Monday, May 15, 2006
France is deciding whether to ban handphones from classrooms and several Singaporeans seem to believe that all forms of restrictions is good and thus Singapore's MOE should follow suit.
This blog is dismayed by the audacious and very naive notion that banning handphones will prevent the filming of 'Happy Slapping' a form of home-made gotcha, where an unsuspecting victim is attacked and the incident is recorded with the handphone. What will banning of the handphones in class archive? If the aim is to reduce such attacks, the obvious course of actions is not the banning of handphones but the disciplinary control of the students. Education of why such behavior is wrong is much more effective than a blanket ban of handphones.
Of course there are other arguments against handphones in schools, including encouragement of theft, or peer pressure to buy the latest and the best phones, but this must be weighed against the convenience of having a phone and being able to be readily contactable. Students in schools today are social animals in an environment where communication is very important. Handphones facilitates these student to student interactions. Over and above that, handphone also help parents keep track of the whereabout of childrens who have an increasingly flexible schedule.
The most important and this blog asserts is the only period of time when handphone will severely and adversely affect the schooling experiance is during tests and exams. However, there are already provisions to ensure that cheating during exams are minimized. As such this blog asserts that the status quo is more than sufficient in terms of restrictions to handphones in schools.
7:54 PM
