Comment by cornholio
20 days ago
The "no devices in school" rule has been tried, scientifically tested, and it doesn't really improve outcomes: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
The real damage is in the brains and attention spans, traditional school just can't compete with the massive dopamine overstimulus of System A thinking students get every day for an average of 6-8h outside school, by simply requiring focused System B reasoning on tiresome and (comparatively) dull tasks while enforcing dopamine withdrawal.
Your appealing to authority with a lancet article but the article just concludes that kids don't spend less time on their phones because of the school bans.
Irrespective of brain feedback mechanisms after school it is still a better teaching/learning environment for students to have a device ban during school time.
What kids or parents enable after school is beyond school policies. Nevertheless teachers should be minimally protected in their ability to teach and kids in their ability to learn.
Somewhat ironically given the topic, you are misreading the scientific article:
> No significant differences in pupil outcomes were observed between permissive and restrictive schools for all other behavioural outcomes (Fig. 2, Table 3) or for attainment in English (adjusted odds ratio 1.45, 95% CI 0.85–2.47, p = 0.18, reference = permissive) and Maths (adjusted odds ratio 1.01, 95% CI 0.45–2.27, p = 0.98, reference = permissive).
Nothing I've said could be interpreted to support the exposure of kids to addictive devices, simply that the quick fix proposed does not seem to have any effect.
The first author's commentary at https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj-2024-082569.full is easier to read than the paper you linked to.
In it she suggests that rather than thinking of a smart phone ban like a smoking ban,
> A more constructive analogy than smoking might be driving cars. In response to increasing injuries and deaths from car crashes, rather than banning cars, society built an ecosystem of product safety regulations for companies (seatbelts, airbags) and consumers (vehicle safety tests, penalties), public infrastructure (traffic lights), and education (licences) to support safer use. Comparative efforts in product safety and education are needed to supplement debates about smartphone and social media bans and to balance the positive and indispensable role of digital technologies against their potential harms.
It's an intriguing analogy because we know well how dangerous cars are to health and the environment, we know there are people who don't want to drive but are forced to because there are no alternatives, and we know how much many drivers oppose support for bike lanes, mass transit, and other alternatives.
And we know the history of how the UK over her entire life has transformed to be more and more car dependent.
If we embrace that analogy, then we need to support alternatives to being digital, with the right to an offline life.
I don't know what System A and System B are, a DDG search for "System A {thinking,reasoning}" finds nothing useful, and the paper says nothing about it nor about comparing dopamine levels.
I apologize for the "System A/B" confusion, I was of course trying to reference the "System 1/2" paradigm from Daniel Kahneman's well known book "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
Addictive apps are algorithmically tuned to maximize user screen time so my (unproven) hypothesis is that tend to promote content that minimizes deep System 2 thinking, which is well known to tire the brain and deplete its energy storage. Educational content - if it's any good - is all about training deep thinking.
Thank you. I had not heard of it before.
Has it been validated? I cannot find citations which test and verify the applicability of that idea.
I ask because there's a long history (left-brain/right-brain, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, learning style theory, power pose, etc) where intriguing ideas which makes some intuitive sense end up being not so clear cut.
2 replies →
> Students' sleep, classroom behaviour, exercise or how long they spend on their phones overall also seems to be no different for schools with phone bans and those without, the academics found.
> However, they did find that spending longer on smartphones and social media in general was linked with worse results for all of those measures.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8plvqv60lo
About the same study. Again, when kids are not on their phones they do better at school. Period. A ban is just a way to try to get there. If it's not effective because kids skirt the rules, we try something else