> It had to be a law because children are people in Finland and most Nordic countries with rights that adults just can't take away.

It's a strange concept to hold that there are rights that can't be taken away, but then take them away merely by passing legislation.

Those rights can't be taken away... without existing legislation.

There are many rights that can be taken away, freedom of movement for example in the case of prisoners, but you need laws in order to not make that taking away a crime itself. You can't just apprehend and throw someone in your basement because they stole something from you.

Same thing with children's phones, a teacher can't just take away the phone because they didn't have the authority before.

Sure, I think this just looks a little alien from an American perspective because most of our rights are set up as explicit negatives to block the government from legislating them away, more than to prevent Joe or Jane Teacher from taking a phone. "Congress shall pass no law..."

I guess the nordics don't have a common-law tradition and so never inhereted the in loco parentis doctrine that allows schools to take substantial actions regarding students? I'm not familiar with their legal history.

You have free speech, but you can't say a certain threat that is in a whitest kid you know sketch. It's the same thing

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY&pp=ygUcd2hpdGVzdCB...

This has always seemed blatantly unconstitutional, though, intentionally abused to create a chilling effect. It's not something I have or will say, but if "I want to kill Fred" isn't classed as a Virginia v. Black "true threat", the government has no legal basis for charging. Technically the statute isn't unconstitutional, it's just widely-abused.

AFAIK, yes, in loco parentis isn't a thing. Rights of the child (or, overall, the individual) are first and foremost. Children commonly have voice in e.g. court proceedings affecting them, too.

Nordic legal system is interesting - it avoids a lot of Roman/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon influence and is rooted instead in the old tradition of "Tings". (Nordic communal gatherings). Which means there's a strong base of communal consensus instead of precedent - in the small, reflected by the presence of lay judges in legal proceedings. In the large, reflected in the Nordic countries together having a set of very closely coordinated legal systems. (Since late 1800s, I think?)

It's super-interesting (if legal systems are interesting to you ;)

There is something called "tillsynsplikt" in Swedish law. Hard to translate, but perhaps "obligation of exercising care/authority".

This normally applies mostly to the parents of a child, but is taken over by the school during school time. The obligation comes with fuzzy yet extensive rights to enforce order, in whatever way and towards whatever goal can be argued to be in the big-picture-best-interest of the child or group of children.

Of course there are various laws specifically granting rights to children. To decide if a particular act is lawful or not, you (or a court!) needs to weigh all the relevant laws against each other.

Technically it only takes 38 states governments, no? Certainly the Americans would never tolerate such an amendment, never the less it is possible.

> most of our rights are set up as explicit negatives to block the government from legislating them away,

Of course, as we've discovered, those rights don't mean much, when the executive doesn't want to recognize them. So what was the point anyway?

It's too early to make that claim. There are multiple branches and levels of government to deal with situations like this. They have worked in the past for smaller scale violations. They should work in the present for larger scale violations. The problem is that it takes time, it always took time, so a lot of people are going to get hurt in the process. (Granted, it is also important for people to fight for their rights because the current government is pushing the limits.)

> current government is pushing the limits

The Republicans* are. Important to be factually accurate here’s the Democrats have never done anything remotely this lawless and authoritarian before.

> . . . aside from supporting slavery and then the Dixiecrats opposing civil rights, you mean? If you actually look at American history, the ugly parts are ultimately bipartisan.

You are really pushing both-sides-ism to its limits.

It goes without saying that if you have to go back that far in history to find an analogy to today's abuse of power, you are proving GP's point: the lawlessness of the Republican party is unprecedented in modern history.

The person I was replying to said "never before," which means that AND the internship of Japanese-Americans during WWII are squarely on the table.

I never voted for Trump and I don't support the power grabs he's trying to make, but I also understand America has a history of playing footsie with authoritarianism every 80-100 years or so.

Internment camps, a civil war over literally owning humans as property, the Alien and Sedition Acts . . .

It is not. The precedent is around ninety years old, but firmly within modern history. As Franklin Roosevelt attempted to enact his New Deal agenda, the so-called "Four Horsemen", often along with Justice Roberts and/or Chief Justice Hughes, repeatedly ruled against his alphabet agencies and sweeping social bills.

