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France Bans Smartphones in School (washingtonpost.com)
When French students return to school in September they'll have to leave one of their most prized possessions at home -- their smartphone. From a report: French lawmakers on Monday passed legislation banning students as old as 15 from bringing smartphones and tablets to school or having them turned off at least, according to the Agence France-Presse. Officials in support of the new rule described the policy as a way to shield children from addictive habits and to safeguard the sanctity of the classroom. "We know today that there is a phenomenon of screen addiction, the phenomenon of bad mobile phone use," education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French news channel BFMTV, according to CNN. "Our main role is to protect children and adolescents. It is a fundamental role of education, and this law allows it." The law, however, does make exceptions for educational use, extra-curricular actives and for students with disabilities, the AFP reports. French high schools can choose to impose a less stringent ban on Internet-connected devices.
Oh wait, they are.
You may be confused, this is France, not America, where the public schools are a mix of shooting gallery, drug den, drone factory and whorehouse, and the private schools are filled with religious indoctrination to make the next generation of arrows for Jesus.
Much better to take notes on dead trees -- aside from the usual distractions, too easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole of searches about something which the professors said which you found interesting. Save the tablet/phone for after class.
If you can't detach for a few hours, you're addicted.
Most kids would rather be on a cell phone playing games than ANY education method- fun or not.
I'm not saying a diversity of teaching techniques and hands on learning isn't useful- it clearly is a good idea; but the phones should be banned too. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
There is no need for school students to have a cell phone in school, period; let alone a smartphone. School is a place for learning and phones and tablets are a distraction.
A student is more likely to be killed by a deer than by a school shooting at a U.S. school (ignore the dumb up-voted reply who doesn't realize that fatality rates are comparable between different population sizes). The whole school shooting "epidemic" is a fabrication by the news media (who are mostly pro-gun control). 3x more students die from complications due to pregnancy and childbirth than from school shootings. Why aren't there 3x as many news stories about the evils of teen pregnancy?
The biggest threat of death facing students is car accidents. That's followed by suicide - usually from bullying. That's over 100x as common as death from school shootings. France's suicide statistics are similar to the U.S., so it's not unreasonable to think their student suicide rate is similar. And smartphones and social media are one of the primary methods now used by students to bully each other.