It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.
PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to “think more in class” because she used to Google answers or use artificial intelligence. “Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do] deep research instead of going straight to AI,” she said.
This kind of blew my mind a bit, as I had always imagined AI being used to do homework, hadn't occurred to me it could be used during a class as well.
That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?
When I was in university, I had a math teacher that brought extra chalk to class everyday because if he saw you on your phone, he'd snap a piece off and throw it at you pretty damn hard. Maybe that wouldn't exactly work in a high school but damn if Dr Murphy didn't have me paying attention in that class.
Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison is not a good one.
I encourage you to seek first-hand accounts of what teaching in a contemporary public school classroom is like. Teacher discipline can account for so much.
The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.
Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention but I read an implication that using humans to source facts is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm misunderstanding their perspective.
Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.
People "roll coal" it because it is kinda amusing to do it, and it is a middle finger towards people they perceive to be preachy.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.
And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
California just got strict about this, too. I have found a dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal talking that's happening in school as a result, which is great!
Australia banned phones in schools 1-2 years ago and it's been widely recognised as a huge success. I think banning social media like facebook/tiktok/etc for kids would be a huge benefit as well. Leaving just IM/group chats for kids to directly talk to each other without scrolling a feed of ragebait and ai slop.
I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.
You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off of... them having a device.
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
Banning a 16 year old from minecraft is so far beyond reasonable imo. I'd agree with not giving young kids ipads and walking away. But what sounds like a blanket ban on gaming is absurd.
Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents at dinner.
assuming they were able to acquire customers and dominate the world with that business model, would that have prevented them from doing algorithmic feeds and promoting clickbait and poisoning politics and the rest?
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part?
My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that the kids are exposed to violent images.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
This is really funny for me to read because as a kid we were prohibited from having telecommunications devices while at school entirely. We were also prohibited from speaking during lunchtime. Our lunch was most definitely not loud.
When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.
In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was always evil.
Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can understand anything while all are shouting. It's surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to allow children to have a conversation.
If the teacher completely forbids talking, they will just talk right around the corner, or write on paper. They will be just unable to impose it on the children for long.
It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.
Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.
As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.
I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
In the early 2000s, when everyone had a phone but no smart phones, we had this "thing" at the college bar:
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
It makes me so sad that it's possible for technology to steal the need to talk and play, even from our youth. If you have little kids you know how frantically they NEED to yap and play. I hold such horror for anything that would sap such life away.
It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.
For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
Problem is for the first month of lessons it is not joy, it is hard frustrating work where you sound bad and know it. Even when you are good lessons often are pushing you to do hard things and so they are not pure joy.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
Practicing is always hard and I struggle to find time or energy to push myself but my goal was to be able to play basic chords and make up silly songs around the campfire so everything else is just a bonus.
For a lot of young people the screen is social - the equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still comms.
The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short video clips that are largely designed to sell product, stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty, etc.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
Most of the social of screens is when you get to a place without them you have something common to talk about. "how about [local sports team]", "what did you think about [whatever happened on latest soap opera]", "lets pretend I'm [some character on cartoon]". It is all shorthand for we have something in common and can skip getting to know each other.
Individual screens can be isolating, they can also be somewhat social. I agree, not a complete replacement for other social activities for sure. But, as a kid with internet connected videogames growing up, those internet connected games kept me playing with friends from school and other groups even if we weren't able to physically get together that evening.
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
As a society we've proven over and over again that we're unable to solve these problems that require coordination against greed. We've pulled the smartphone out of Pandora's box.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in the first place and that this was just about pushing back against the helicopter parents.
I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the students are already staring at a screen during class, they continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.
I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
The "Safety" excuse is bullshit. What safety problem could exist in a school that a child with a cell phone can solve? Fire? School administrators will call the fire department. Intruder? School administrators will call the police. School shooter? Same. There's nothing that a child with a cell phone will fix.
Why should articles like these always start with some fictional story like a novel? The actual news is buried somewhere half-way after the throw-away story.
It is following a magazine style. This is partly to elicit an emotional reaction and partly I suspect because the copy writer is bored and wishes they were writing novels instead.