So, Roosevelt worked to find the necessary votes to pack the court. His "Judicial Procedures Reform Bill" was not so different from any of the other "judicial reforms" we've condemned when other strongmen around the world used them to strengthen their power. Politicians from Roosevelt's bloc spewed vitriol at the justices who were simply trying to do their jobs. In Iowa, effigies of the six justices who had opposed any of Roosevelt's actions were found hanged by nooses. Once Roosevelt secured political support and signaled his willingness to push for packing the court, the justices backed down and began ruling in his favor, repeatedly. Where months before it had struck down a New York minimum wage law, a nearly-identical law in Washington was deemed perfectly constitutional. The National Labor Relations Act was fine and dandy. Coal mining was suddenly interstate commerce after all. In fact, the Commerce Clause now covered everything; one clothing factory in Virginia was enough commerce to quality. Later, the court would rule that a man growing wheat for his own consumption was sufficient "commerce" to warrant near-limitless federal rule-making. After all, it meant he bought less wheat from someone else, so clearly it was within the feds' purview. Wickard v. Filburn stands as precedent today. The justices on that court kept their seats but gave up their power.

Now, another populist has shown up. One who has a different vision for the nation than that laid out by the neoliberal technocrats who have dominated American politics since Clinton. Trump has explicitly called out FDR's new deal coalition, the coalition emplaced by vaguely authoritarian means quite similar to those he is using, that was the underlying basis for politics for almost the past century. I don't care for Trump's vision much more than I care for Roosevelt's or Clinton's. But claiming that this is "unprecedented" only serves to point people away from the prior time in history when this happened, when we utterly failed to stop Roosevelt and remove his power. Perhaps learning from history is the better choice so this time we can do a better job of it.

This tradition goes back further than Roosevelt. In addition to being a notorious bigot and racist, Woodrow Wilson was open about the idea that the Constitution was outmoded and needed replacing so that a technocratic government could take its place.

You also have Roosevelt's first appointment to SCOTUS, a literal hood-wearing klansman and true-blue progressive. Broadly the progressive movement was also home to a high level of racism; more of the paternalistic variety than the hateful, but still led to e.g. forced sterilizations. Progressives today have abandoned that, but there was no such radical realignment for them.

Our history is ugly, but that particular detail needs to address the southern realignment where the Jim Crow-era Democrats moved to the Republican Party. I think it’s less about bipartisanship and more that there’s a group of people who both switch parties and influence within parties trying to accomplish their goal of maintaining their superiority over other groups. Their loyalty is to their group, not the party.

This isn't an accurate picture either. A good example would be Justice Hugo Black, Roosevelt's first appointee to the Supreme Court. Black remains one of the most noteworthy big-time liberals in the history of the court (with a few exceptions like Korematsu.) He was a southern democrat and a klansman; not a member of some shadowy cabal that exploited the democrats for political expediency but a true believer in progressivism.

Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure, and only through it can one be purified. None of us is free from history, none of our forefathers was clean, but neither are we responsible for their failings.

> Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure

Opposition to slavery isn’t exclusive to the left, but also if that isn’t hyperbole you really need a wider sample. By far the most common perspective I’ve heard from anyone in the anti-racist camp is that nobody is perfect because we are all shaped by our environment. The whole point of entire campaigns is to avoid reinforcing those biases because they’re so widespread.

This also touches on the perceived inaccuracy you mentioned: my argument is that the key part for Black isn’t the Democratic affiliation but the southern white identity. People are motivated by issues but some people prioritize that one above everything else, and that’s what happened with the southern realignment: some people valued white supremacy most and changed what were in many cases generational party affiliations, while others decided that things like labor rights or social programs mattered more and shifted correspondingly. It was largely the same people but they sorted themselves into different parties and that shaped the policies of those parties.

Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal. Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal.

So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for decades to come.

You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

As someone who has lived in the south (my family is not from the south), I’ll tell you that the Republicans were correct. The clan controlled the local counties (most important offices) and nobody would stop them from disappearing people or burning them out of their homes regardless of that the federal government said.

What changed was the people. Each generation has grown more tolerant. That finally broke the clan control and the millennial generation in the South is overwhelmingly not racist.

Unfortunately, the recent moves away from MLK-style equality to the radical Marxist-style equity (equity except for people who happen to be born white as they see it — very similar to Russian discrimination against children of formerly Middle/upper class people like engineers) seem to be pushing gen Z back toward racial supremacy (this seems true across the whole country).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the...

The most interesting question is why republicans and democrats supposedly swapped parties in the 1960s, but the black vote shifted in the 1930s. The answer seems pretty clear. Black unemployment was through the roof and the New Deal promised jobs, so they broke with the part of Lincoln because they were forced to. As things stabilized, there was a risk of them switching back and once again creating a Republican supermajority which is what spawned support for a federal civil rights act by the racist democrats.

> You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.

LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.

A larger proportion of both House and Senate republicans voted for the '64 Civil Rights Act, true, but that doesn't change the fact that many preferred the state model. Goldwater, the party's nominee for president in '64, had been an outspoken civil rights supporter since before it was cool. He opposed specific titles on specific grounds because he, like many others, believed in upholding constitutional limitations on federal power, rather than just writing a bill and calling it solved. This was not as a proxy for racism, and Goldwater had been a major proponent of the prior two major civil rights bills in '57 and '60. He even spent many of his later years advocating for gay rights.

