[HN Gopher] NY smartphone ban has made lunch loud again
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NY smartphone ban has made lunch loud again
Author : hrldcpr
Score : 158 points
Date : 2025-11-05 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gothamist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gothamist.com)
| everdrive wrote:
| Hopefully society continues to develop healthy norms with regard
| to this sort of technology. Collectively it's taken us a while,
| but I think people generally are starting to get the picture.
| Smartphones are bad in a wide variety of ways, but even when
| people miss some of the nuance I think we can make progress
| regarding the minimization of their usage.
| causal wrote:
| Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that tech
| companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for us.
| chronciger wrote:
| > Hopefully as a society we can also learn the lesson that
| tech companies cannot be trusted to deliver what's best for
| us.
|
| If society were ignorant, then it's forgivable. But society
| is not ignorant.
|
| We know tech companies deliver things bad for us (lies and
| manipulation).
|
| And we knowingly choose it, over the good (truth).
| 9rx wrote:
| Why would anyone expect them to deliver what is best for us
| when the purpose of a company is to deliver what others
| _want_?
| array_key_first wrote:
| Because social media sites like Facebook literally said
| they're going to make the world better, by connecting more
| people and empowering more ideas.
|
| It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it,
| myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social
| media was much more optimistic.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much
| more optimistic._
|
| Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I
| suppose.
|
| _> It was all bullshit of course_
|
| Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being
| incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media,
| people don't actually want to be social online. That
| takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to
| spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back,
| relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
|
| As before, businesses can only survive if they give
| others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily
| overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger
| isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in
| because it is something many people want. Arguably small
| communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people
| can make it work to some extent, but that is not
| something that captures the masses.
|
| It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of
| social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are
| little more than TV channels with a small mix of
| newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually
| found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the
| 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either.
| It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally
| speaking).
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do
| what most people would consider good that also required
| any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part? My
| impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask
| forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but
| because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us
| look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark
| reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
| rc5150 wrote:
| This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA
| for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that
| the kids are exposed to violent images.
|
| While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies
| that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc,
| it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and
| moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or
| Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for
| society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and
| accountable adults.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| America has an entire political party who runs a party line
| that unregulated businesses will _naturally_ do what 's
| "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even
| sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means
| "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to
| constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society
| to collapse.
|
| >What's best for society is a collection of rational,
| intelligent, and accountable adults.
|
| That same party insists that you should be able to _choose_
| to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but
| teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like
| "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not
| proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They
| demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to
| these institutions, based on _their_ choice.
|
| Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of
| millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian"
| americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative
| media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce
| tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an
| imagined persecution complex against christians.
|
| If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have
| power or sway in this country, they are literally the
| reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn
| businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and
| probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House
| majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous
| VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like
| Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of
| christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ.
| Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made
| millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh,
| and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Here in MA there is a 'bell to bell' phone ban bill in the
| works. I'm very happy we're letting kids be kids again. There
| is no need for a phone during the school day.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I'm expecting a kiddo this winter and my use of devices+my
| likely future kid's relationship with tech has really been on
| my mind. The fact that people are thinking through this and
| actually working on it puts me slightly more at ease.
| eitally wrote:
| You probably won't have much to worry about until you have
| to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is
| a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have
| peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head
| again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is
| middle school age and all their friends have smartphones.
| Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for
| you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off
| of... them having a device.
|
| Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device
| control software on their phones and laptops. The younger
| of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one
| just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his
| life [most of the time].
|
| I _personally_ advise you not to let your young kid get
| into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft
| are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits
| are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable
| by much healthier alternatives.
|
| Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have
| Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle
| & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for
| math. When she watches streaming media, though, she
| frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked
| me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with
| that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch
| things without other people meddling in her business.
| Shrug.
| Yeul wrote:
| Parents have always wanted time for themselves. There are
| Americans alive today who will tell you that they used to
| play outside from dusk to dawn and only saw their parents
| at dinner.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Banning a 16 year old from minecraft is so far beyond
| reasonable imo. I'd agree with not giving young kids
| ipads and walking away. But what sounds like a blanket
| ban on gaming is absurd.
| eitally wrote:
| California just got strict about this, too. I have found a
| dramatic increase in the amount of interpersonal _talking_
| that 's happening in school as a result, which is great!
