The phone won’t ring during class – Kommersant FM

The State Duma finally banned phones in the classroom – deputies immediately approved amendments to the law “On Education” in the second and third readings. They suggest that schoolchildren should not use gadgets during the educational process, except in situations that threaten the life and health of students and school staff. The Duma Committee on Education clarified that we are talking only about the means of communication that children bring with them. This measure will not apply to fitness bracelets. Schools themselves will decide how to implement the initiative in practice, the parliamentarians emphasized.

But how exactly can this be done? And how realistic? The director of the “School of Life” in Zhukovka, Ian Patlis, notes that in small educational institutions this is already working quite well: “We have a small school, and in each class there are special boxes with labeled cells where phones are stored. They are located under video cameras, so you can always see who took what and so on.

Schoolchildren leave their smartphones there when they go to class and can pick them up during breaks. For four years, nothing was lost, nothing was damaged, and everyone was already accustomed to this system.

Yes, of course, we need a person who will ensure that these boxes are not accidentally knocked over and the phones are not broken. But this is not such a serious problem. In a large school, you’ll probably have to rack your brains about how to organize this.”

At the same time, from January 1, 2021, SanPiN prohibits the use of phones for study in Russia. Against this background, some educational institutions have previously tried to introduce their own restrictions, but it was not always possible, shared Dmitry Kazakov, a history and social studies teacher at one of the schools in the Nizhny Novgorod region, an activist of the Teacher trade union:

“We had such experience, some class teachers, together with parents, tried to solve this issue: they bought a special box with a lock, in which children put smartphones at the beginning of the school day, and received them at the end of lessons.

But after a while, both teachers and children got tired of it, because someone always needed the phone during recess, or parents started calling the class teacher about all sorts of trifles. It is not comfortable. People are accustomed to smartphones as a means of communication. In addition, I myself saw how a child gave up one phone and used another.”

If all schools start banning phones in class, it is not entirely clear how the institution will resolve issues with the safety of gadgets, noted Ruslan Tkachenko, chairman of the Moscow City Parents Committee: “Of course, this ban will help teachers more or less establish discipline in the classroom.

But, for example, I bought my daughter an expensive gadget, she returned it, it got lost, broke or crashed. In this case, who will bear financial responsibility for this?

School? Is it possible for her to purchase lockers in which smartphones will be stored and install security guards to protect them? Do you have a budget to pay for the damage? Of course not. Should parents do this then?

So far, this law only allows the teacher to say in class: “Put the phone away because you are breaking the law,” and that’s all.”

According to an October Superjob poll, more than 80% of parents of schoolchildren support a ban on using phones in class. Among teachers, 87% of respondents answered this way. The study involved 1.6 thousand parents and 500 teachers from all regions of Russia.

Vladimir Rasulov