As a teacher from a country that passed a similar law a few months ago: this is stupid, it won’t work unless you get parents involved. Also, it offloads the parenting responsibility to already overworked teachers. You know a law that could actually be more effective? Ban the use of social media for those below 18. Another one? Make the use of parental controls mandatory for people below 18. This kind of law may only work if it’s implemented together with other changes where it’s possible to spread the responsibility over the issue across many layers. If all you’re doing is relying on schools and teachers, all this law will do is to contribute even more to the high levels of burnout teachers have. Can we please force parents to actually have to parent their fucking kids??
People under 18 shouldn’t be on social media, at all. It’s incredibly bad for them, as proven by many many studies. You don’t need to lose your liberties for this, I guarantee you that google/apple know most people’s age from their super vast data collection based on how much people overshare online. All it takes is to force these giant companies to actually enforce the use of their own technologies, and for governments to spread awareness on how and why to use them, passing a law making it mandatory and part of parental duties is just an icing on the cake that can be used by schools to demand that parents parent their kids.
As a teacher, I do mind taking a student’s phone away, as I don’t think the phone itself is the problem, but what they’re doing with it. And the best approach is not to simply shun the device, but to learn and foster how to use such a powerful tool as a potentiator of education. Banning devices is stupid because it’s the easy way out, the lazy choice. It has been done since I was a kid and all some of us had were brick phones that could call our parents and maybe play simple games. And It has never worked, I know because I often would play games under the desk and my classmates would also often use their phones for games or sms. And today, even if you force kids to hand their phones in at the entrance, or lock them away, they can easily have a backup old phone to hand in instead of their actual phones. And this all comes back to parents. Where are kids getting phones? Why are they being allowed to stay their whole day in them? Because parents don’t want to parent, and governments don’t want to do what’s actually right but hard, so they all decided that it’s easier to shift the responsibility for controlling device use onto teachers and schools and pretend the problem is solved. It’s not.