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Australia banned phones in schools 1-2 years ago and it's
| been widely recognised as a huge success. I think banning
| social media like facebook/tiktok/etc for kids would be a
| huge benefit as well. Leaving just IM/group chats for kids
| to directly talk to each other without scrolling a feed of
| ragebait and ai slop.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| And just to show how (US) universal this idea is becoming, a
| Texas law banning cellphones went into effect at the start of
| the school year.
|
| This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten
| Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms
| would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while
| it works it's way through the courts [0]
|
| [Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban]
| https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-
| ban...
|
| [0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-
| schoo...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > how (US) universal
|
| I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is
| quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal.
| There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia,
| France, Germany is talking about it.
| amelius wrote:
| Some people will slap a label like "liberal" on "using my
| smartphone whenever the hell I want". And then people will
| think that's how it should be.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| An electronic version of coal rolling. "You can't tell me
| this is unhealthy, and I'm going to prove it!"
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Sounds more like "freedom" which New York has taken away with
| some big government regulations.
|
| /S
| causal wrote:
| It makes me so sad that it's possible for technology to steal the
| need to talk and play, even from our youth. If you have little
| kids you know how frantically they NEED to yap and play. I hold
| such horror for anything that would sap such life away.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| It varies a lot. My kids will run around and play given the
| opportunity, but when they arrive home at 6pm from after-school
| club, completely exhausted, I think it's fair that they get to
| collapse in front of a screen for a bit.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV.
|
| For my parents, it was the radio.
|
| For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy
| ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of _The Pickwick
| Papers_! "), or playing instruments.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Yup. I'm Gen X (1972), and I'd read a book, watch TV, or
| (once we hit the mid-80s) I had a home computer.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I spent much of my free childhood hours from about 1976
| to 1988 in front of a computer screen. But I was
| certainly not in the mainstream.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| I don't think the mainstream people end up on HN.
| bix6 wrote:
| Music is medicine. I've been taking guitar for a few years
| now and it's pure joy.
| bluGill wrote:
| Problem is for the first month of lessons it is not joy,
| it is hard frustrating work where you sound bad and know
| it. Even when you are good lessons often are pushing you
| to do hard things and so they are not pure joy.
|
| My son has been taking violin for years, is really good,
| and loves it - but most of his practice time is still
| really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the
| hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...)
| and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped
| lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
| bix6 wrote:
| Practicing is always hard and I struggle to find time or
| energy to push myself but my goal was to be able to play
| basic chords and make up silly songs around the campfire
| so everything else is just a bonus.
| wagwang wrote:
| These things are not remotely comparable. Smartphones,
| especially social media double depression and suicide rates
| among teens.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Even then, individual screens is isolating.
|
| Collapsing in front of the TV with the family was still
| quality time enjoying something together.
| mister_mort wrote:
| For a lot of young people the screen is social - the
| equivalent of the long after-school phonecalls from the
| before times. Be it games or just Discord, it's still
| comms.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short
| video clips that are largely designed to sell product,
| stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty,
| etc.
|
| Observe young people using their phones, and you can see
| the social use is often just occasionally switching from
| TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and
| then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from
| having actual long phone conversations with friends after
| school.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most of the social of screens is when you get to a place
| without them you have something common to talk about.
| "how about [local sports team]", "what did you think
| about [whatever happened on latest soap opera]", "lets
| pretend I'm [some character on cartoon]". It is all
| shorthand for we have something in common and can skip
| getting to know each other.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Individual screens let parents get some peace and quiet for
| a while. As with everything, moderation is the key, not
| abstention.
| vel0city wrote:
| Individual screens _can_ be isolating, they can also be
| somewhat social. I agree, not a complete replacement for
| other social activities for sure. But, as a kid with
| internet connected videogames growing up, those internet
| connected games kept me playing with friends from school
| and other groups even if we weren 't able to physically get
| together that evening.
