There's a phrase for something that people can't stop using -- addictive substance.
We (and companies) need to ditch the equivocation and be honest about what we created.
(Edit) > Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
Is a red herring and justification for helicopter parents to normalize their micromanaging.
Someone shouldn't be texting or calling on their cell in an active shooter situation anyway. One phone per teacher/room, with the ability for anyone to dial emergency services, is better.
I agree that phones/apps/social media/video games are addictive (the ones that aren't just don't get popular) but I disagree with your proposed framework for identifying "addictive" things for children in schools. Schools are very artificial environments with a massive lack of stimulation and self-agency for young developing human children. Damn near anything is "addictive" in that environment - books, doodling, origami, annoying people around you, etc.
Would be interesting if phones would be "addictive" to children used to playing outdoors in autonomous groups in (semi-nomadic, not city-based) pre-colombian civilizations.
> Damn near anything is "addictive" in that environment - books, doodling, origami, annoying people around you, etc.
False. If any of that were addictive, the student would continue doing it even when other options exist, and continue doing it despite negative consequences.
> Schools are very artificial environments with a massive lack of stimulation
Correct but misguided.
Schools are artificial environments with imposed constraints. You're supposed to derive stimulation from being interested in the nature of the world around you, but that's boring, so at least derive stimulation from entertaining yourself within the constraints.
Everyone here has a story about hacking the school computers to play Doom (a learning experience and achievement, however subversive), but 30 years from now, none of these kids are going to be talking about how awesome it was to mindlessly watch TikTok during math class. None of them will remember what they even watched.
The phone has endless "stimulating" content, but it's not stimulating you to actually do anything but repetitively scroll through content you'll quickly forget. It's junk food for the brain, and only "stimulating" in the way stool softeners stimulate a bowel movement-- you shit it out long before you absorb anything of nutritional value.
Reminds me of a rat study that I forget the details on, but essentially they gave cocaine to rats in a sterile basic cage, and they went ham
Then years later, a researcher refuted the claim of the original landmark study (regarding addition), by giving the rats a sanctuary with other rats, area to roam, basically a mini park, I believe the rats either didn’t take the cocaine, or did it once and didn’t like it after.
Addition isn’t in a vacuum. Anything can be addicting. It’s the environment that matters as well.
Soldiers coming back from Vietnam were doing opium like mad, to a point where the US government was preparing for an opioid epidemic (ironic now), then found that rates of opium addiction were FAR below than perceived, most likely cause the soldiers weren’t fighting in a terrifying jungle 1000’s of miles away in a war forced upon them that was a losing battle.
I think this goes a bit deeper on a forum like this. Like it or not, many many many folks here work for companies enabling this addiction.
One thing I've noticed over my 20 years in business - many, often very bright folks need to feel they work a moral job, doing good for the world. So far so good. But then we meet reality of gray office jobs with unclear positive/negative rating, ie working in bank is bad? But which type of bank and which job? Classic retail ones don't do crises, they store money for common folks so they don't keep it under mattress, and give loans to start businesses. Or working for google, is it the great-maps-for-free or tracking-the-hell-out-of-ya one? Same for facebook etc.
I am fairly strict on this topic and agree with you - we've created unparalleled addiction devices. Don't trust me, random stranger, check almost any kid with phone, which is almost any kid. Check their habits, ask parents, ask at school. Its pretty consistent and dark picture. There are ways to lesser the problem, but problem at its core is seemingly too hard - maybe kids actually shouldn't have their phones, rationing is already dealing with addicted (=fucked up for life) situation. Fucking up entire generation isn't balanced with saving few lives, even as a parent that's a completely stupid approach from any angle. Maybe we shouldn't listen to only most vocal folks in our communities? The loudest ones often have unresolved mental issues that distort otherwise good discussions badly.
But then we go even deeper - growing up kids these days is darn hard. State doesn't help much actually, if you are far away from close family and are not one of those few family-only types who can find life fulfillment for 2 decades straight, without any meaningful break, in just parenting. So folks little by little give up on being a perfect parent, and to have some time off they allow it. And then there is peer pressure. Remember a generation ago kids spent their lives in front of TV? And our parents didn't care that much, did they (little yes, but actually going and finding a new cool hobby for their kid? rare)
> Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
Then buy a 30€ dumb phone.
100% of the parents I spoke with justify themselves with "all his/her friends have it, I don't want to create a social pariah".
It has a real social impact if they don't have a phone. They will miss out on things. You might argue "but if they were real friends..", but the issue is they may never get to be real friends if they keep missing out on things.
