Here's a couple of arguments I had to deal with whilst expressing my support for electronics ban at schools including a blanket social media ban:
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
> I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
Those statements as described earlier were made in bad faith:
> 1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
A public school intervenes between the parent and their children to tell the student what is good work and what is not. Parents do not always know best. (Yes, there are policies which let the parent appeal, but the parent does not have final authority.)
Child protective services can take children away from parents who are egregiously poor parents.
I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
If we believe in educating citizens then we set rules to help educate citizens. There is a long history of prohibiting certain electronics at school. At https://archive.org/details/makingvaluejudgm0000elde/page/38... we can read that over 50 years ago some schools prohibited transistor radios.
If the claim is in good faith then it's also saying that laws and rules forbidding smoking in school must be repealed. I certainly want to keep them in place, so I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
Which is an argument that if the child wants to play video games all day and is getting Ds or worse in every class, than teachers should like the child continue to make that mistakes. I don't see this as a good faith argument.
Do you really think that people can't come up with such arguments on their own? People aren't very unique, lots of people independently come up with very similar stupid arguments.
You should have to deal with these arguments, as should anyone else who is in a similar position to you advocating for an institution to ban something for other people.
I will not say that some kind of electronic use ban at schools is necessarily bad, but someone proposing such a ban should absolutely have answers at hand to these reasonable counter-arguments.
Forbidding things doesn't work. Not for kids and not for adults. Hence speakeasys and the end of prohibition, or the war on drugs (which was won by drugs).
In pretty much all countries that instituted heavy restrictions on smoking, e.g. banning smoking from restaurants, you can see an accelerated drop in number of smokers the years after that ban regardless of changes in education. This is particularly easy to verify because it has been done in many countries but all at fairly different points in time. Some did it decades ago, some have done it recently, there are still countries where it's allowed.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
Would a parent be allowed to send their kid in with a pack of smokes, and expect their kid can smoke them inside the school?
No?
Because it effects others and brings down the overall ability for the learning environment to succeed. Same deal with phones. If it makes the environment toxic to success, there should probably be some prohibition within those grounds. This isn't banning phones across the board, or banning them for kids. It's banning them within a location, like how firearms are banned inside courthouses.
Forbidding things works. People drank less during prohibition, and they do less drugs than they would were they legalized. Hence there is no serious proposal to legalize most hard drugs
Eh, nuance: forbidding things entirely, which people want to do, and don't really harm others, doesn't work.
Having separate spaces works a lot better. Which is why we have alcohol venue licensing. Forbidding kids from phones entirely, at the same time as adults are on them constantly, isn't going to work. But having a phone-free space like a smoke-free space is more viable.
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.