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perlgeek

At my daughters' school, the rules are roughly:

* no phones during classes or during breaks (with the exception of lunch break, I think)

* phone can be allowed by teachers for a particular class and purpose

* if a student uses a phone while it's not allowed, the phone will be confiscated until the end of the school day

* (there might be a more severe rule for repeat offenders)

IMHO this strikes a pretty good balance between allowing phones for coordinating transit to school and back home, and no distraction in the class room.

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In Finland the confiscation is the problem (or rather WAS the problem, until this law).

Children are people, people have specific rights. A teacher is just a random person as far as the law is concerned and can't take someone's phone away any more than an usher in a movie theatre can take someone's phone for being disruptive.

By that argument, it sounds like schools in Finland have zero authority. How does punishment work? What's stopping a kid from going anywhere they want at any time or doing litterally anything that isn't outright illegal?

If Finnish children have the same rights as adults, does that mean the children are also subject to the same legal punishment as adults? Can a Finnish child be jailed or fined for the likes of theft, assault, or battery?

I don't know, but I would hope that it works because parents are expected to teach their children to behave. Also just because they can't take their phone or punish them, it doesn't mean that they can't suspend students or fail them.

> I don't know, but I would hope that it works because parents are expected to teach their children to behave.

Unfortunately that hasn't proven to be a reliable method here in the United States :(

> Also just because they can't take their phone or punish them, it doesn't mean that they can't suspend students or fail them.

I'm not a teacher but my wife is so I can only speak to what I've heard from her. And by her accounts, out-of-school suspention is ineffective because you're essentially rewarding misbehaving children with not having to come to school. She also isn't allowed to lower a student's grade for behavioral issues. Their grade is supposed to be purely a reflection of how well the know the material defined by the curriculum.

I'm aware that the US isn't Finland, what works in the latter might not work in other places. The US has gone to the far end of FREEDOM and is paying the consequences. Certain countries managed to reached an acceptable level of disciplined freedom.

Presumably there are laws that give teachers some rights to act in the place of parents and control students. However those laws did not include the ability to confiscate property preemptively.

At my daughter's high school, kids are expected to pay attention, take notes and get assignments done. There's little restriction on phone use unless the kids are explicitly supposed to be doing something else with their hands. Kids are even allowed to use personal laptops/chromebooks. They routinely send kids to Ivy leagues and top 10 engineering programs.

I would be very interested to know under what kind of condition such rules work, and where they don't.

It's an academically selective public city school. Very diverse student body in all dimensions (ethnicity, wealth, lots of immigrants). Most take public transit on their own. Kids there are just kinda treated like adults. They're definitely brighter than average, but not necessarily more mature or responsible.

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