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Opinion | Phones and education technology deserve no place in Hong Kong’s classrooms
- Billions spent on useless ‘ed-tech’ are draining badly needed education funds and profiting tech entrepreneurs instead of supporting teachers.
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Over a year ago, the US surgeon general warned of “growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health”.
Last September, Unesco exposed the pandemic’s “ed-tech tragedy”, where an “unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people”.
In March, Jonathan Haidt warned, in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, of a catastrophic shift in children’s energy and attention to the virtual world from the physical one.
Earlier this month, the Canadian province of Alberta, following in the footsteps of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia, announced classroom restrictions on mobile phone use, with Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides saying: “The risks to students’ mental well-being and academic success are real, and we must take steps now to combat these effects.”
In Los Angeles, the school board has approved a mobile phone ban, with board president Jackie Goldberg observing, “This is an addiction that is serious.”
The evidence has been building for a long time and has become overwhelming – there are at least 54,006 studies on academia.edu about “social media addiction”. It is no longer a question of the issue needing more study or the default cliché that we need to teach responsible internet use.
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