I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

throwaway31131 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

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hombre_fatal 5 days ago | parent [-]

I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.

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KPGv2 5 days ago | parent [-]

yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.

	▲	brewdad 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.
	▲	hombre_fatal 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not sure what your point is. My point is that the entertainment was finite, in this case because it was only available for a set duration. That Dragonball Z came on for a single episode created a dead zone where it made sense to do homework and it wasn't pulling teeth when it came time to sit down for dinner with my family (something we both would be very privileged to have in our youth btw).

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Edman274 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.

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BobaFloutist 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?

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decimalenough 5 days ago | parent [-]

So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?

	▲	raincole 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> but not Asia It's happening in many Asian countries too. Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum... HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

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dbish 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yes, and none of those things are just available to you while you're also learning in the classroom. no school should allow phones in the classroom.

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djeastm 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes and it was a fair argument then, too. It's likely only a matter of degree of distraction.

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aprilthird2021 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?

Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems