Eton Replaces First-Year Student Smartphones With Nokia 'Brick' Phones (businessinsider.com) 53
An anonymous reader shares a report: Eton College, one of the world's most prestigious boarding schools, is planning to ban smartphones for its incoming first-year students and replace these with old-school Nokia phones instead, a spokesperson for the school confirmed to Business Insider. The new policy comes as the UK-based school grapples with managing student's educations alongside technological developments.
"Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools," a spokesperson told BI. "From September those joining in Year 9 will receive a 'brick' phone for use outside the school day, as well as a School-issued iPad to support academic study. Age-appropriate controls remain in place for other year groups," they added. Eton College is an exclusive boarding school located outside London, near Windsor. Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and Eddie Redmayne are among its best-known alumni.
"Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools," a spokesperson told BI. "From September those joining in Year 9 will receive a 'brick' phone for use outside the school day, as well as a School-issued iPad to support academic study. Age-appropriate controls remain in place for other year groups," they added. Eton College is an exclusive boarding school located outside London, near Windsor. Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and Eddie Redmayne are among its best-known alumni.
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
To many requests for admission (Score:2)
There's more than one way to limit the applications for admission...
Between this and the fucking Yondr stuff... (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of top UK private schools are undergoing a collective moral panic about this right now -- or rather, they believe that the parent cohorts are, and they're trying to cater to that. It's all so fucking stupid, and based on absolutely no research. Many of these schools give the kids iPads anyway, and the kids can and do circumvent the controls easily (I have a Year 10 daughter who keeps me updated).
Re:Between this and the fucking Yondr stuff... (Score:5, Informative)
based on absolutely no research
Well, that's not quite true; there have been quite a few studies linking social media to issues in education. For example (quoted from the summary here [aeaweb.org]):
We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health.
Also here [researchgate.net]:
While it offers numerous benefits, it also presents challenges such as distractions, privacy concerns, and the spread of misinformation. Moreover, the addictive nature of social media can negatively affect students' focus and productivity.
So it's not (all) mindless panic-mongering. There are real issues and, while social media can be used in education to good effect, the drawbacks can't be hand-waved away.
Re:Between this and the fucking Yondr stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)
But this isn''t about the use of social media, which kids can and will access on tablets and computers as well as phones. It's about phones specifically. And there's no credible research showing a link between smartphones and deterioriating adolescent mental health. (The evidence re social media is pretty weak, too. See https://www.przybylski.xyz/pap... [przybylski.xyz] for several examples
Re: Between this and the fucking Yondr stuff... (Score:1)
It's not solely about phones impacting mental health. The presence of smart phones in classrooms also serve as distractions to learning, and for that, I don't think the school needs to rely on formal research for what it empirically knows to be true.
Re: Between this and the fucking Yondr stuff... (Score:2)
Kids are a lot more relaxed. We were surprised by the strong effect it had. I will miss the be real pictures during breaks though.
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No, this is nothing to do with class. Elon, in common with every other private school, bans phones in class. This is about phones *outside* the classroom, because Elon is a boarding school.
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there's no credible research showing a link between smartphones and deterioriating adolescent mental health.
WHAT?!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
How are you so uninformed?!
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Only one of those three papers looked good to me. The second was a study with 19 volunteers, and the third took as its axiom that smartphones damaged health and looked for other studies that evaluated “risks” of “addiction” ie it begged the question.
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Great, just do a search for scientific papers on the topic and you'll find plenty of them because it did a 10 seconds search and just posted a few result. You can discount the ones you don't deem worthy but there are plenty that are entirely legit. Just because you have ignored the topic or have a personal does not mean it's an ill researched area of interest.
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I don’t think the consensus is anywhere near as clear cut as you think it is. I posted a link above to an academic who’s published multiple papers in this area and not found the evidence of the link that you are convinced exists. He’s not some kook, either.
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It's about phones specifically.
It's certainly not about phones - didn't you notice that Eton isn't planning to take phones away from students, but replace smartphones with Nokia bricks, which can be used for emergencies or checking on the student, but don't have access to the internet?