My kids get phones in 9th grade, but it is clear they aren't to be on them during school. What sets me apart from a lot of parents, though, is that I'll believe and support their teacher.
"everyone's meeting up at the pizza place to hang out"
There are obviously ways around that -- a lot just won't bother.
And sure, someone that isn't that courteous might not be worth being around, but if it's a loose social group with a common interest there will be others there that might be.
Their social lives revolve around their phones. Not having a phone impacts it greatly.
Sure it shouldn't be but it's the America we have and it's constitutionally difficult to do anything about it with the current interpretation of our second amendment in the Supreme Court.
Does the lack of that language in the other amendments mean they're not really protected?
There's similar language in the other amendments in the bill of rights, "Congress shall make no laws" in the First Amendment for example, where we have and accept some limitation on those rights.
Does the "well regulated militia" clause imply an individual right to bear arms or only that the Federal government can't make laws to disarm recognized militias?
Ultimately in the US system it doesn't really matter what you or I think a particular phrase means the only opinion that matters directly is that of the majority of the Supreme Court. Even the current Court's interpretation of 2A accepts there are reasonable restrictions on gun rights they just need to be similar or comparable to restrictions around the founding.
SCOTUS held quite a different view of the 2nd Amendment for many many years until the efforts of the NRA and gunmakers succeeded in altering this in the last 30 years.
I'm assuming both that you're arguing in good faith, and that your ability to use search engines must be seriously impaired. So here goes:
1875 - US v Cruikshank. Held that states have the ability to regulate firearms independent of the Federal government.
1939 - US v Miller. Held that the "obvious purpose" of the 2nd Amendment was insuring effective state militias. Specifically insisting that only those guns usable in militia service and held for the purpose of militia service were protected by the Second Amendment.
Until DC v Heller in 2008, this was all settled law.
Until 1977, the NRA was focused mostly on firearms safety education, recreational shooting/hunting, and marksmanship/sportsmanship. A group of right-wingers took over at the 1977 annual convention and by 1980 was solely focused on expanding the 2nd Amendment and more importantly, financing candidates who would oppose any gun control. Reagan was the first president ever endorsed by the organization, and within a decade the NRA had tremendous influence on the Republican Party. And they funded an incredible amount of legal "scholarship" attempting to shore up the sandy foundations of their 2nd Amendment interpretation.
AB 1591 was signed into law not because Reagan supported gun control in general, but because the Black Panthers had been conducting armed protests in 1967. 12 years after signing the Mulford Act into law, Reagan diminished the act; "I hardly think it was gun control."
The cases show the former and long running consensus in the court that some regulations were not unconstitutional infringements in contrast to the "shall not be infringed" absolutism popular among progun groups today.
Students don't spend time on their phones because they are "addictive," but because school is boring and doesn't provide them with anything of value.
Schools need to radically overhaul how they operate so that they can compete with TikTok for student's attention. Banning phones is lazy. I want to see:
- Gamified learning, using apps like Duolingo. TikTok-style short form videos produced by top content creators instead of boring lectures from mediocre teachers.
- Opportunities to earn real money, power and status as a reward for school achievement. Good performance should grant perks like the ability to freely skip class to play videogames, study from home or earn an income during the school day.
- Autonomy: give students control over how they learn, holding them accountable only for the results.
> Is a red herring and justification for helicopter parents to normalize their micromanaging.
We live in Plano, TX, just a few minutes south of the Allen Outlet massacre.
Yesterday my son texted me at noon "Shooting threat at school" and "It’s a rumor though but a lot of people are leaving anyway".
You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.
It actually would have been better if neither your son nor you knew about nearby shooting.
It had nothing to do with the school your son was attending. That you responded in a panic is due to a common pattern of miscommunication during an emergency. The least effective response to an emergency is everyone panicking and operating independently of each other and ignorant of the ground truth.
How did the rumor of the school shooting begin? Probably from another student responding to some quick take on their socials? What if they didn’t have their phone? Would this even have caused a false panic in the first place?
Everyone take the time to look up the road death statistics to remind yourself what you really need to worry about. Always use your turn signal, even for your driveway. Slow down, but not too much… drive with the flow of traffic. Don’t change lanes in an intersection. Don’t swerve out of the way of a white-tailed dear, just try and punt the thing with the front of your car and count the hang time. Yield to the right at a 4-way intersection. Again, always use your turn signal, even for your driveway… why the drive way? Force the good habit!
I live in Texas. My wife is a public schoolteacher. We are coming for your son’s phone and we will convince enough people to agree with us.
