Actually effective way to protect kids without massive societal consequences and it also improves learning.
German here. Have a kid in elementary school and one in middle school. No phones allowed whatsoever. But to be fair: every school in Germany can decide that for themselves. But when we were choosing schools, all schools had similar rulesets. Some event prohibited smart watches.
Plenty of Palo Alto parents seem to want basically what Czechia appears to be doing:
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/palo-alto-schools/2026/07/10/...
https://www.fournorms.com/campaigns/petition-for-intentional...
We were told no phones in schools. I used my phone. They confiscated it for 2 weeks. I was like yeah fair enough.
I don’t understand why this isn’t done now?
My kids were basically required to have a phone for school. In theory they could use a laptop for everything but in practice it was assumed you had a phone.
They were supposed to use the calendar for assignments (and were given time to use the calendar), the teacher would tell them to take a picture of the white board with their homework assignment on it, and they used some private app (don't know the name of it) for messaging the teacher.
This was a few years ago though, so maybe now the tide has turned?
Edit: The rules have changed:
https://tea.texas.gov/taa-letters/implementation-texas-house...
That’s actually pretty cool if they’re being taught to use the organizational tools of the phone.
I’m strongly against phones in school, but as a child myself, I was extremely unorganized. And did not get my act together fully until college, when I had a simple laptop with a calendar app where I could plan out all my classes, assignments, etc.
This is pretty wild, I had no idea any school was like this. What grade and area was this in? Public school?
High school, central Texas, public school. I think the idea was to teach appropriate use of devices.
I don't understand the legislative pushes for some of these things.
Schools can already say "no phones during instructional hours". Many of them do. I guess legislating it can mandate the policy across a school district, state, country etc., so perhaps that makes sense.
But others call for outright bans for kids, all the time. Parents can also restrict usage or set rules for appropriate use. Many do.
But if kids refuse to put their phones away during classes, teachers have no right to take them since they are the kids' personal property. And yes, it is in the school rules that you cannot use your phone during class.
My SO teaches English and struggles with it permanently. Kids are on their phones and not paying attention to the lecture. And no support from the headmaster. Other teachers claim they do not have the problem to save face, but then you talk to an expat teacher who was in their class for observation and hear something else.
> But if kids refuse to put their phones away during classes, teachers have no right to take them since they are the kids' personal property. And yes, it is in the school rules that you cannot use your phone during class.
Is this true? When I was in high school, teachers could take away your phones.
Well yes. A teacher can have a box for phones, but kids need to put the phone there themselves. Of course, depends on the relation teacher has with their kids, but that's how you should do it by law.
And even then, if the teacher trips the box, it is on them to reimburse owners for broken phones.
Kid gets two options: hand over the phone, or sent to the principle's office. Parent can pick them up and the kid can come back without the device the next day.
Same effect, a difference with only a nominal distinction.
I don't understand how people fail to understand how public policy works. You can tell people to do something and they may or may not ignore you depending on how you say it, and what incentives and penalties you provide.
Being a parent or a teacher puts you in a position of fighting multi-billion dollar corporate interests that are trying to capture your kids' attention. It's also fighting their very successful advertising campaigns that makes kids, just like adults, feel FOMO for not having the latest gadgets, or access to the same social media outlets as their peers.
Any public policy trying to counter this needs some weight behind it, and a strong consensus as to what we value as normative behavior in society.
> It's also fighting their very successful advertising campaigns
If you want to talk about successful advertising campaigns, things like age verification laws are actually being lobbied by Meta. In other words, Meta wants to do this and is spending money to make it happen. That should make you suspicious.
> Being a parent
I am a parent. I really hate it when people pull out this "parents say this ..." crap as if it's a shortcut to winning an argument. They don't want to have a discussion on the merits. A lot of the people pulling out that line seem to be childless, if it matters.
Have you talked to a teacher lately?
I'm the primary caretaker to two kids. So yes.
Parents are responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of the notifications kids get at school
> Parents can also restrict usage or set rules for appropriate use. Many do.
If you talk with teachers, some of them complain that kids are on the phone with _parents_ during the class time. And that parents loudly complain to the headmaster if the teacher tries to prevent their child from speaking to them.
Yes, it sounds crazy, but it's true.
Do we have any actual evidence that this significantly improves things?