It’s fascinating to see a practice that was previously limited to Silicon Valley executives become first a national class signifier and now go mainstream.
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still bring a standalone camera to school.
I don't think smartphones should be allowed in schools but as someone who was dumbfounded by the lunchtime cacophony of my peers, I wouldn't lead with that as a triumph.
Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their healthy social environment. I personally was always able to find a quiet spot.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids, believe it or not.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want noise during lunch. The library should always be open during lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know how to dress for any other weather).
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
So I have eye witness accounts of this lunchroom saying that's not true. The lunchroom was deafeningly loud before the ban.
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and learning about society and human nature enough
I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there will always be variations by school.
A whole lot of people who got to their great tech jobs by commoditizing their screen addictions (I.e a significant amount of this very website) are massively harmed by these policies. I can’t believe that the folks here nearly universally like this.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll through apps.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)
It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was universal before we had the chance to push back.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Sports gambling is astoundingly popular for teen boys. Already the prevalence of zero sum games like crypto and day trading was getting to be too trendy for teenagers, and this shit just supercharges it.
> But we have just encountered one of the rare times where something new actually was harmful.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
ChatGPT "caught on fire" faster than iPhones.
I think the operative word here is 'let'.
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
> I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
>What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson.
valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.
a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
The bullying is still there, it's just moved online. If anything it's easier for the perpetrators, because they can hide behind anonymity, or create humiliating deepfakes - and so on.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything you’ll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It’s not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go away.
That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more choice in when/where you are forced to interact with bullies.
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
Worst case you can switch jobs. It's not easy, but it's a lot easier than switching schools.
Also, bullying in school has no consequences, but outside it might have some.
Bullying in school absolutely has consequences, and they're mostly going to be much farther-reaching than those suffered as an adult - getting messed up psychologically is more impactful as a kid, not to mention any physical toll it takes, or the impact of it on one's education.
I think the user means that bullies in school face little consequences, but a bully at work may get called by HR and potentially disciplined.
Oh fair enough. My apologies Mr Worf. I don't fully agree - plenty of shitty behavior gets ignored (or even encouraged) even in a workplace - but there's definitely some truth here.
PE class being the other one where bullies thrive, and prey on the sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful kids. The coaches look the other way because they want the "win".
Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media A-OK.
Avoidance: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems
The point you're making is important and I can already see how many, once years out of school, are able to re-frame their memories into something that bullying wasn't so bad and it's actually a social good, etc. It's as if the return-to-office-policies bringing back bullying/sexual harrassement to one's work environment would be hailed as a chance to improve one's social skills. Ridiculous.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
I don't think they're reframing. They weren't bullied or were the bullies themselves.
Or there simply weren’t any bullies.
Not everybody’s childhood played out like Lord of the Flies.
Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with smartphones.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of high school, because in their high schools there aren’t such hard knocks.
I agree with you, American schools seem particularly bad at breeding these sorts of unhealthy dynamics, and we shouldn't accept it as normal. But even in a better environment, unstructured social interaction with peers still seems like a useful part of growing up/socialization and shouldn't be replaced with kids sucked into their phones.
It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the world.
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That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or up until recently) they could practically have a computer in their hands all class?
When I was in university, I had a math teacher that brought extra chalk to class everyday because if he saw you on your phone, he'd snap a piece off and throw it at you pretty damn hard. Maybe that wouldn't exactly work in a high school but damn if Dr Murphy didn't have me paying attention in that class.
Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison is not a good one.
I encourage you to seek first-hand accounts of what teaching in a contemporary public school classroom is like. Teacher discipline can account for so much.
The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a previous technology tier instead of reforming society and culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't really make sense.
Are you saying that reading comprehension is an outdated technology?
Look, I had a zoomer colleague of mine ask GPT to solve a moral dilemma in a personality test at work...
It's...rough out there.
Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well, reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention but I read an implication that using humans to source facts is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm misunderstanding their perspective.
Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while, but I think people generally are starting to get the picture. Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress regarding the minimization of their usage.
Some people will slap a label like "liberal" on "using my smartphone whenever the hell I want". And then people will think that's how it should be.
