Maine banned phones in schools to help teens focus and connect. It's working

jethronethro 59 points 9 comments October 27, 2026
apnews.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

throwaway81523

Don't they mean focus and disconnect?

ElijahLynn

#HappyNews - what an uplifting piece of news today!

bjourne

Can the adults stop shitting on the young generation? There is no way in hell anyone in the workforce would agree to relinquishing their phone at the start of their shift so why should children? People lazy scroll YouTube and Facebook all the time at work yet kids can't. Hypocrites.

lathiat

Perth, Australia too: https://www.education.wa.edu.au/mobile-phones - phones are banned from the start to the end of school. Primary students cannot have them on them, secondary students can but they must be off and out of sight (even at break times).

Quibblingeek

I don't know if this falls under the category of "with age comes wisdom", but I don't exactly see this change as a bad thing. If I'm remembering correctly (and this was a long time ago), when I was in school, the schools I went to had a sort-of zero tolerance policy for cell phones. Seemed a bit asinine at the time and the punishment for having one even more so. I believe it was taken for three months the first time, the entire school year on the second (the ethics of which are absolutely up for debate, but this was in the middle of redneck America so make of that what you will). Of course as a kid I disagreed with it, but cell phones didn't offer a ubiquitous portal into all of the social ills of social media that they do today, nor do they provide an avenue to completely subvert human interaction at a stage where developing social calibration is taught as an unwritten and untaught subject. I guess the backwards rednecks got this one right, all be it for the wrong reasons.

Brog_io

They did this in Belgium as well, surveys noticed that the overall screentime is the same. They just use their phone more after school, and 62% still used phones secretly. https://www.brusselstimes.com/2333030/despite-ban-at-school-...

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
10,780 stories · 101,661 chunks indexed