Patrick Usmar: Will New Zealand’s school phone ban work?

Will New Zealand’s school phone ban work? Let’s see what it does for students’ curiosity

With the coalition government’s ban of student mobile phones in New Zealand schools coming into effect this week, reaction has ranged from the sceptical (kids will just get sneakier) to the optimistic (most kids seem okay with it).

In a world where nearly everyone has a smartphone, it’s to be expected nearly everyone will have an opinion. The trick is to sort the valid from the kneejerk, and not rush to judgement.

Michael Johnston: I'm the operator with my large language model

In 1981, the German electronic band Kraftwerk released a song called Pocket Calculator.

At the time, affordable calculators were a recent phenomenon. Kraftwerk, as dyed-in-the-wool technophiles, were clearly pleased.

Many educators were pleased too. Young children often don’t enjoy learning arithmetic. Those educators thought that calculators could free them from having to learn it. Instead, they could learn to apply mathematics to real world problems. This, they thought, would be more motivating.

Peter Winsley: Education as Master, not Servant of Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge accumulated over Generations

When past social or technological advances are discussed young people sometimes disclaim all knowledge and remark “I wasn’t alive then”, as if nothing can be known without having been lived through. This is not Hayek’s “pretense of knowledge” so much as the misguided view that nothing is real except what you have seen, touched and can vouch for in person. In fact, learning accumulates and is passed on through the generations. For example, a first-year university Mathematics student stands on the shoulders of generations of mathematicians from many cultures. The known evidence suggests that mathematics originated in Mesopotamia in around 3000BC and advanced greatly within the Islamic world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “but I cannot say for sure because I wasn’t alive then”.