|
| Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a
| fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all.
| I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any
| way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation.
| There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become
| isolating.
| brainzap wrote:
| The play-based childhood is over; the phone-based childhood is
| here.
| tyleo wrote:
| It's here but do we think it's better? Should it stay?
|
| As a society we do get to answer these questions.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| As a society we've proven over and over again that we're
| unable to solve these problems that require coordination
| against greed. We've pulled the smartphone out of Pandora's
| box.
|
| There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion
| selling telecom services, trillions more selling social
| media, and most of the economy involves selling their
| products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives
| to maintain the status quo, or get people even more
| addicted yet.
|
| I don't think our society is capable of answering that
| question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and
| destroying all machines-that-think.
| naIak wrote:
| No, the issue is that most parents don't want to do any
| parenting. There's a product that makes children shut up,
| of course it's selling out.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Not universally though, the local skate park and sports
| fields see plenty of activity.
| chronciger wrote:
| > Not universally though, the local skate park and sports
| fields see plenty of activity.
|
| Sure if "at least one match" means activity.
|
| Back in the day, you couldn't find parking for several
| blocks radius around every public sports field.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| Just until they are shutdown to put in pickleball for
| retirees.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Thankfully that state is far from evenly-distributed.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| The school president is 17?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Yes, the president of the student-elected body of mostly-
| powerless "school government."
| JJMcJ wrote:
| The student-elected body is often called the Student Council.
|
| Sometimes each grade level will have a class president.
|
| Varies from school to school for the details.
| jes5199 wrote:
| it's an america thing
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Other countries don't have prefects? Wikipedia seems to
| indicate the phenomenon is worldwide.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_president
| 1718627440 wrote:
| We wouldn't call such a thing a president, but yes.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| That's just an elected student position that usually interfaces
| with the school leadership about student issues - it isn't the
| vice principal/principal/superintendent that run the school(s)
| cramcgrab wrote:
| No more kids cameras in the classroom
| leptons wrote:
| This does nothing to ban cameras. The fact that a smartphone
| has a camera doesn't mean cameras are banned. You can still
| bring a standalone camera to school.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Which would cause a lot of questions if you pull it out in
| the classroom.
| jollyllama wrote:
| I don't think smartphones should be allowed in schools but as
| someone who was dumbfounded by the lunchtime cacophony of my
| peers, I wouldn't lead with that as a triumph.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Those of us who hate the noise of boisterous social
| conversation are the outliers, but it is a sign of their
| healthy social environment. I personally was always able to
| find a quiet spot.
|
| My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult
| persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my
| personal tolerance to be their norm.
| cmxch wrote:
| Tech will prevail on the long term, even with these misguided
| bans.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The smartphone OSs hide all that "tech". They are not more
| educational (by themselves) than interactive advertisement
| streams.
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem, when it comes to smartphone bans, isn't the kids,
| believe it or not.
|
| My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is
| that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT
| contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of
| everything all the time. It's not great.
| bluGill wrote:
| Schools should provide quiet spaces for kids who don't want
| noise during lunch. The library should always be open during
| lunch hours. There should always be an outdoor space for those
| who want it (unless there is lightening - I assuming you know
| how to dress for any other weather).
|
| Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud
| during lunch there should be a place for them to do that.
| Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like
| perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a
| minority.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is really funny for me to read because as a kid we were
| prohibited from having telecommunications devices while at school
| entirely. We were also prohibited from speaking during lunchtime.
| Our lunch was most definitely not loud.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You can always tell a Milford man.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| When I was in elementary school one of the teachers would hold
| a decibel meter and subtract minutes off of recess if we got
| above a whispered conversation.
| bluGill wrote:
| In class that is good. However at lunch kids should be
| talking to other kids. I know many teachers/schools are
| control freaks and so they would do such things, but it was
| always evil.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Have you never been to a room full of people/children? If
| there aren't these 'control freaks' in the room, then it
| gets louder and louder until to the limit where nobody can
| understand anything while all are shouting. It's
| surprisingly fast, about ~2 minutes to the maximum/stable
| loudness. This 'control freaks' are the requirement to
| allow children to have a conversation.
