Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools

Sure, I think this just looks a little alien from an American perspective because most of our rights are set up as explicit negatives to block the government from legislating them away, more than to prevent Joe or Jane Teacher from taking a phone. "Congress shall pass no law..."

I guess the nordics don't have a common-law tradition and so never inhereted the in loco parentis doctrine that allows schools to take substantial actions regarding students? I'm not familiar with their legal history.

Now I'm curious. Is there a law that carves out specific exemptions for parents disciplining kids/teenagers like grounding, taking away phone and internet privilege etc.

Maybe I'm seeing this wrong but a public school is a government institution, right? It seems reasonable, then, that the government could say "no phones in here", just like they can say "no drinks in the courtroom".

The US constitution doesn't give any rights. It restricts the power of the government to curtail rights that already exist.

And hopefully the constitution sets some bounds on said restrictions...

Otherwise a constitution becomes ineffective at some point.

There are such things as unconstitutional laws and laws that should not be observed nor enforced...

The first two require she bring her phone to school with her. Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.

The last one doesn't require a cell phone, since the school has phone lines. But it's certainly more convenient to let her use her own phone than have 20 kids in line at the office every morning calling their parents.

> It's worth noting, according to the article, the law gives school officials leeway to allow kids to use their phones in some circumstances. So, the law doesn't stop any of the use cases you've listed.

Somewhat my bad.. but I was responding to thread's content and title.

- The article says "[Finland approved] a law that restricts the use of mobile devices by pupils at primary and secondary schools"

- The title of the thread says "bans smartphones in schools".. which is not at ALL what they did; they banned _use_ of smartphones in schools _without permission_.

And what I said was that my daughter brings her phone to school; she doesn't use it there unless there's a good reason (like I noted).

All don't need a smartphone.

Those studies speak about social media addiction, smartphone addiction, and excessive phone use and not about having a phone.

If you want to prevent the negative effects of social media and (designed to be) addictive apps, then you should ban social media and addictive apps, and not phones (because that would just mask the symptoms).

The schools here I have experience with are stricter about smart watches than phones - you can get everybody to turn their phone off all day or keep it in a locker, but it's much harder with watches.

I assume those effects are similar even if they're only using the phone before and after school.

Sure. I remember standing in line at the phone for 10 minutes as a kid waiting for my turn to call my parents when my activity was done. Cell phones are better. Smart phones would mean I could use the time waiting for something.

Smart phones when class is in session is a distraction and should be banned. However outside of class they are helpful.

PS: emphasis mine PPS: and i meant "the finns", not "the finnish"

As part of the last generation to grow up without phones in (early) school, this.

The endless rationalizing of why kids need to have phones at every moment rings hollow...

Because grade school kids actually did just fine without them.

Things functioned, people got where they needed to get, emergencies were handled, etc.

Especially with pre- and post-school access, we're balancing a minimum of in-school utility against a massive danger to learning and development.

We should just accept we built addiction boxes and therefore restrict them appropriately.

Here around public phones are gone since long, even inside schools. However, mobile phones that just do calls and SMS are still a thing. And anyway, the Finnish law is not preventing any of the use cases you mentioned as far as I understand it.

No they cannot. My school had multiple doors that could not see each other - more than once my parents were waiting for me at a different door from the one I was standing at waiting for them. We did find each other, but only after a lot of searching - sometimes we even passed each other as we both switched doors to wait at.

Okay, it did work out, but not nearly as well as a simple cell phone. Smart phones add additional functionality. (I can see on google maps where each kid's phone is)

I don't know how it is done in the US, but I definitely learned about cars at school. Including:

- Lessons about road safety (causes of accidents, number of deaths, etc...)

- In elementary school, navigating the roads as a pedestrian or cyclist. Including going outside and crossing roads.

- In secondary school, basic information about traffic law, road signs, and information related to light motor vehicles (mopeds, ...)

- Though I didn't do it personally, some school had a class at a practice track, using pedal cars to learn about things like right of way

So while we didn't do actual driving, probably for economic and liability reasons, it is definitely part of the curriculum.

Kids still get to walk with cars around, ride bikes, drive motorcycles usually a few years before majority, they also ride cars and are usually familiar with how they work way before driving.

I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.

On the other hand, we don't teach kids in school the mechanical basics of automated locomotion, how to distill oil into usable fuel and how to mill an engine block before we allow them to get a driver's license.

