"Internet bad, and as parents we don't really want to be parenting, that's extra work, therefore ban" stance

I'm not sure why we give kids smart phones and laptops. This is actually unavoidable. Your school will give your kid a laptop, even if you prohibit it at home. Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class. I never would have managed it.

> Imagine being 14 and having an entire laptop to prevent you from ever needing to focus in class.

Depends on the school obviously, but at my 15 year old's school they default to their laptops staying in their bag and only get them out for specific tasks when directed by the teacher. The rest of the time the laptop is in their bag. They don't just sit there staring at a laptop during every lesson and goofing around on the Internet.

Also all of these school provided laptops have pretty extensive keylogging/etc installed. The laptops are not provided for personal use and the school picks up pretty quickly on any student browsing websites they shouldn't be looking at or typing things they really shouldn't be typing, even when at home and not on the school's wifi. The students are all aware of this and cope quite well.

Leaving it in the bag sounds really reasonable. I'm not really worried about _where_ a kid goes on his laptop. Even if all you had was wikipedia that would be way more interesting than what you were being taught in your lecture. It's the opportunity for distraction here which is what I'm worried about rather than what the kid actually does online. (social media is its own problem, but I'm not addressing that here)

This is textbook survivorship bias.

If you’ve spent any time in a classroom in the last 5 years you’d know there are some kids who manage it, and lots of kids who absolutely don’t.

Maybe the past 5 years have some other variables that might have contributed to that, huh?

Kids get ChromeOS and learn how to navigate their school's UI. They're not learning computing. They're given a math question which could have been on a piece of paper or in book.

This seems like a really narrow perspective on kids' use of computers in schools, but even if that's the case, it seems to me the solution might be to... teach them computing, not take it away. Or, we might recognize that there's lots of technology we don't learn the ins-and-outs of and yet that are fundamental to our lives, even if we could technically get by without it

Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.

Also, a related comment points out that not all is doom-and-gloom - surprisingly, schools can actually implement sane usage restrictions for laptops in class.

>Anyway, I would think that having a simple, locked-down OS at school is preferable than having a laptop on which they can do whatever they want, at least to the issue of being distracted in class.

This may be true, but even more preferable than this would be no laptop.

"computing" is not what today's internet is about. I think you'd actually have more success teaching computing if the internet was turned off.

They still engage, possibly even more so, with the topic if it's setup and structured the right way. (It's all too easy for lazy teachers/schools to just shove work onto a laptop for the kids to do and then pay little attention, but this was also definitely true back in the days of work from books or sheets of paper.)

My 15 year old can touch type(*) at about 60wpm, knows how to browse the Internet and drive a search engine effectively, can create reasonable presentations using Powerpoint or equivalent, can create nicely formatted docs, is comfortable with spreadsheets, not be fazed by online forms or similar, has a basic understanding of cyber-security/safety, password security and password reuse, spotting scams, etc.

All of these are useful skills that my parents in their 70s struggle with.

Having a phone means they're able to keep in touch with their friends far more effectively than I was when I was that age. They can keep in touch with us (parents) much more easily. They can see how much money they have as they've got a banking app on their phone. They can check the weather themselves. They can check the train and bus times themselves.

I trust my kid to use the phone (and laptop) responsibly. In return they know that I will occasionally ask to check what they're doing just to make sure they're safe. I don't want to have to police it.

Back to the school bit, they could be doing Maths questions from a piece of paper or in a book, which they do do some or most of the time, but their engagement levels seem good when doing it on a laptop via Sparx or MyMaths or whatever. Plus things can be a lot more interactive on a laptop/tablet. Being able to tweak values/variables/functions/etc and see how things change in real time, that's laborious to do again and again with pencil and paper.

> They're not learning computing.

No, but most will have that option to if they want. My kid wasn't interested and so didn't choose Computer Science as an option despite being able to do various simple things in python. Their interests lay elsewhere (sport, music, etc).

* I remember watching when my kid sat down at my work computer and wasn't fazed at all by the entirely blank keyboard I use. There was just a "oh, that's cool" and off they went typing away.

It's a coordination problem. I can "parent" my kids by banning them from social media sure, but if the other parents don't also do that, then I just made my kid a social outcast.

As it is we have to allow our eldest a lot more screen and social media time than we think is healthy, but it's more healthy than not having any friends.

I'm not necessarily in favour of a government ban, but I do wish more parents were on board. At the primary school (age 10) 100% of other kids had phones, and no one else seemed to give a shit.

A lot of the calls for bans are coming from non-parents. There’s a full moral panic going on about social media and short form videos right now.

Your stance is one of those thought-terminating stances. It's not as if parents somehow have more control over their children than the entire world. Yes, they may have a plurality of the influence - they are the single most influential factor - but it doesn't outweigh the entire rest of the world.

Plus, what are you going to say about children of people who aren't very good at parenting? Do they deserve to grow up addicted to dopamine and groomed into fascism? Or should we try to help them too?

I don't like the solution of age verification on every social media website, but the problem is real and must be solved if we want the future to be any good.

Let's make drugs free and available on every corner then ? Surely that will make us better parents, we'll have to work harder.

wildly false dichotomy

if you're a parent and you don't want your kids to do something, the answer is to supervise them. should hot stoves and sharp knives require inserting an ID for age verification?

It's not a wildly false dichotomy.

It's hyperbolic, sure, but the broad point that there are things that parents find hard to parent for reasons, and society should think about helping them out, is 100% true.

it's a false dichotomy because it implies that the only two options we have are either draconian regulation, or no regulation whatsoever. that's the dictionary definition of a false dichotomy.

The other side is a false dichotomy because it implies the only options we have are either blame parents or do nothing.

I never argued that we do nothing. There are plenty of laws on the books related to internet safety, and plenty more that we could pass. What I'm specifically against is mandating ID verification.

I always find it ironic when people complain about social media on social media, drawing some arbitrary line on what is social media (implied to be bad) and what is not (implied to be good).

I would also add GitHub and StackOverflow to the list of social media, they have user-to-user interaction and a visible reputation system with gamification. Stretch things a bit and you could even include email. IRC and USENET too of course.

The only time I have seen something sensible was is I think a proposal in a US state, where the social media the ruling is about is clearly defined. I think it has to have user interaction, a personalized algorithmic feed, and a number of specific patterns, such as infinite scroll, essentially Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,... but not Reddit or Hacker News. The good think about that is that the social media in question could "work around" the ruling by stripping off some dark patterns, I would consider it a win should it happen.

Because it gives governments authority to pick and choose which sites to ban or allow, it’s a mechanism that can accommodate political coercion and subterfuge. The platforms can now be de-platformed.

It’s no longer user-to-user websites, its user-to government-to-user.