Public payphones? Going into a bakery or a post office or any shop and politely asking to place a call from their landline to mom&pop's, having their number memorised, possibly placing a reverse charged call? "you are here" public maps/carrying a paper map? Learning how to use a compass+map or just sun and stars? Eating home-cooked meals and walking/biking around a lot to go from A to B?
For better or worse, the world is both more of the same and very different from what it used to be. Direct comparisons are not really useful, and quips like "how did people drive without a gas gauge / survive without seatbelts" are missing a ton of context.
I really, really hate this mindless, lazy line of argument in general. It gets tossed out with absolutely everything, from the internet to vaccines to modern farming. The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't". Life expectancies were in fact lower in the past. More people died, or were maimed, with no hope of treatment. Or sometimes it's "they did, but much less efficiently and we come to depend on each growth of the economy which at the foundation is literally about being able to do things more efficiently". Ease of communication, knowing what the weather is, all sorts of things mean less wasteful use of time and energy. Sometimes "they did, but perhaps less happily". A loved relative was in and accident, went to the hospital and you never got the chance to be involved when it mattered. And of course in some cases it's "new things have created downsides that create a need for other new things, the world has changed". Sometimes we can do something about that in the near term. Sometimes we cannot.
Low effort responses like you made are discouraged on HN for good reason. Yeah, absolutely new negatives have come with the new positives and seeking to reduce the former matters. But productive discussion and activity tends to focus on specifics vs generalities. Reducing the benefits of real time communication devices to a binary "life/death" and then NOT grappling with modern trends in everything from natural disasters to school shootings to reduced bussing doesn't strike me as great Walter.
I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it?
It's zero in my case.
Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
If you still want it, put a landline phone in each classroom on the teacher's desk. The principal can also have a switch to turn it off in an emergency.
>I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it? It's zero in my case.
Yeah, there were no school shootings in my state in the 90s either. But since Columbine objective fact is there have been over 400 affecting almost 400k students [0], and the trend doesn't seem to be going down. Events like sudden wildfires going out of control in a real hurry are now also radically different then even 20 years ago. And yes, some of the scheduling and health features watches offer would have been very helpful to me in school thanks. The communication features of watches are pleasantly minimal and also almost necessarily public. They only work well 2-way with voice, which is not something one can do silently by definition and thus highly policeable in class. The information consumption capability is highly minimal. Watches also do not have cameras with all the associated issues. And it'd be possible to take the communication restrictions further with cellular restrictions in school and forcing everything through the school's firewall.
>Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
Out of genuine curiosity: can you show me some good studies on this with respect to watches, not phones? On the smart phone side yes, I've absolutely both seen studies and personally experienced the addictive and distracting aspects. But I have not seen anything like that with watches, and my personal experience is also that it's completely different in usage.
I stand by my assertion: you threw out a form of argument that is lazy, shallow, and constantly misapplied. Even if in this specific case the balance of factors weighs against any smart devices at all (which I both extremely doubt and think will become extremely problematic for other reasons longer term), the form of argument "how did anyone survive before X" is so regularly bad faith, aggressively stupid, or both that it coming out instantly makes me more not less suspicious of whichever side the person stating it is supporting.
Why does a health monitor need to be in constant connection with the internet? If there's a problem, it can just beep at you.
Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.
For wildfire, call the principal who then hits the fire button. We had tornado drills in elementary school. No phones were required, it was a siren mounted on a pole. It worked fine.
>Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.
A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.
That's a rare circumstance that is made to seem more common by very wide media coverage. And even in that sort of situation, it seems doubtful that it actually helps anybody either. Some parents will show up and get in the way of emergence responders. Most kids who call their parents will end up surviving anyway, and the phonecalls end up increasing the number of people who get PTSD from the whole thing. If a modest sized school of 500 kids has an above average shooting which kills 20, then you have 480+ parents getting a premature ""last call""; all would have been better off hearing about the incident after they already knew their kid was safe.
These kinds of calculations aren't useful to a typical US parent who, after the Uvalde disaster, has absolutely no reason to trust law enforcement to handle such a situation competently, and every reason to distrust them. Why should they assume that the cops in their town are any better than Uvalde's? They're going to hear "your kid can't have their phone in our school" and think of this.
I don't understand, do you guys think the children's phones are being vaporized by the Phone Vaporizer 5000?
When people say "no phones in class" they don't mean kid's can't have phones. They mean they can't use their phone in class.
I think, probably, this rule does NOT apply during an active shooter. That's my guess. I would imagine the teacher isn't going to start enforcing that rule while under lockdown. What do you think?
