A diploma from the type of school the author describes is already pretty worthless, imo.
I don't get why schools can't just get strict in response to these issues. No electronics in class, period. Accessibility problems can be fixed by having each impaired student get a volunteer scribe for the class.
You're in school to learn, and electronics hinder in-person education more than they help, especially as ChatGPT style AI is available on them.
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.
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.
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.
At its core, I think it's basically just a self-evident metaphor of how human cognition works that does not need any validation.
For example it's very clear that when you see a square you can instantly tell what shape it is without reasoning about the number and length of the sides, angles etc.; another System 1 example would be driving, you can do it for hours without even thinking through your physical actions, I need to press this pedal, shift into this gear, etc. the car basically becomes an extension of your body.
Conversely, when asked to mentally multiply 175 and 12 the answer does not similarly jump out in the head of most people, and you need to run an algorithm to get the answer, and the process of doing that is frustrating and tiresome if you don't have the exercise; conversely, with enough exercise, the answer might jump out, or your brain might begin to see patterns and shortcuts like 175 = 350/2 and 12 = 10+2 etc. This is what education forces, this continuous exercise that leads to higher cognitive function.
I don't think you could dispute the paradigm in this vague and self-evident form, but surely the exact details of how System 1 does its pattern matching and how System 2 rationally trains it to recognize future patterns are up for debate. Some of the examples and arguments Kahneman gives are dated and have been discredited or questioned in the great psychology replication crisis.
Is System 1 equivalent to all four stages, or does it include more or less than that?
Is there a similar set of stages for multiplication, and how does one tell if it's System 1 or System 2?
If there is an innate modularity of mind, does the System 1/System 2 lets us assign which modules are which?
In Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development there is "a series of four qualitatively distinct stages (the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational stages)." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-general_learning )
Which of those are System 1 or System 2, or is that a completely different view of how the mind works? If the latter, which makes stronger predictive claims and what is the result of comparative testing?
That same page describes John B. Carroll's three stratum theory, and others.
That there are so many different self-evident metaphors for human cognition is exactly the reason it needs validation.
> 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.
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
I don't get why schools can't just get strict in response to these issues. No electronics in class, period. Accessibility problems can be fixed by having each impaired student get a volunteer scribe for the class.
You're in school to learn, and electronics hinder in-person education more than they help, especially as ChatGPT style AI is available on them.