For example, can we expect Czech PISA scores to go up by 50 points from this change?
Or is this one of those "it feels like it should be good, therefore it's good"? Or maybe "we asked a bunch of people whether they think it's good and they said yes"?
You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms, so they need to provide measurable improvements.
The ubiquitous availability of smartphones also limits kids freedom. It creates a very particular style of interaction with peers where quitting means you are left out. That means kids are subject to apps that prey on insecurities, have extremely addictive properties, force feed constant doomerism messaging on them, etc just to stay connected. Another way to look at it is it’s a tax on the joy and freedom of being a kid.
This is a freedom-from / freedom-to distinction. Once you look at kids as a social group rather than as a single individual I think you can come to very different conclusions about what is on balance healthier.
> You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms
Children’s freedoms ought to be limited, yes.
"This law might force kids into doing something other than whatever they want, whenever they want, with zero consequences. What happened to freedom?"
So many people have wacky ideas on how to raise kids these days. I question the effectiveness of laws like these, but they are worth trying out. And I think a lot of parents in my generation (millenials) need some serious assistance with teaching kids boundaries.
> So many people have wacky ideas on how to raise kids these days.
Keep in mind that, while you feel like they’re millenials because you are one yourself, many of these people might be kids themselves. That’s the problem with children having access with the internet: there cannot be no boundaries anymore, everyone is an equal being their anonymous account.
They’re limiting freedom of children in school, who already don’t have the freedom to ignore other school policies.
Studies show phone bans help school performance, albeit not by much immediately, but there’s not much upside.
If something is hard to measure, is it automatically bad in your eyes ?
This was my takeaway. I'm imagining arguments against mitigating climate change along the same lines.
There's been several pilots that prove this being very effective. Czechia is not first doing this.
Forcing kids to go to school is already limiting their freedom
> You've got to remember that measures like this are limiting people's freedoms, so they need to provide measurable improvements
I think people like you are the reason I’m a strong supporter of the concept that people should pass an evaluation and get a permit to have a child.
Of course the freedom of choice for children is limited because their brains are not mature enough to make an educated decision and quite gullible. That’s why it’s illegal for them to drink alcohol, drive vehicles and smoke cigarettes.
ALL modern electronics should be banned from regular classrooms, up to and including projectors. We now have evidence that at _best_ it does not help. At worst it's actively harming students.
(yes, yes, with obvious exemptions for special needs, computer science classes and so on).
Ban social media for anyone under 18 while you're at it
This doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. I think all screens should be banned from schools. No TV, no phones, no projectors, no slides. No shortcuts for anybody, no distractions. Everything handwritten. I know this sounds like I'm sarcastically criticizing phone bans but I'm serious.
(Edit: obviously will need some accommodations for disabled students, and computer labs will have to exist for technical literacy classes.)
Actually, I benefited from a school-issued Chromebook. I mostly used it for note-taking (I'm bad at handwriting) and homework. Even though it allowed some simple browser games, I suspect it was less distracting, and the browser games could've been banned if the school used a whitelist to make it even less so. Even with paper students can be distracted by doodling and daydreaming.
But I wouldn't oppose banning those as long as the schools provided an AlphaSmart (because again, I'm really bad at handwriting). I think e-readers would be best but those are expensive.
I think banning tools for teachers, like projectors, is unnecessary. I suspect I learned easier from projected computer screens vs. staring at a whiteboard, but anything projected on the screen (e.g. powerpoint presentations) could be passed to students on paper, except movies but those may rarely be necessary.
Whether those things are distractions depends on what they're used for.
I'm fairly certain schools had projectors a few decades ago, and nothing bad came of it.
You don't really need to ban phones from schools; just ban them in class. I don't know why this stuff is treated as such a big deal. Students should pay attention in class, which means not using anything (not devices, paper, books, etc.) except as needed for instruction.
Phones should be banned from children’s lives altogether. They have no benefit for them, only harm.
Yes, yes, we've heard that about books, radio, film, television, and game consoles. I'll put your complaint in the queue.
> books, radio, film, television, and game consoles
None of these tools is designed for the sole purpose of interacting with random people on the internet.
A child can get all the potential benefits of a phone from books, radio, film, television and game consoles — all the while not interacting with random people on the internet.