And there's no credible research showing a link between smartphones and deterioriating adolescent mental health.
This is a fallacy - it's not the smartphone in itself that causes problems, so asking for studies on that is pointless. You might as well focus on the material phones are made of, and complain that there's no study linking black plastic cases to students' g
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Your reply is both spectacularly pedantic (complaining about my use of the term phones instead of smartphones) while also wildly missing the point -- the ban on smartphones does absolutely nothing to change students' ability to access the internet: the fettering that they have today continues (no use of smartphones in class) while outside class they're free to use tablets and computers which provide, doh, unfettered access to the internet. So yes, the ban is exactly about smartphones and no, it does nothing
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I think it's reasonably likely this ban results in a lot of kids getting iPad Minis, as the most portable non-smartphone form factor (or Android equivalents)
The New Abnormal (Score:2, Informative)
And they students will carry two phones... (Score:3, Insightful)
Teaching them how to cheat on spouses from an early age, get two phones, one for official use and one for not. Got it.
Can you use an iPad to send messages? (Score:1)
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Still too advanced (Score:3)
A CB radio and a Commodore 64 at home.
Poorly informed comments (Score:5, Informative)
One of the main issues with allowing smartphones into boarding schools like Eaton, is that the parents are paying a f**king fortune for their kids to build relationships with other boarders, who are likely to be future leaders & executives in large organisations & corporations. They aren't going to do that if they spend most of their days with their faces glued to a smartphone screen. In that sense, it's a waste of their parents' money.
The other thing is that there's now substantial research that shows strong correlations & likely causal relationships between smartphone use in schools & academic performance, social & emotional well-being, & behavioural issues.
Re: Poorly informed comments (Score:2)
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The other thing is that there's now substantial research that shows strong correlations & likely causal relationships between smartphone use in schools & academic performance, social & emotional well-being, & behavioural issues.
Sure, there's always a market for provocative stories to terrorize the rubes. The "research" isn't designed to uncover truth, it's designed to sell clicks.
Many people are horrified by any kind of change. Perhaps you're familiar with the story of the Comics Code, created because comics were allegedly corrupting America's youth and precious bodily fluids. The D&D game was, of course, training in genuine Satanic rituals to summon a genuine Satan. Don't get me started on the dangers of rock'n'roll, jazz, an
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Re:Poorly informed comments (Score:4, Informative)
Eaton is a boarding school
boarding schools like Eaton,
If you misspell the school's name twice you might not be as insightful as you think.
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Here's a couple more for you: "Tunbridge" & "Cheem" I bet you don't even know what or where they are.
Re:Poorly informed comments (Score:4, Interesting)
This is such a fucking reach. My daughter is in the middle of applying to Wellington and Brighton (both highly regarded boarding schools). This "issue" is a complete non-issue among kids, parents, teachers, etc. Kids use phones *as a means of connecting* with each other because, surprise, they're not all in the same physical room as each other all the time (among many other reasons). Noone imagines their child is continually engaged in networking with future business leaders, FGS.
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One of the main issues with allowing smartphones into boarding schools like Eaton, is that the parents are paying a f**king fortune for their kids to build relationships with other boarders, who are likely to be future leaders & executives in large organisations & corporations. They aren't going to do that if they spend most of their days with their faces glued to a smartphone screen. In that sense, it's a waste of their parents' money.
That is horseshit. You can't force you kid to socialise by taking away their phones, and having a smart phone doesn't mean someone doesn't socialise.
Other comments may be poorly informed, but yours is just dumb and doesn't reflect society in any way.
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Dumb is a bit far I think. Mobile phones were just getting a thing when I needed to fulfill my obligatory military service in the Netherlands. Now that has been a while ago, I'll admit.
No mobile phones were allowed on base, period. New entrants were not even allowed to leave the base the first month. Most in my platoon I don't consider friends or even friendly. Definitely not in touch. But on base, doing military exercises, we knew how to get those done, without getting punished/reprimanded very quickly, ev
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Oh, "Eton" not "Elon"... (Score:1)
My brain read that headline as "Elon Replaces Employee Smartphones With Nokia 'Brick' Phones"
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Came to say the same thing. Ninjad.