Speak of the devil... I just checked my messages and saw this from my wife an hour ago: "ACC north ridge has an armed person on campus. Don’t go out"
I checked the news just now and found this out: "AUSTIN (KXAN) — A shelter-in-place order was lifted for the Austin Community College Northridge Campus.
The campus issued the order at 8:50 a.m. amid reports of a possible armed person nearby. Police investigated the reports and issued an all-clear.
The shelter-in-place was lifted at 10:20 a.m., and the campus returned to normal operations."
So literally by just spending my time being nerd sniped on the internet and tweaking a Dockerfile I missed the entirety of this nothingness.
To me, this is the "past generations" litmus test I measure any of my personal preferences against.
If people were able to handle not-it in 1920, it's probably a "nice to have" rather than a "must have."
Which, we can all feel very strongly about things that are nice to have, but people were also doing just fine before constant connectivity was a thing.
> You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
"Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1–54"[0]
I wonder if you speeding in your car increased the likely hood of death for someone more than collecting your son from a rumored school shooting. Not saying you were wrong to do that, obviously this is something that comes to the front of your mind when something is wrong at a school. The disconnect between risks we find acceptable, and those we don't is interesting though.
Some enterprising individual should figure up how many highway miles driven with a kid in the car it takes to exceed the annual risk from school shootings. I bet it's not many, but nobody thinks a thing of driving their kids around.
USDOT says 1.34 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Assuming 32mph average speed[1] that's 1 death per 2,332,089 hours driven.
There were 40 students killed in school shootings in 2022 [2]. Assuming 50M students and 2K hours/year in school that equates to 1 death per 2,500,000,000 hours spent in the classroom.
The difference is a factor of 1,072 meaning that if you drive with your kid for 2 hours, you have exposed them to a higher risk of dying in a traffic accident than an entire year of risk from school shootings.
I'm a parent of two school aged kids, one of whom attends school 10 minutes away. In a state that's had multiple school shootings as well.
I still accept that if something happens, it's going to play out before I rambo in and fix things.
I have firearms in the house and am trained in their use, but I'm not a professional. In a chaotic, lethal situation, even my presence as a transporter is only going to increase confusion and delay professionals doing their job.
What's going to save lives (including my kids') in a crisis is their knowing (1) how to handle themselves, (2) stay present and think critically, and (3) follow good directions when they receive them.
Never going to happen in the US, because it's antithetical to the current interpretation of the Constitution and because half the country doesn't trust the government to define "crazy" (or uses distrust as an excuse because they actually don't care / NRA).
Sadly, I think statistically it would help a lot. Obviously wouldn't completely solve the problem, but you have to have something pretty wrong with you to want to murder a lot of people at your school. And that likely shows up in other behavior.
But then, to me, "temporarily take guns away from a small segment of the population who has demonstrated, serious mental health issues" doesn't seem like a slippery slope. So I guess I'm on the "other side" of the issue. :/
Of note, the current interpretation of gun rights (the individual right to own) is a relatively new construct largely created by the gun lobby (roughly 1977, when there was an internal rebellion in NRA leadership) and a conservative court (Heller, 2008).
And FWIW, I'm in the camp that we can't define "crazy" adequately. So, I'm all for limiting access to all semi-automatic firearms. Regulate them all similarly to automatics and other "NFA" weapons.
Yup, the US constitution, including all of the Bill of Rights, only started being incorporated after the 13th Amendment.
The 2nd wasn’t even incorporated until McDonald v Chicago in 2010.
I mean, Barron v Baltimore could not be more clear about this:
The third clause (of Section 9), for example, declares that "no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed." No language can be more general; yet the demonstration is complete that it applies solely to the government of the United States.... the succeeding section, the avowed purpose of which is to restrain state legislation... declares that "no state shall pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law.” This provision, then, of the ninth section, however comprehensive its language, contains no restriction on state legislation.
I understand your point of being able to react to situations faster.
The key word is "react". It's disappointing and shameful that there's an apparent need for kids to have phones because of prevalent school shootings. If you aren't advocating for gun reform yet I hope you and others jump on board soon so that we can squash that fear and move on to mitigating the damage these computers in our pockets are causing to children and teens.
There was a time where school shootings weren't a primary concern and it was in my lifetime. It is possible to get back to that. We need to fight for it because it's not fair to the students that are traversing the school system, their families, and the ever climbing numbers of dead or harmed babies, children, teens, young adults, adults, and elderly and all living relatives affected by gun violence.
I understand your concern towards the difficult situation and your immediate action to look out for your family.
