A teachers union says it’s fed up with social media’s impact on students::The nation’s second-largest teachers union said Thursday it was losing patience with social media apps that it says are contributing to mental health problems and misbehavior in classrooms nationwide, draining time and money from teachers and school systems.
They’re not wrong. Social media has been almost as destructive to my mental health as MMO games.
Social Media is much worse than MMOs. How many people have played World of Warcraft & Co? Meanwhile everyone and their grandmothers are on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.
I’m not sure about that. Personally, I’m sick of kids running through the hallways screaming “For the Horde!” and painting “The people called Alliance, they go the house” on the walls.
As much as mainstream social media is bad, there are online communities that are strictly necessary for some groups. Banning social media would stop closeted queer youth from participating in communities that would support them. Asking your homophobic parents about queer sexuality, for example, is a one-way ticket to getting your ass out on the street. Asking a community of fellow queer people anonymously is more viable. As toxic as social media can be, it can also be a refuge for good people who need to escape the real world and the consequences of it.
It really is an all-or-nothing approach. Either we make systems that are effective enough to stop everyone, or make them ineffective enough that they can be bypassed.
We should be helping young people navigate, and have a healthy relationship with it. The technology reflects and caters to the negative parts of the society it exists in. The best thing we can do is make the world better in the first place. Body-negativity isn’t here because social media decided it must exist, it’s because an algorithm decided that appealing to the existing negative thoughts and beliefs of people gets engagement. The only other way to deal with this problem is to dismantle capitalism so that organisations that run these platforms aren’t perpetually seeking profit at all costs.
I’m so glad to see this. There have been several studies that show social media is terrible for the mental health of minors.
Here in the Netherlands the government gave the strong advice to schools to ban the use of phones in classrooms. They did not go as far to make it a law, but schools are free to enforce the rule however they want. Some ask that students have to put their phones in their lockers. I believe this is a good step by the government, being someone who grew up in the starting era of mobile phones during high school. I for sure think it has rotted my brain, as I find it hard to stay away from my phone if I am even slightly bored.
Banning smartphones in schools is stupid, unless you have other alternatives like laptops (where you can block social media). The thing is, the internet is basically a huge library and kids learn how to solve problems on their own. I sometimes see 20-30 year olds who literally don‘t know how to use google and if they don’t know something, they don‘t know how to research it.
Digital literacy is as important as literacy itself in todays world. The computers and the internet have become interwoven with just about every facet of everyday modern life. I don’t see how we can educate people for that same world if education system tries to pretend we are still in the pre-digital era.
If we want to equip children with the skills to navigate a digital world we need to figure out how to thoroughly integrate digital skills into education.
I went to school in the time before mobile phones were really a thing at all. We still still had plenty of ways to goof around and plenty of ways to be pressured. Part of being educated is being taught how to behave and how to handle life’s challenges.
Someone close to me is a HS teacher. During covid, the schools changed their policy from “no phones in class ever” to “you can have your phone in class but you’d better only use it to help with classwork or in an emergency.”
They’ve been trying to reverse the policy back to how it was, but it’s hard to get all the kids to believe that they can’t do this anymore. They don’t take the threat of punishment seriously because everyone is doing it now.
Even if you manage to deal with the phone issue, the school gives kids chromebooks now to do their work on. The student wifi network seemingly has no restrictions, since the teachers sometimes need to have them watch something on YouTube or Netflix.
So kids, during class, watch Netflix on their Chromebook instead of paying attention.