An electronic version of coal rolling. "You can't tell me this is unhealthy, and I'm going to prove it!"
People "roll coal" it because it is kinda amusing to do it, and it is a middle finger towards people they perceive to be preachy.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Obviously, I don't do this deliberately.
Sounds more like "freedom" which New York has taken away with some big government regulations.
/S
Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There is no need for a phone during the school day.
And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of the school year.
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...
> how (US) universal
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
California just got strict about this, too. I have found a dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal talking that's happening in school as a result, which is great!
Australia banned phones in schools 1-2 years ago and it's been widely recognised as a huge success. I think banning social media like facebook/tiktok/etc for kids would be a huge benefit as well. Leaving just IM/group chats for kids to directly talk to each other without scrolling a feed of ragebait and ai slop.
I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.
You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off of... them having a device.
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
Banning a 16 year old from minecraft is so far beyond reasonable imo. I'd agree with not giving young kids ipads and walking away. But what sounds like a blanket ban on gaming is absurd.
Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents at dinner.
>> There is no need for a phone during the school day
I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.
Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.
> Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.
If society were ignorant, then it’s forgivable. But society is not ignorant.
We know tech companies deliver things bad for us (lies and manipulation).
And we knowingly choose it, over the good (truth).
Why would anyone expect them to deliver what is best for us when the purpose of a company is to deliver what others want?
Because social media sites like Facebook literally said they're going to make the world better, by connecting more people and empowering more ideas.
It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it, myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
They could have gone down the path of being a service with a monthly subscription. Instead of making the customer become the product.
Imagine an alternate universe where, since you were paying them, they kept you safe and secure online, and kept the bad actors away.
assuming they were able to acquire customers and dominate the world with that business model, would that have prevented them from doing algorithmic feeds and promoting clickbait and poisoning politics and the rest?
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part? My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that the kids are exposed to violent images.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
> the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!
How do you know? :)
This is really funny for me to read because as a kid we were prohibited from having telecommunications devices while at school entirely. We were also prohibited from speaking during lunchtime. Our lunch was most definitely not loud.
You can always tell a Milford man.
When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got above a whispered conversation.
In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was always evil.
Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can understand anything while all are shouting. It's surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to allow children to have a conversation.
in small doses, but I've seen them go overboard to the point where we are better off without.
If the teacher completely forbids talking, they will just talk right around the corner, or write on paper. They will be just unable to impose it on the children for long.
I think my parents went to this school. Did the nuns slap you with rulers?
title should include "school" like in original article:
"NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"
It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills and habits.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
No it was Covid. But one party’s dogma was to close schools and force all socialization to be online for almost two years and rather than admit it was wrong and harmful they blame phones instead.
Smartphones have been around much longer than before 2014. My takeaway from this is that people just always think it's worse than what they went through.
As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs, and heated conversations during lunchtime.
I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
In the early 2000s, when everyone had a phone but no smart phones, we had this "thing" at the college bar:
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
Is it just me who finds it annoying that some people like using the pattern "make something <adjective> again"? Like, you don't have any other choice?
It makes me so sad that it's possible for technology to steal the need to talk and play, even from our youth. If you have little kids you know how frantically they NEED to yap and play. I hold such horror for anything that would sap such life away.
It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to collapse in front of a screen for a bit.
For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
These things are not remotely comparable. Smartphones, especially social media double depression and suicide rates among teens.
Yup. I'm Gen X (1972), and I'd read a book, watch TV, or (once we hit the mid-80s) I had a home computer.
I spent much of my free childhood hours from about 1976 to 1988 in front of a computer screen. But I was certainly not in the mainstream.
I don't think the mainstream people end up on HN.
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Music is medicine. I’ve been taking guitar for a few years now and it’s pure joy.
Problem is for the first month of lessons it is not joy, it is hard frustrating work where you sound bad and know it. Even when you are good lessons often are pushing you to do hard things and so they are not pure joy.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
Practicing is always hard and I struggle to find time or energy to push myself but my goal was to be able to play basic chords and make up silly songs around the campfire so everything else is just a bonus.
Even then, individual screens is isolating.