Why would you arm your students? (Score:2)
Blunt force trauma is no joke!
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Ah... Nokia... A lesson for the youngsters (Score:3)
For the youngsters who don't know much about Nokia... Going back into the early 2000s, Nokia became the king of mobile telephones around the world. There wasn't a market anywhere they didn't make a phone for. You might be surprised to learn that Sony actually competed with Nokia back then on mobile phones. So did Swedish company Ericsson. In those days, there were no Android phones and no iPhones. If I remember correctly, sometime in 2007 I bought a Nokia N70. I had had other Nokia phones before. Their "smartphones" were pretty primitive by today's standards. The keyboard was a number keyboard like for dialing and you had to punch the number key a certain number of times to spell something. Want to spell "cat"? That's three presses of the 1 key to get C, one press of the 1 key to get A, and one press of the 8 key to get a T. Yep. That's how we did text messaging in those days. I truly don't remember if there ever were in web browsers for phones, but data was expensive and having to press so many buttons to spell really gave you an incentive to write as little as possible. Nokia's phone competitors were dropping like flies. Sony and Ericsson combined forces and then threw in the towel. Blackberry competed with Nokia, but their devices sucked. I used one for a few months at work. Absolutely hated it. I don't remember who else was there competing with Nokia, but they're probably gone now.
Maybe 2 months after I bought the Nokia N70, Apple came out with the iPhone. My phone, prior to the iPhone, was state of the art. The iPhone turned my phone into an electronic equivalent of 2 tin cans with a string in the middle. Not only was the iPhone significantly better in every way, Nokia had no answer at all for it. None. They didn't even have stuff in the pipeline that could do the touch screen magic that made the iPhone a small computer and a phone at the same time. My Nokia was a phone that was also an extremely limited computer that could barely do a few things. Third world country where the average citizen makes like $10 USD a day or less? Nokia wants your business! Apple? Screw that, our phones cost what they cost. If you can't afford one, buy a Nokia. I owned some Nokia stock and I sold it at a big loss. I only put a few thousand dollars into it, but I think I lost about 50% of what I paid. I did get to claim the loss on my taxes though. I can't believe Nokia still makes phones, but nobody wants their crap. Microsoft tried to partner with them in the early 2010s and after a few years, that failed too. Almost forgot - 10+ years ago, just about every day some dumbass Boomer would post on Slashdot "I want a phone that's just a phone!" Yeah, right. None of them are using anything other than an iPhone or Android today.
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>"Maybe 2 months after I bought the Nokia N70, Apple came out with the iPhone. My phone, prior to the iPhone, was state of the art."
The N70 wasn't what I think of as state of the art at that time. I was using a Palm Treo running PalmOS from THREE YEARS EARLIER than when the iPhone was released. Backlit QWERTY keyboard, fully addressable color touch screen, apps, SD storage card, Email, web browser, a full and robust ecosystem that spanned many years of devices. It did lack WiFi.
>"My Nokia was a pho
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Eh (Score:2, Troll)
Private boarding schools just shouldn't even exist.
Why bother with "brick" phones. (Score:1)
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It appears we both grew up in a time before the internet was publicly accessible and smart phones were a twinkle in Steve Job's eyes. So yes, I couldn't agree more with your statement about not having to be in touch 24/7.
Might even go a step further and say that the lack of connectivity made you, as a person, discover much faster who you are and how you should behave in this world. 'Character-building' might even be the better term for that.
So... (Score:2)
the students will get Jackets with iPhone pockets, since you can phone with it as well as do everything an iPhone does.
and they get these, where? (Score:2)
I have been looking for a simple phone that has no data and has an 8+ day standby battery life, like i had before they switched off the networks that they used.
None of those old phones work. They either connect and are horrible quality due to intentional degradation or simply have nothing to connect to anymore.
So please do tell eton, where you are getting a simple phone phone that supports 4-5g. There is the CAT phone, that has poor reviews, a bunch of flip phones that run android (so battery life is still