How would that be beneficial? We don't need to make teachers' jobs more difficult than they already are by removing all the aid brought by digitalization.
TVs are good when used appropriately. We watched Macbeth for the literature class.
[dead]
Seriously, why isn’t this implemented everywhere?
Workplace next!
I think you might need to narrow down what kind of workplaces... A taxi/bus driver, agreed. A an integration engineer, hard disagree.
Either way, when you're an adult, assuming you would be in a workplace, you're maturity should decide. If you want to be a distracted employee and risk termination, you're an adult.
Yeah, especially in Indian scam call centers.
At the same time as a lot of other countries.
Don't they have more important issues to tackle?
Stanford researchers studied the second assertion and found no change
https://ed.stanford.edu/news/national-study-school-cell-phon...
No immediate benefits but could be beneficial long-term (increased well-being but not the same as learning). Whether things in Czechia are comparable to that US situation I wouldn't know.
Bear in mind that those conclusions are for a different student population -- country of course, but also age range:
Czech schools: "The new measure, which has been at the center of heated debates in recent months, will apply in kindergartens and elementary schools, most likely from September 2027. ... It doesn't apply, however, to secondary schools, universities or vocational schools."
The Stanford study was based on "more than 43,000 middle and high schools nationwide".
Also, while half of the authors are Stanford research associates, the other half are at other institutions. The publication is a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
And from the preregistration, "Our measure of treatment (i.e., whether a given school has a true phone ban at a particular point in time) is based on organizing sales and shipping data from Yondr (i.e., a company that sells lockable phone pouches)", a company they partnered with for the study.
How .. odd. Is sales data for a single company really the right way to tell if a school has a true phone ban?
How is this effective at all? Every kid will continue to use them surreptitiously, as they always have.
Increasing the friction to do something will always reduce usage, see sports gambling
The only friction here is 'you're not allowed to do that' - which doesn't typically work on teenagers. We had the same rules for dumbbphones and iPod's 20 years ago and it didn't work then.
Fwiw when I was in school kids would definitely check their phones from time to time or send an occasional surreptitious text. But it wasn't as pervasive as it is today- I was pretty shocked to see even at the elementary school level how much class time kids spend on their personal devices
> which doesn't typically work on teenagers
Depends. You have "good kids" and "bad kids".
If this law helps the good kids, then that's at least a win.
In many US schools, they'd take those things away (and return them at end of day, typically) 20-30 years ago. But it helps when it's policy, if it's not a policy then the teacher has no backing from the school.
It definitely reduced usesge though. I was the same age in teens with dumb phones and they were only banned in class. Either way, it's better to have the restrictions in this case than a free for all because teenagers will push limits constantly. I don't see a downside to this.
It absolutely worked in my school a little over 20 years ago. Teachers and staff always took away disallowed devices and that set the tone quite well.
If it’s legally grounded you get more options.
I've talked to parents of kids where they banned smartphones and the difference is palpable. And good.
Eh? It did work. You'd get it confiscated off you.
This type of repetitive comment[1] is a bit like the bike lanes discussion:
1.City introduces bike lanes on street.
2. Residents complain about parking spaces going away, businesses complain about future bankruptcies due to fewer customers, general uproar is huge.
3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersections are safer.
4. Businesses (re) discover that cars don't buy things, people in big metal boxes going 50+kmph don't buy as many things. But people biking and walking are... foot traffic... and business goes up.
5. City decides to introduce bike lanes on another street.
6. Cycle repeats.
To your point about phones, it is very effective. If nobody can take their phone out on the school premise, suddenly it's very obvious who's trying to break the rule and guess what. Kids play, kids talk face to face, etc.
* * *
[1] This type of comment is one of the first things posted for these types of articles.
Agree with all of that but want to point out one thing that is almost always true re: businesses citing loss of parking to oppose bike lanes:
99% of the time the business owners are really just mad that they personally cannot park directly outside their business anymore. They may cite nonsensical things like 2 less parking spaces outside their business will lead to less customers, but what they are really mad about is their own personal parking space going away. Very dumb and selfish
Must be location dependent. Where I live you never move beyond 2.
> 3. Residents discover bike lanes are quiet, and they also reduce ambient noise levels due to reduced car traffic, air is also cleaner, roads and intersections are safer.