Unlike modern education, which puts a massive emphasis on teaching how to do menial, useless things before going the sensible route [e.g. I remember vividly how we were tortured by doing table of values calculations in maths for what felt like weeks before we were allowed to use derivatives. I loved maths. Until that point. Then I hated the course (not the subject) with a passion.

Lo and behold, I enter university, and the first thing we do in Mathematics 101 is 'let's forget everything we have learned, we're going to start from the beginning'. Joy.]

I want to stress the point: Smartphones exist (and have existed for 15 years - a more modern 'scary new tech' would probably be LLMs). Banning these things from school will only keep teachers happy because they can keep their teaching methods from the 1890s alive for some more time, instead of using what is available to get kids educated better.

Honestly if driving was teached at school and you get license once you graduate, that would be amazing

There are quite a lot of things you can mess around with. Install a custom ROM, a custom recovery or build a custom ROM from scratch. Use emulated players such as winlator for gaming. Use GrapheneOS for maximum privacy and security. Use termux for learning CLI. There are tons and tons of things you could do with that little rectangle screen

Where my kids went to high school, a smart phone was required. The teacher would encourage kids to put assignments and tests on their calendar. They would use the camera to take a picture of a home work assignment written on a whiteboard. They used the camera for photo and movie projects. They had some twitter-like app for the teacher to broadcast to all students.

I think there might be something to be said for the idea of teaching computer literacy on smartphones. There's often a real gap in comprehension of conceptual computer use in those who grew up in the age of ambient smartphones/socialmedia/etc.

That smartphone one only uses for TikTok is still 100x more powerful than any computer we had access to at that age, and it can do real work (just so long as you look beyond the consumption apps).

Using the smartphone a a useful tool while avoiding the mindless scramble for dopamine is the skill.

Glossy magazines, handy-dandy mobbing tools, porn, a kiddie slot machine, a big stack of totally random niche zines that include yes the icky ones, a kiddie panopticon, their anxious parents, a gaggle of marketers and influencers grooming their income streams (this is a fun game) and interacting with them.

For some reason, we learn math as if we were farmers in the early 1900s. We do not learn (Bayesian) statistics early enough to tell fact from fraud, what city dwellers and voters could probably use instead.

And applied math on a PC would be great, but we barely have applied math on a calculator.

And kids love calculators: only digital numbers are numbers. 2/3 is cleary not a number to anyone below 20 years of age, that is two numbers, we have to write .6666666\dash_over{6} down as a solution instead.

It's not really smartphones by themselves that need to be discussed, but rather (simplified) the dopamine loop reward system.

Explain it to young kids as the smartphone giving you a 'treat' for doing nothing. Eventually you get lazy and won't do any work because you get a 'treat' from the smartphone for free whereas if you play sports or hang out with your friends you only get the 'treat' for doing something.

Then explain that very smart people have taught the smartphone how to make the 'treat' tastier and tastier until you spend most of your time chasing treats instead of doing and enjoying things.

> The first several years of school is indeed childcare. Childcare mixed with education.

Yes. Former teacher here to tell you I cared about the children. :)

But seriously, in the United States teachers are considered "In loco parentis" which "refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

At least used to. Last few years Finland's PISA scores as measured by the OECD have plummeted and now they are just a bit above average but nowhere near what they used to be.

At least used to

Child care? This is legally required school attendance for under 18 year olds.

Most school days are way shorter than that. The curriculum seems to keep my kids intellectually engaged. Commenting as a finn.

In my experience and observation, as the age and school level increases, there's more actual learning going on.

By the time you're 16, I'd say a significant amount of school time is decently geared toward learning, and you're old enough to supplement that yourself during spares or downtime if you want to.

At younger ages though, it definitely seems like more of a daycare service than a learning focused environment. The free daycare is important, but I do feel bad for the kids who are stuck in that absurd environment. Someone can come up to you and stab you with a pencil for no reason and that's just par for the course.

Because of child labor laws.

Have you met a 16-year old?

Those teachers are admirable, but their actions are more of a 'nice to have' than the primary objective of the system.

As I wrote below. My most memorable math class was a teacher failing to explain fractions to me, what later became obvious to me was that the teacher did not understand fractions either.

I am sure you want to blame me for this, but somehow I went to university and got a degree in (applied) mathematics. So I doubt it was some fundamental problem with me.