| bluGill wrote:
| in small doses, but I've seen them go overboard to the
| point where we are better off without.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| If the teacher completely forbids talking, they will just
| talk right around the corner, or write on paper. They
| will be just unable to impose it on the children for
| long.
| tootie wrote:
| So I have eye witness accounts of this lunchroom saying that's
| not true. The lunchroom was deafeningly loud before the ban.
|
| This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing
| kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who
| actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
| donohoe wrote:
| I have a kid in a non-magnet HS and one in a magnet HS (in
| NYC). This article isn't off-the-mark but I would say there
| will always be variations by school.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| All my teacher friends (before this article) had joyously
| reported on lunch rooms being loud again (and even fights and
| lol, sex) happening.... But in a good way. If kids aren't
| getting into some trouble then they're not interacting and
| learning about society and human nature enough
| bemmu wrote:
| Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to "think more in class"
| because she used to Google answers or use artificial
| intelligence. "Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do]
| deep research instead of going straight to AI," she said.
|
| This kind of blew my mind a bit, as I had always imagined AI
| being used to do homework, hadn't occurred to me it could be used
| _during_ a class as well.
| ugh123 wrote:
| That just sounds like lazy teacher discipline in class. Decades
| ago we couldn't even use calculators on some tests, but now (or
| up until recently) they could practically have a computer in
| their hands all class?
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| Allowing kids to have their phones in class, even if they
| weren't allowed to use them, was setting teachers up for
| failure. It's easy to call them lazy, but if you've ever
| tried to police the phone use of a bunch of screen-addicted
| adolescents you would understand. The calculator comparison
| is not a good one.
| malnourish wrote:
| I encourage you to seek first-hand accounts of what teaching
| in a contemporary public school classroom is like. Teacher
| discipline can account for so much.
| Razengan wrote:
| The insistence of people, in every era, on staying in a
| previous technology tier instead of reforming society and
| culture around the present ubiquitous technology, doesn't
| really make sense.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Are you saying that _reading comprehension_ is an outdated
| technology?
| Iulioh wrote:
| Look, I had a zoomer colleague of mine ask GPT to solve a
| moral dilemma in a personality test at work...
|
| It's...rough out there.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Surely reading comprehension is still required for, well,
| reading AI-generated text. Perhaps it's not their intention
| but I read an implication that using humans to source facts
| is outdated, which is... well, I'll just assume that I'm
| misunderstanding their perspective.
| kevinfiol wrote:
| As a millennial, the concept of public school lunch not being
| loud is weird to me! I always remember the constant chatter of
| school lunch. Definitely had my share of hearty shared laughs,
| and heated conversations during lunchtime.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones
| were quite common.
|
| The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in
| their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a
| rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you
| had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though
| somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
| havblue wrote:
| I'm guessing that teachers never wanted smartphones in class in
| the first place and that this was just about pushing back against
| the helicopter parents.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Kids have phones for "safety" reasons. It's pretty irrational,
| but hard to push back against without help from on high.
| wavemode wrote:
| I'm astounded that this has become a thing. My school had a
| zero-tolerance "if I see it, I confiscate it" phone policy. And
| your parent had to come retrieve it.
|
| There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally
| fell out of a pocket lol
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I'm out of school for 3 years. For most of the time smartphones
| existed, but were forbidden in class. It were the teachers, who
| allowed it and even encouraged it to be used in class. When the
| students are already staring at a screen during class, they
| continue doing so after. When they do not, they don't (at least
| initially). In my final years, it was obvious who thought about
| class and who was completely mind-absent, by looking who looked
| at an school-supplied iPad. > 90% of these people were just
| playing games during the whole lesson. This was known by
| everyone in the classroom and the teachers just ignored them.