Collapsing in front of the TV with the family was still quality time enjoying something together.
Individual screens let parents get some peace and quiet for a while. As with everything, moderation is the key, not abstention.
For a lot of young people the screen is social - the equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still comms.
The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short video clips that are largely designed to sell product, stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty, etc.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
Most of the social of screens is when you get to a place without them you have something common to talk about. "how about [local sports team]", "what did you think about [whatever happened on latest soap opera]", "lets pretend I'm [some character on cartoon]". It is all shorthand for we have something in common and can skip getting to know each other.
Individual screens can be isolating, they can also be somewhat social. I agree, not a complete replacement for other social activities for sure. But, as a kid with internet connected videogames growing up, those internet connected games kept me playing with friends from school and other groups even if we weren't able to physically get together that evening.
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
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The play-based childhood is over; the phone-based childhood is here.
Not universally though, the local skate park and sports fields see plenty of activity.
Just until they are shutdown to put in pickleball for retirees.
> Not universally though, the local skate park and sports fields see plenty of activity.
Sure if “at least one match” means activity.
Back in the day, you couldn’t find parking for several blocks radius around every public sports field.
Thankfully that state is far from evenly-distributed.
It’s here but do we think it’s better? Should it stay?
As a society we do get to answer these questions.
As a society we've proven over and over again that we're unable to solve these problems that require coordination against greed. We've pulled the smartphone out of Pandora's box.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
No, the issue is that most parents don’t want to do any parenting. There’s a product that makes children shut up, of course it’s selling out.
I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in the first place and that this was just about pushing back against the helicopter parents.
I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the students are already staring at a screen during class, they continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.
I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And your parent had to come retrieve it.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
Kids have phones for "safety" reasons. It's pretty irrational, but hard to push back against without help from on high.
The "Safety" excuse is bullshit. What safety problem could exist in a school that a child with a cell phone can solve? Fire? School administrators will call the fire department. Intruder? School administrators will call the police. School shooter? Same. There's nothing that a child with a cell phone will fix.
Why should articles like these always start with some fictional story like a novel? The actual news is buried somewhere half-way after the throw-away story.
It is following a magazine style. This is partly to elicit an emotional reaction and partly I suspect because the copy writer is bored and wishes they were writing novels instead.
It’s fascinating to see a practice that was previously limited to Silicon Valley executives become first a national class signifier and now go mainstream.
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
FOOD FIGHT!!
No more kids cameras in the classroom
This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still bring a standalone camera to school.
Which would cause a lot of questions if you pull it out in the classroom.
Smartphones are this century's cigarrettes.
I don't think smartphones should be allowed in schools but as someone who was dumbfounded by the lunchtime cacophony of my peers, I wouldn't lead with that as a triumph.
Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their healthy social environment. I personally was always able to find a quiet spot.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids, believe it or not.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want noise during lunch. The library should always be open during lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know how to dress for any other weather).
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
Tech will prevail on the long term, even with these misguided bans.
The smartphone OSs hide all that "tech". They are not more educational (by themselves) than interactive advertisement streams.
The ban will be revoked after Meta sues for business damages caused by unlawful government interference with their customer acquisition operations. /s
We need to sue Meta (et al.) for social damage caused by unlawful acquisition of addicts from the public education system. (My personal opinion)
So I have eye witness accounts of this lunchroom saying that's not true. The lunchroom was deafeningly loud before the ban.
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and learning about society and human nature enough
I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there will always be variations by school.
A whole lot of people who got to their great tech jobs by commoditizing their screen addictions (I.e a significant amount of this very website) are massively harmed by these policies. I can’t believe that the folks here nearly universally like this.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll through apps.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
The school president is 17?
Yes, the president of the student-elected body of mostly-powerless "school government."
The student-elected body is often called the Student Council.
Sometimes each grade level will have a class president.
Varies from school to school for the details.
That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)
it’s an america thing
Other countries don't have prefects? Wikipedia seems to indicate the phenomenon is worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_president
We wouldn't call such a thing a president, but yes.
All of this read and written on a smartphone.
Reversion to the past is not preparation for the future.