I think it's just a result of society insisting that their entire lives revolve around a phone due to convenience. Kids these days (I feel old saying that at age 33!) now are raised by parents who were around for the first wave of everyone having a phone, except those parents' phones up until college or later were dumb phones that could call, text, and take pictures (and play snake!). Thus, their well-intentioned move to give their kids a phone is self-defeating and will only hurt in the long run.
I went to a public school and don't really remember at any level of classes where my classmates were outright addicted to their phones - some would occasionally text or take pictures or whatever, but perhaps that was due to the limitations of what the device could do.
I do understand that modern problems need to be addressed with modern solutions, and smartphones, in a vacuum, aren't a bad thing - they open up a lot of avenues of education that were simply not possible when I was growing up....and I'm all for that, I think its better to prepare kids for the world of tomorrow rather than the world of yesterday. However, there needs to be a limit to how intertwined technology becomes with modern educational practices.
I dread the US becoming like China, where people's lives revolve around a smartphone from a very early age. Sadly, we might have missed that boat already.
I went to a public school and don't really remember at any level of classes where my classmates were outright addicted to their phones - some would occasionally text or take pictures or whatever, but perhaps that was due to the limitations of what the device could do.
I do understand that modern problems need to be addressed with modern solutions, and smartphones, in a vacuum, aren't a bad thing - they open up a lot of avenues of education that were simply not possible when I was growing up....and I'm all for that, I think its better to prepare kids for the world of tomorrow rather than the world of yesterday. However, there needs to be a limit to how intertwined technology becomes with modern educational practices.
I dread the US becoming like China, where people's lives revolve around a smartphone from a very early age. Sadly, we might have missed that boat already.