Government accepts advice of commission that also says children under 13 should not have their own smartphone
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250225163509/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/25/denmark-to-ban-mobile-phones-in-schools-and-after-school-clubs
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Banning them at after-school clubs is a bit much. I get wanting to encourage kids to participate & interact in social settings without technology. I’d much rather schools have a class that teaches them about positive & healthy choices involving technology.
You think that can compete with TikTok?
I think a lot of people are really delusional when it comes to children and that they somehow should be able to make reasoned choices.
Exactly, and banning mobile phones is one fantastic way to make sure schools can never provide classes that teach them about positive and healthy technology choices, and I meant a real class about that, not just a class for the sake of pretending to be a class filled with only hypotheticals
If you want to provide classes that teach about technology you can open exceptions for those classes. You don’t need you phone during math, acience and language classes.
That’s the whole point here, allowing or disallowing phones should be the discretion of teachers based on what class they are actually teaching, be it language classes where there’s no need for phones or STEM classes where a pocket general purpose computer has many good uses and offer particularly good opportunities to teach students how to make constructive uses of smartphones in practical real life situations.
And instead having this being outright a ban on the school level, like being proposed here, is exactly the single worst possible way to do this. Having it banned on school level but having arbitrary “exception” being allowed defeated the whole purpose and makes it practically no difference from the above, and also open up lots of loopholes for abuse. You also can’t just have a list of school or government level “officially approved exceptions” because it’s ultimately about a technology, and technology is always evolving way faster than bureaucracy.
If a phone is required for a class, teachers can still demand it as course material.