> A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.
I’ve had this scenario in training at work before deploying to certain global locations (Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia etc)
That it even crosses your mind suggests that the US is a country broken beyond repair.
if you really want to optimize for a very-low-probability event, just don't live in a school district with cellphone bans
you'll trade for a near-guarantee that your kid will have some social anxiety or attention issues...but if you really want to make sure they have a phone available in the low-probability event of a school shooting, this is the tradeoff you will make
To look at life expectancy, you need to normalize for the fact that numerous things have shifted dramatically in society. For instance smoking rates have completely plummeted relative to the past, to say nothing of the fact that up until the 90s you could generally smoke everywhere, even on airplanes! Then there have also been major changes in typical occupations, reductions in youth driving, and so on.
Given that life expectancy increases have been coming at a snail's pace, and on occasion reversing, I suspect if one normalized for these sort of non-medical shifts in society, we'd see that life expectancy is most likely decreasing, likely due to things like widespread obesity, mental illness, and other ailments which modern gadgets are significantly contributing to.
Walter's comment could be applied exactly as well to an argument that there shouldn't be electricity in schools (after all, kids survived without electricity just fine for decades).
The talk is about having a client for tiktok but with ability to phone - on your Math lesson. When the phone used to have no tiktok the situation is tolerable even if the phone rings occationally.
Now the tiktok client successfully competes with teacher for kids' attention and some dumbheads are shouting - "Look, the tiktok client still can phone police/firefighters/parents! What else are you going to prohibit, maybe a paper?"
I've made the comment before that all the schools really need is a classroom, desks and chairs, a chalkboard, and a teacher. Pen & notepaper helps.
The rest is just useless fluff.
Note that Caltech was exactly that. A prof, a chalkboard, a lecture hall. I learned more in 2 weeks with that than a year of high school. I've suggested to college students that they'll learn better if they leave their laptops in the dorm. And I say this as a computer professional.
You need much more than that for a good education. While I do agree that smart devices are not necessary, you still need a lot of extra materials for most subjects. You need various kinds of maps for geography and history, you need many images of animals and plants for biology, you need teaching manuals for every subject, you need various books for literature to read poems and prose, you need various materials for arts and crafts. Not to mention when you get to advanced subjects you need a heck of a lot more, at least for practice.
Having many of these materials in a digital format on a smart device can help a lot in terms of cost and availability. It's not critical, and I very much understand the downsides of having an always-connected device that kids are used to play with, but it's also not at all 0 cost to go entirely to paper.
I'm sure your time in math classes at Caltech that were only chalkboard and notes was extremely productive. But some lectures require more materials (you can't have a good lecture on Alexander's conquests without a map of what he actually conquered), and a full education requires much more than lectures. You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
> You need much more than that for a good education.
No, not really. At Caltech, about half had a textbook, but the textbook was not referred to during lecture, and what was taught tended to diverge from the textbook.
> maps
The prof would freehand the salient aspects of a map and any other drawings required.
> literature
I never took any literature classes, as I saw no value in them. Even so, I cannot see the utility of a textbook during class.
> You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
I had to laugh. None of that was available in the 70s.
I drew circuits freehand on paper. OMG. There were labs available for students building circuits, where the rubber really met the road.
I was not majoring in EE, I just enjoyed the classes. But the EEs Caltech turned out were all first class engineers. Taught by lectures with a blackboard and chalk.
Quantum physics was taught the same way. Not even a textbook.
The engineering work I did on the 757 was pen and paper, with a calculator as a crutch.
The most damning evidence against all these materials is that there is zero evidence of any improvement in K-12 results in the last 50 years, and things just seem to be getting worse.
You mean, make my own entirely different argument? Passive aggressive dig is not an argument either.
No, what Walter wrote what what he wanted to say. However, since you agree with the conclusion, you will defend the argument even if it is not too good.
That "How ever did anyone survive before" answer means absolutely nothing. Yes, we survived the 1990s, if we didn't we wouldn't be there to talk about it, thank you Captain Obvious.
I know, I know, this is sarcasm, but where is the argument? If anything, it is a textbook example of the "appeal to tradition" fallacy. There are many good arguments against smartphones in classrooms, that one isn't. For the details, see xoa's answer.
Amusingly, at Caltech the only phone in the dorm was a payphone down the hall. The only time I recall ever using it was to make flight reservations to visit my parents.
My first cellphone was in 1994 or so. It took many years before I was acclimated to using it, and didn't get an internet phone until 2015.
I was a very early adopter of computers, but pretty late with phones.
For kids? How ever did anyone survive before 1990.