surprised that they have ever been allowed in the first place, in any country. When I was in school, i had rubik’s cubes and walkmans confiscated(I think I’ve discovered my “walking two miles in the snow”). Why the world’s most distracting device is ok is a mystery. They are also calculators, have access to a mountain of information, you can play games on them…

If all you could do with them was make and receive phone calls, you could make an argument for their utility, but smart phones really changed the game in this respect.

How did we manage before cell phones? They ride should be there after practice. Hell, a lot of times Parents are AT the practices. But if a parent is going to be late, they call the coach. If the child needs to contact the parent, they can use the coaches phone or one of the many parents milling around.

Everyone can come up with “what ifs” where a cell phone will be handy.

I can come up with many more “how it is actually used in the classroom as a distraction” examples.

Also, per the article, it looks like one could still keep their phone in their bag, and not take it out until AFTER class.

Yes, that is an obvious exception. Though hopefully he isn’t also Candy Crushing it.

Where I grew up, Payphones were also almost non existent. If one is walking home, most of that is going through a residential area, with no pay phones. My walk or bike home had no pay phones. I’d have to ride probably nearly an equidistant away from my home to the main drag and probably find one at the super market or the gas station. I really had an emergency, I’d knock on a door for help (gasp, perish that thought today!)

My Kid has a half dozen things she is into from volley ball, to archery, to choir, to orchestra, to horse back riding, to plays. She doesn’t have a phone and yet her mom and I manage to pick her up and get her around. It is called a minimal amount of planning.

But again, these points are moot as the article said to ban them DURING SCHOOL, including breaks and lunches. But the ban didn’t extend to after school for these two scenarios.

o_0 yeah NO ONE at a business or residential home has a phone they can use? Give me a break. We are never more than 10 steps from a phone any more.

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Totally sarcastic (as I half-suspect @wsmcneil was being), I was just enjoying the delicious irony of someone calling others idiotic, then using thought-blocking business jargon. Which I see in hied and despair for us all.

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I bet you’ll still find an updated version in every main office in pretty much every school, though.

Most institutions of civilized society (like schools and hospitals) still maintain landlines, afaik.

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Yeah, but that’s besides the point. Unless the word “between” bears an alternate meaning I’m not aware of.

Prisons. Many phones get smuggled in via body cavities.

:slight_smile:

Good point. Also, what are those kids doing on my lawn!?!

Incorrect, at least for my area and my daughter’s school. There is one phone for student use per 2000+ students, and that’s locked in an office within 15 minutes of the end of the school day. There are no other landline phones on campus.

My commute can be anywhere from 45 minutes to 90 minutes. If I had a long drive in the morning and had to plan for worst-case-scenario drive to pick a kid up from practice, I would essentially show up to work, drink my coffee, check my emails, then start driving back across town. It’s not feasible.

Except, as many people have now pointed out, there are legitimate applications of phone technology during school, including during class. Why throw away the utility of these tools because of the possibility of bad behavior rather than directly addressing the bad behavior?