Unpopular opinion here, for sure, but I use it voluntarily for all work stuff when I’m at home. It’s not as bad as you might think. I never use it for personal stuff, for that I use librewolf and chromium when librewolf doesn’t work, like webusb. I don’t want any work/life cross contamination between cookies and history, and different browsers seems to work well enough for me.

I mostly agree with what you are saying, but when was this golden age where school was about pure learning, exploration, and inquiry, and wasn’t an institutional machine? At least here in Canada, schools have never been more about inquiry than ever before… to the point where much of the value of traditional teaching styles is lost. IMO.

I don’t think phones make kids hate school, and I don’t think kids use phones because they hate school. Phones have seeped into our lives and into our children’s lives and it has prevented them from using their brains the way they are naturally made to work.

Last year most provinces in Canada banned phones from schools. But it didn’t work because students bring them anyways and parents still text their kids 24/7 so they are fine sending their kids to school with them. Teachers don’t stand at doors patting kids down. The problem is not, IMO, at the school system level, it is cultural. We are destroying the brains of a generation and sitting back and watching the train wreck in slow motion.

I’m sorry but this comment, as well as the posted article is misguided. I am a classroom teacher and I can say without hesitation that it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand. It is extremely challenging when the phone is in their pocket. It is manageable but not ideal when it is in their bag.

Your brain is capable of doing one thing at a time and if that thing is scrolling feeds, then it is not learning.

If you’d like to develop an informed opinion on the matter, I highly recommend The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. His book comes with a website with a regularly updated collection of research and data on the matter. The data is staggering; there is absolutely no question that smartphones do not belong in a classroom, full stop. They generally don’t belong in a child or adolescent’s hand either, but schools cannot do anything about that. To think otherwise simply indicates that you have not been in a classroom later than 2011.

Here is a link to that data: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/collaborative-review-docs