alt Hacker NewsSame phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones.
Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.
I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?
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The founders of the Miniaturwunderland Hamburg were in the media describing how they push back against smartphones and media in their family life: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/ndr-talk-show/miniatur-wun...
Strange coincidence: shortly after they were hacked https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/11/12/miniatur-wunderland...
> Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“.
I would totally land in Realschule because I had an educational slump in fourth grade.
Over here they tried a similar system - middle school spanning classes 7-9 inclusively, named "Gymnsasium" as well, but it included everyone[0] and I recall having a similar sentiment, thinking: "why shove people around like that? So that we don't form lasting friendships and thus make better worker drones?"
Ironically I'm still in touch weekly with the three guys who were my only friends at the time, even though we live in different cities now.
[0] The split between college material and the rest only happened around high school.
agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).
i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.
when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
Your scenario paints an overly negative picture. Neither do the majority of the kids move between schools every year, nor do they switch up classes within a school every year. They usually stay with the same class 2-3 years and only switch for individual courses for a couple of hours per week.
You can criticize the way how kids are separated into different levels by 5th grade, but this has nothing to do with being able to find friends.
Furthermore, your argument doesn't make much sense, because the school system is like this way before smartphones even existed and kids were able to find friends back then. It's not like the school system forces them into escapism. Just that smartphones are simply addictive.