alt Hacker News> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class
I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.
I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
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> I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.
The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.
Good luck!
And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.
Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.
And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.
We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)
[1] https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...
[2] https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
[4] https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...
[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...
Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.
I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.
It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.