Except that 3 doesn't actually happen... Bike lanes stay empty and kill businesses.
In Seattle and Portland the businesses within 1 block of new bike lanes declined faster after 2019.
Interesting. In a city by me, they found that businesses along new bike lanes actually grew by 17%, while the citywide business receipts were static (grew by exactly 0% in inflation adjusted dollars). They were looking at a similar time period (2019-2022). Maybe COVID just hit different cities differently.
Sauce: Culver City Move Pilot Report, page 59 https://www.culvercity.gov/files/content/public/v/8/services...
My own research. I'll compile and publish it.
And yes, I'm _very_ aware of these papers. I used the same methodology as they did :) Note the timestamp on them, they are from the time when Seattle was booming.
And I even specifically looked at the Fourth Avenue that they used as a control because it also got a protected bike lane.
I have _not_ yet checked this hypothesis thoroughly, but from a cursory look at the data, the increase in business can be explained by highly-paid professionals moving into dense housing nearby (we can see that by looking at real estate prices and historical apartment rent data) and by tourists from cruise ships. It's further corroborated by the fact that the percentage of bike commutes did not increase significantly enough.
I would appreciate sources from the GP but the claim was that businesses within 1 block of bike lanes declined faster then those without. The business community as a whole would be serving as the control for other external factors.
Or maybe the general urbanistic upswing was able to overcome business-killing properties of bike lanes before?
If you look at research on bike lanes in American cities (or in other well-designed human-oriented modern cities), they typically _at_ _most_ don't affect businesses. There's scarce evidence of them helping anything but creating traffic jams.
> Perhaps once that event is identified, we can consider what businesses did survive and compare them to the foot traffic heavy businesses and see if there's some other qualitative difference between those that made it through and those that didn't.
I live in Seattle, and that's what initially motivated me too look at modern urbanism. I was very much a proponent of "stong towns", transit, and all other stuff before. Then I noticed that areas that get an "urbanistic renewal" always get worse around here, and that was even before COVID.
Now the difference is just stark. Seattle Downtown is a ghost town. Bellevue (a city across the lake from Seattle) did not do anything significant with its downtown car infrastructure, and it's thriving. And even in _Seattle_ a place called "University Village" is doing fine. Because it's away from transit, bike lanes, and has a lot of free parking.
My own research, using business tax receipts following the same methodology as in PeopleForBikes papers. Yes, I'm compiling them into a book.
"after 2019" - you cannot be serious here right?
> declined faster after 2019
Is your study discovering the effects of... COVID-19? I guess you've just discovered your own analogy of https://xkcd.com/1138/
and completely seriously:
7. right-wing gains power and bans bike lanes anyway, labeling them "leftist"
city after city in various states/countries
but back to phones
the real problem is they can't rule that parents must be responsible for their children
I find the moral panic about kids with phones/internet access fascinating
because of course it's a problem, but it's not the root cause of the problem
ps. I am so old we weren't allowed to have calculators in school, absolutely forbidden
> the real problem is they can't rule that parents must be responsible for their children
It's impossible for the average parent to police their child's smartphone. They just don't have, and never will have, the technical skills.
> I find the moral panic about kids with phones/internet access fascinating
And for those parents, which are quite rare, that do have the technical skills AND the involvement to ban smartphone usage at young ages, guess what. When Joey and Mickey and Sarah all have smartphones and are doom scrolling TikTok, even those parents lose. If all socializing moves to smartphones, the weirdo kids that don't have them or access to the "cool stuff" are automatically excluded. It's extremely alienating and nothing like not having calculators or PCs.
Back in your day (or mine), huge corporations more akin to drug dealers employing tens of psychologists weren't trying to get kids addicted to calculators.
I can only speak for what I've seen, and my state has banned phones during school.
Before the ban, students would just openly use devices during class. Teachers were essentially powerless to do anything. Kids would be openly playing games, watching videos, etc with practically no recourse.
Now with the state law actually forcing it, enforcement is mugh higher. If phones are caught out the administration takes the devices and requires a parent to come into the school to sign off and release the device.
Does some usage still happen? Sure. Is it far less than before and considerably less during actual classtime? Absolutely.
It's like you're arguing murder still happens even though it's illegal so what's the point of making it a crime.
Every kid? Seriously?