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated
| when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018,
| and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing
| during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is
| odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops.
| Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without
| them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
| chis wrote:
| That's an interesting data point. I think covid did a lot of
| damage too. Kids spending formative years stuck in their room
| texting just didn't get the chance to build basic social skills
| and habits.
|
| But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and
| earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10
| when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as
| addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have
| vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Smartphones are this century's cigarrettes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's fascinating to see a practice that was previously limited to
| Silicon Valley executives become first a national class signifier
| and now go mainstream.
|
| We haven't extensively studied how social media and smartphones
| affect a kid's brain. It's becoming abundantly clear the former
| is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It's emerging that the
| latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| It hasn't been limited SV executives. Go to any Waldorf school
| and you'll find communities that have been resisting and
| banning phones in classrooms since the beginning. Probably many
| conservative Christian schools as well, though I have less
| experience with that.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| A whole lot of people who got to their great tech jobs by
| commoditizing their screen addictions (I.e a significant amount
| of this very website) are massively harmed by these policies. I
| can't believe that the folks here nearly universally like this.
|
| We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I learned to use a computer, by doing things that are possible
| air-gapped. Using a shell, etc. I did not by scrolling through
| social media, while all my peers treat computers like magic and
| lack basic knowledge, because they only know how to scroll
| through apps.
|
| Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is
| down.
| gostsamo wrote:
| The ban will be revoked after Meta sues for business damages
| caused by unlawful government interference with their customer
| acquisition operations. /s
| 1718627440 wrote:
| We need to sue Meta (et al.) for social damage caused by
| unlawful acquisition of addicts from the public education
| system. (My personal opinion)
| leptons wrote:
| FOOD FIGHT!!
| legel wrote:
| All of this read and written on a smartphone.
|
| Reversion to the past is not preparation for the future.
| chis wrote:
| It's so insane that they let things go this far. It could have
| been immediately obvious to those involved that cell phones in
| class would have immensely negative effects. I mean they talk
| about a lunch room "quiet enough to hear a pin drop"??
|
| I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in
| school. That time period is probably more important than any of
| the classes themselves.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| > I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch
| rooms in school
|
| What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy
| social lesson. It's who is allowed to sit where, and who is
| outcast from a table. It's the shit teenagers lower on the
| social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are
| higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High
| school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and
| lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If
| everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a
| benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and
| shaming.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Asociality is not the same thing as social harmony. It's not
| better for children if their shithead peers are replaced with
| smartphones.
|
| The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying
| are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you
| won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being
| unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a
| ton of different adult emotions.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| That high school is necessarily a place of cliquey behavior
| and bullying, and that kids may even benefit from it, is
| not a universal thing. In some countries, viewers of
| imported American TV shows are baffled by that depiction of
| high school, because in their high schools there aren't
| such hard knocks.
| squigz wrote:
| It might be better if those shithead peers are replaced
| with supportive peers who happen to be elsewhere in the
| world.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Both of these are different failure modes of adults to parent
| and/or mentor children. Just because A and B are both bad
| does not mean C is not a potentially better place to be. Just
| because lazy teachers and staffers tell kids "you have to
| learn to fight your own battles" does not make social media
| A-OK.
| justonceokay wrote:
| Learning where you fit in the social hierarchy and attempting
| to navigate that hierarchy is more important than anything
| you'll learn in math class. Even if it is embarrassing. It's
| not like you graduate high school and then the bullies go
| away.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| That's quite a claim. I'm not sure I buy it. We never had
| all this lunchroom social drama growing up, and my old
| mates and I seem to be doing just fine.
|
| Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more
| important than anything in math is because that's the kind
| of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's
| truly more important?
| squigz wrote:
| Generally, once you leave high school, you have a lot more
| choice in when/where you are forced to interact with
| bullies.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Avoidance: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's
| problems
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I feel like we have had a long history of overreacting to new
| things. "D&D is the devil", "Rock music is evil", etc. But we
| have just encountered one of the rare times where something new
| actually was harmful. But it rolled in so rapidly that it was
| universal before we had the chance to push back.
|
| I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these
| social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook
| ever could.
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