Let schools set and enforce their own policies.
It seems to me that the main result of having an actual legal ban is that teachers are now prevented from using smartphones in class for teaching purpose if they wanted to.
I can imagine that you can use smartphones for teaching purposes but I'm also sure that in the vast majority of cases it's a huge distraction. If a teacher wants to punctually tell their students to bring their phone for a special lesson the GIGN won't send their snipers to stop them.
Furthermore using the student's own smartphones as a support for courses creates an other issue: what about students who don't own one, or only a crappy one? It's not like they're cheap.
Having checked it, it allows exceptions (e.g. teaching purposes or for disabled pupils) which schools are free to decide on and set in their own rules.
The 'issue' of debating schools rules in each school, which isn't an issue at all, is thus not even addressed.
Arguing that a law is pointless because there are exceptions is like saying that red lights are pointless because ambulances are allowed to ignore them.
Of course if it turns out that most schools end up creating a huge number of exceptions which make it trivial for everybody to side-step the law then yes, it will end up being useless. It's a bit too early to tell though.
I am countering your argument that this law is useful because it prevents arguments in schools. This is both incorrect and lazy.
This is just a terrible argument. Just because a subset of people may be able to enact rules on their own does not mean you shouldn't create consistency at a higher level. Especially if you desire a specific outcome instead of having some groups come up with something completely different.
Also this law was one of Macron's campaign promises. People voted for this and people got what they voted for. Apparently people didn't want schools to make up their own rules.
Right, because there aren't any precedents with, say, banning smoking in schools. If you leave it entirely at the school level then a small number of motivated parents can harass the schools to get what they want. They did it with smoking[1] ("we don't want our children to leave the school grounds to smoke") and they did it with phones ("we want to be able to reach our children at any time"). Being able to stay "that's the law and that's it" is definitely a good way to avoid having this debate every year in September.
[1] http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/213036/article/2017-09-04/fumer-d...
[2] https://bit.ly/2xEDILf (sorry for the minified URL, HN won't let me post the original for some reason)
Also why would teachers need smartphones for teaching purposes. Most (all?) schools have proper desktop computers to learn things like Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) or Sketchup, etc.
Citation needed - that's not the case.
Schools are ran in a collegial manner (PTA + Teachers + Admin - I sit in my son's school board) What's imposed is pedagogical content (over a teaching cycle - three years long - kids should have learned this and that.) Then how it's done is really not the state's business. Schools implement it the way they want.
Schools were perfectly able to restrict use of smartphones before that law.
In fact, here is a description of schools' internal rules by the French government itself:
http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid100605/le-reglement-interieu...
I don't know why a few 'contributors' downvote comments in this thread. Is this Reddit?
You've asked this several times and it will attract downvotes every time as it's against the guidelines. People have been worried about HN "becoming like Reddit" since soon after it launched over 10 years ago.
People generally downvote because they don't find the comment convincing or enlightening.
Downvotes are less likely when commenters explain their position with thoughtfulness and effort to help the community understand and learn things.
Why is it flagged? What do i miss here?
You can vouch for it if you think the comment has its place here.
(edit I don't have the "vouch" option, so maybe the comment has been downvoted as well, but it doesn't appear grey to me so I'm not sure).
Other matters can be negotiated between the Ministry and the town council, like the number of teachers or number of classes.
What a school can decide, maybe (and provided the mayor of the town where it is located, agrees), are super trivial matters like the timing of recess, etc.
Most already were (my son's school was.)
> It seems to me that the main result of having an actual legal ban is that teachers are now prevented from using smartphones in class for teaching purpose if they wanted to.
All middle schools and up in France will soon be equipped with tablets. There's one large pilot happening in my region: books, assignments, quizzes, homework, etc... lots of it is done (at the teacher's discretion) on the tablet. It's great.
Music classes for instance are producing homework using garage band, etc...
Schools can pick their tablet. My son's school went with Apple. The high-school next door went with Android.
The fact that schools are state schools does not imply that headteachers cannot set some rules. Especially this new law does allow exceptions which schools can set in their own rules.
The fact that a law was passed means that this will apply to all schools, state and private. It's in fact explicit in the text of the law. Private schools are also "ruled by law"...
> The only exception is when smartphones’ use is assigned by a teacher.
If I understand right, the law was necessary to allow school to enforce such a rule.
It's more an attempt to stop nitpicking and move on with the question.
I cannot find a single reason to do it at any other level than national.
In my opinion the federal level government should mete out rules that are unquestionable. There's nobody of sound mind that would genuinely and rationally argue that stealing could be anything less than harmful to a society, and so it makes sense to lay out federal restrictions on such. But I am certain there are a good deal of people that would genuinely argue, with some evidence to support their cases, that smart phones are something less than harmful towards the development of children during school time.
To understand why I'd make this distinction, imagine this is something you would personally disagree with. Once something is federally banned it is quite difficult to unban it, and more importantly it also precludes any further studies of the effects of it on a large scale. By contrast imagine one region in France locally banned smartphones and another did not. And then after 20 years we see measurably different outcomes outside of these two regions previous trajectories. That would be quite informative and evidence that could help push more local regions to push for bans.
Local level bans allow citizens to choose to either opt-in or opt-out of certain rules and thus live in conditions that are closer to their ideal. Federal level bans, by contrast, are ultimate unless you choose to move to another country which is a much more substantial change than moving to another district/city/state/etc.
Citizens are equal everywhere, therefore it makes little sense not to enact public health measures nationally.
It seems even more questionable, to me, to enable a measure for 20 years in one region using their children as guinea pigs, but that would most likely be unconstitutional anyway.
That's how it works. A law is debated, voted on and if accepted then enacted. Another way to call it is "progress". It works the same for... well mostly everything that becomes law.
But since you're not French, you can easily wait 20 years and then decide if it was a good thing or not. For now, France has debated the subject and taken a decision, and I don't think it needs advice on whether the political process should have been different or not.
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And how would you propose measuring whether or not this experiment will be a success, lacking any control to measure it against? If it turns out French students are performing worse 20 years from now there will certainly have been countless other 'experiments' carried out since then, meaning any causality is going to be extremely difficult to trace. And similarly if they are performing better. By contrast when things are enacted locally we can often get samples of groups where things are very similar except for [x], which can help determine causality.
Instead it all turns into, as usual, retrospective confirmation bias. People take what they want to be true, and attribute positive results to that while taking what they don't want to be true and attribute negative results to that. It's hardly a logical way of trying to achieve genuine "progress."
As said elsewhere in that discussion, most school (all of them?) are already banning smartphone, so it has already been tested before.
This seems like a typical French statist approach...
But the real question is why are you questioning the way the French are running their own country? I don't think they are really asking for guidance on how to use the French political structures.
Boy, we are on Reddit...