This is the best summary I could come up with:

Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.

As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake).

The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps.

When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health.

Providing dumb phones could be part of the way forward, Nina Marks admits, but she wonders if funds at already strapped public schools could be put to better use.

While Hollier says that Light Phones are intentionally small and slow, so that people use them less, students report that they also break easily and the batteries die quickly, which wasn’t in the plan.

The original article contains 1,688 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Today my computer science teacher asked a friend of mine to show his screentime statistics as a joke. Bro literally spent an average of +11h A DAY on his phone…

I watched the first generation that got personal unrestricted mobile phones for themselves. Somehow I thought it was a good idea at the time. It fucked them up mentally, and then Covid-19 came and doubled the effect.

Now I think that a parent who gets their under 12 year old kid a smart phone should be treated roughly in the same way as if the parent gave the kid cocaine.

Don’t all schools ban phones? They were banned when I was in highschool maybe ten years ago. And smartphones were already very much a thing by that point. Everyone still used them because enforcement was basically impossible.

The only teacher I ever saw who had an effective strategy was my math teacher. He told kids to put their phones on their desk at the beginning of class so that they were out in the open. If he found out you had come to class with a phone and didn’t put it on the desk, you’d lose it, even if you weren’t using it. And then he said you could use them for a few seconds to check them, but you had to keep them out in the open. No hiding the phone by your legs.

Having lived my whole life in the Information Age, I am 100% in support of this.

Problem with the digital world is it’s all fake, it’s all bullshit. It’s only anything at all because we’re here. But like everything, it comes with a cost.

During the brain formation years, the brain should get opportunity to form both with and without it, so the maximum number of possible capabilities are preserved for future access.

Anyone and everyone can benefit from putting away their smartphone, not just students.

Off topic, but when were the photos of these students taken? Their clothing and hair looks like they came straight out of the 90s. Even some of the photos themselves looks “film-like”.

Crazy how people otherwise firm supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of tech suddenly change their minds when the person involved is under 18.

You actually hit it right in the nail. What actually works is talking to them like thinking, rational human beings, explain the situation and then be a mature adult and understand that they will have to make their own choices and there is nothing you can do about it.

Ideally we should be teaching self-control instead of submission and evasion. A lot of what’s going on in the world stems from this tendency.

For enclosed schools, it surprises me they don’t just faraday cage all the rooms, and then run school-controlled wifi.

But in my day, teachers freaked out about electronic calculators and word processors. I’d think the appropriate thing to do is integrate smart-phone use into curricula. If your kids are texting, then your teaching model sucks.

But here in the states, we already know our teaching model sucks, because the state doesn’t take it seriously and gives zero fucks about kids until they can be loaded with debt and can serve as a laborer or soldier for billionaire vanity projects.

I went to school right at the time where Smartphones become popular and at the beginning most either had no phone or a basic featurephone and in the end almost everyone had a smartphone. And I think the impact was very minimal. School sucked regardless. People were bullied regardless. Some had really short attention spans regardless.

Official government recommendation for Dutch school is to ban smartphones in class. For now it’s just an advice, but it may become law in the future.

Personally I went to school before smartphones were a thing and it was still miserable lmao