Everybody is upset when someone tells them they fail at their jobs and teachers are an entire industry of total failure. In a single semester of university I learned so much more than in 12 years of school. If teachers aren't at fault, who is? By any metric I was a successful student.

>the actual purpose of school is to socialise children

I agree that this is probably the most important thing for children to learn. My point is that sitting in a room for 8 hours does very little to accomplish that.

>And telling if time spent learning is wasted is actually quite hard - if you know something and everyone else knows something it often fades into the background and nobody notices. But it still makes a difference.

I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster.

To talk about schooling we first have to make clear what the goal is. Sure everybody needs to learn how to read, write and do basic arithmetic, but that is not a 12 year endeavor. Even including basic general knowledge is not a 12 year endeavor. And we should not be wasting children's time on things, just because we can't be bothered to have them do something actually meaningful.

> Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

Citation needed. I've heard it repeated a lot, but never by someone with actual historical credentials. It varied from society to society (and many societies were sexist so boys and girls would have different results). Likely most is correct, but also misleading as it appears many societies were very literate even among poor people.

From what I understand (recognize I'm not a historian!), Jewish boys have long had a right of passage of reading the bible in the local synagogue. Most languages are not that hard to learn the basic phonics of and thus read and write. You wouldn't be good, but you could do it.

Historians have told me that most of their references for is literate were from time/places where literate meant Latin. The common person know much Latin (despite going to mass in Latin), and couldn't read/write it. However they would have had more education in their local language which was never counted.

I did not take me twelve years to learn to read and write. What an awful excuse. What made me good at reading was reading books outside of school.

In a single semester of university I learned more than in 12 years of school.

They did. Well at least officially. Being able to read was needed if you wanted to get married.

>Do you think that was because their methods were bad, you didn't bother and they couldn't force you, or that their methods were not adapted to the way you learn?

It was because they had nothing to teach. I still remember trying to learn fractions from a teacher who clearly did not understand fractions either.

Just to be clear, I did very well in school. Given their standards I would be considered a "successful student" and I went on to get a university degree.

>Also, you probably learned social skills, basic project management and collaboration, and some knowledge which is probably useless other than maybe as a basis of understanding the world

None of that I learned while sitting in class. I learned it despite the school activities I had to do.

From what I know about Germany, they don't teach anything about the depths humans can go or how to prevent them recurring. They seem to just learn the Nazis were evil people and as long as you're not one of those, similarly evil things can never happen again. Also because only evil people can do evil things, calling out an evil thing is illegal because it implies someone involved is evil and that's an attack on their honour.

See Germany-Palestine relations. One third of weapons used in the Gaza war are paid for by Germany, and the remaining two thirds by the USA. Other countries contribute negligibly.

>German schools expect quite a lot from students that do actually want to go to better schools.

Not my experience.

>But yes, it is possible to slack through it all if you want to slack.

I was a good student though and did really well. I never learned for anything though and was bored in basically every subject.

There never were any expectations on me which I didn't trivially meet.

Heavily depends on where you went to school.

Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!

Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.

Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium

Smoking ban in bars and restaurants seem to work. So doing same with phones in schools during lesson time does not seem unreasonable.

If you would like to prohibit e.g. gambling mechanisms in games or social media you need a legal framework and then you investigate and fine the firms that don't adhere to the rules. This works very well in the EU as seen by the example of apple and facebook last week. It's not perfect but what is?

yeah but isn't that precisely what banning smartphones in schools fixes? Nobody said anything about outside of school.

Growing up we had computer class in school, where we did BASIC programming and worked on typing, and this wasn't a particularly good school system. Moving towards "you'll learn computers and typing by having them in your face all the time" feels like a considerable regression in both computer and general skills.

I saw this in the Netherlands: Chromebooks with which the children did their research online, submitted their homework online, got them graded online, organized their workgroups, schedules and meetings online ...

Actually </s> they were learnig vital skills like Agile Sprint management! (I don't know if they ever physically met for standup meeetings)

1. Correct, I think you've changed my mind on this and I'll investigate further. Though they should probably get foundational knowledge on tech literacy.

2. True, though less true over time. Even in the non-tech jobs you're now constantly using technology. In the trades, you need to know how to operate a CNC machine. As a nurse, you're operating medical devices that are getting more and more powered by technology.