However, your anecdotal experience is still a "false positive" (fortunately), which doesn't allow us to conclude that, in the case of an actual emergency such as a school shooting, children with phones are statistically safer than children without phones.
But I'm genuinely interested in such a study, and I believe data is already available for us to compare the differences in these kinds of occurrences before the emergence of smartphones in schools and after. That would provide a north for making decisions that truly improve security for us and our loved ones.
I feel like a drama queen, because we (my immediate family) have had two near misses in 3 days. We were at the Allen Outlets and left 5 minutes before the shooting happened. 2 days later there's a school shooting threat at my son's high school.
Nothing physical has happened to _us_. I can't stand up and say, "I lost a family member due to gun violence!". I still feel like things are spiraling out of control and there's nothing I can do about it. How do you stop going outside where other people are for fear of a shooting? How do you send your only child to school knowing what's going on?
I hope I can cope and hope that everything turns out OK.
I think the main challenge is that true a solution can only be reached if the society as a whole faces the issue together. Meanwhile families are left on their own to try their (suboptimal) best.
I recently saw this youtube piece that shares the Swiss perspective on the topic of Gun ownership, and apart from some intended sarcasm in it that can bother viewers with distinct political views, the content has been worth watching:
> You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
There are multiple layers of “bad” with this. If there is a threat, you’re hindering emergency response. Regardless, you’re putting everyone at risk by “speeding down the street.”
I know the general consensus is that I did a bad thing with my reaction. I get it.
I don't trust law enforcement to do the right thing. I don't trust that grown adults sworn to serve and protect would act quickly to neutralize a threat that's not against themselves or their loved ones.
I see Uvalde playing out more than once in the future.
jtreminio says:"I don't trust law enforcement to do the right thing. I don't trust that grown adults sworn to serve and protect would act quickly to neutralize a threat that's not against themselves or their loved ones."
Your decision, were it properly weighed, would have to also assume that you could do better somehow but that is impossible (even if you were John Wick or Jason Bourne).
The hubris you display is enormous! Imagine that the American embassy had dropped an Chinese-American citizen into the middle of the square during the Tiananmen Massacre and demanded that he rescue the man under the tank!
Emotions got the better of you - you're in denial. There are a few more steps before you'll admit that retrieving your child was a futile and risky act for you, him and everyone else.
How would you take down an armed assailant yourself? In this hypothetical scenario where you are rushing to the school, are you carrying a firearm as well?
There will be no emergency response. Just a clean up crew. If you get there first you might get in before they Block the entrance and wait for the situation to resolve.
You've computed, incorrectly but that's not relevant here, P(his kid dies in a school shooting).
What you should have computed is P(his kid dies in a school shooting|rumor of shooting threat at school that enough people believe that they are leaving the school).
We WERE at the Allen Outlets on Saturday. We left 5 minutes before the shooting began. If I had purchased one more item from a store we would have been right there.
Tell me again how I am being hysterical. This country is going down in flames and not everyone can see the fire.
A traumatic experience for sure. One might almost think that after such an experience, you'd overreact at the slightest hint of anything like that ever happening again.
You are being hysterical.
(I am sorry for sounding dismissive. I pray for the safety of your family.)
You are hysterical, possibly b/c your interpretation is pessimistic. But most people interpret such an occurrence as a sign they are lucky.
I recommend you adopt such an attitude b/c it is healthier and b/c, when your story is retold, people will often want to touch you (so that the "good luck" rubs off on them)!
Most shootings at schools are targeted (jilted lover type situations—often these target an adult, not a student; something related to other crime, like beef over drug dealing territory between students) or are coincidences (a shooting otherwise having nothing to do with the school happens to take place on the edge of the parking lot, or something like that). They're not what people usually mean by "school shooting"—though, I mean, obviously they're still not great.
However, even including those, a couple years back I ran the numbers on odds of a kid even being present (not hurt or killed) during any kind of shooting at a school, over a 13-year K-12 school career, and I don't remember the exact figure, but it was low enough that I concluded none of this was worth any real concern on my part at all. And that's assuming shootings at schools are evenly distributed, which I'm sure they're not.
> The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.
You have badly misread the statistics on this, if you're that worried about it.
We (and companies) need to ditch the equivocation and be honest about what we created.
(Edit) > Parents have been split on the issue, with many critics insisting their children need phones in case of an emergency.
Is a red herring and justification for helicopter parents to normalize their micromanaging.
Someone shouldn't be texting or calling on their cell in an active shooter situation anyway. One phone per teacher/room, with the ability for anyone to dial emergency services, is better.