I am personally opposed to maintaining what I see as an overreach of the federal government. This goes back to the start of the new deal and stretches through much of what primarily the Warren Court found constitutional. Plenty of us "states rights" types are in favor of it on a whole host of other issues, e.g. many of the policies Trump promulgates. Please stop trying to erase the concept of local governance with hostile and incomplete interpretations of the past.

They also don't mean much when state governments just ignore them and never get called to account (and I can point to examples on both sides of the aisle).

Americans don’t have constitutional rights. It’s a fantasy that has crumpled the second it hit the reality of having a dictator as president and a political party that doesn’t care about laws. The Republicans have deported American citizens (children) who were born in America. The Republicans have arrested a judge in Milwaukee because they didn’t like that judge following the law.

This wouldn't be the first time that it took a while for the courts to redress wrongs. Dred Scott technically stood until rendered obsolete by the Thirteenth Amendment. Brown v. Board didn't happen until the fifties. The courts didn't catch up to applying the Alien Enemies Act to japanese during WWII until after the war had ended.

This doesn't mean that we don't have constitutional rights. The whole point of an inalienable right is that it's an inherent right recognized by governance. The state can't take them away, only violate them.

As for your other points, I think you're actually keying on the wrong one; the administration's actions with Garcia are much more clearly wrong. The Wisconsin Supreme Court today temporarily suspended Judge Dugan despite the fact that four of its seven justices generally lean liberal, and are elected rather than appointed. We'll see if there's anything to the charges. If not, maybe we'll see each other at a protest, but it doesn't appear she was "following the law". As for the children, I believe that was due to a policy of keeping families together; if their parents must leave the country, they must follow or be placed in foster care.

Dismissing rule-of-law as a concept is both premature and counterproductive, in the sense that it only discourages people who could otherwise focus on using the checks and balances in place for this reason to rein in the administration.

Now I'm curious. Is there a law that carves out specific exemptions for parents disciplining kids/teenagers like grounding, taking away phone and internet privilege etc.

"can't be taken away" here means "can't be taken away by parents."

Different countries fall in different places on the scale between "a child is strictly a property of the parent, with which the parent may do as they wish", and "a child is a human being which the parent has been given an obligation to protect from harm, but not to control." The US is a lot closer to the former, most European countries, and especially the nordics, are much closer to the latter.

The former enables parents to send their kids to a private school with a decent curriculum if the state school forces propaganda on them, but it also enables parents to send their kids to a school where they teach creationism or prohibit being gay. The latter prohibits teachers from taking away children's rights to get a tattoo or use nail polish, but it also doesn't give schools the right to punish children for infractions or take away phones.

Those are extremes of course, and most countries fall somewhere in the middle, but that point is different in different countries.

The keyword here is just.

They cannot simply order children to comply, there has to be same legal basis like there has to be for ordering an adult to comply.

Maybe I'm seeing this wrong but a public school is a government institution, right? It seems reasonable, then, that the government could say "no phones in here", just like they can say "no drinks in the courtroom".

Not all schools are government institutions or funded by the government. But it wouldn't matter to your point, because by that logic anyone who owns the building should then be able to make rules about what goes on inside that building, or any organization, etc. Much like how you have basic wardrobe etiquette, you could also have a rule that says no phones in a classroom.

Now me being Estonian, just across the sea from Finland, I was surprised to learn this needed to be a law in the first place since when I went to elementary/primary school smartphones and laptops were not permitted in the classroom. Didn't need a special law for that, it was just the school's rules. You either play ball or you get called into the principals office. This happens enough times and you simply get kicked out of the school.

Well sure, I tend to agree with that. Government buildings can be an exception because they're public and we more carefully constraint the things the government can do, and because you can be forced to go there.

I too am a bit baffled by the idea that you need a law for that. But, as I said, we have a different common law tradition in America that changes things. The only two big legal influences which I've read on are common law and the justinian codex -> napoleonic code path; scandi law is alien to me.

Can't "just take away" ie, there has to be a law prescribing the removal of the right. Lawful rights vs inalienable human rights. Same thing exists in US. You have a right to certain things, like the right to privacy, but that right can be lost in the right circumstances as determined by law.

The difference here is that in the US, children don't by default inherit the same legal rights as adults and instead have a different set of rights which often means they never had a legal right to, for example, privacy or ownership, in the first place.

You have the right to get intoxicated, you possibly have the privilege to drive a car if you are licensed. It’s quite the shame that these shmucks legislated against doing both at the same time.

Not at all. Libel can punish you for speech. Defamation can punish you for expression. If you break a law, you no longer can vote in some states (I heavily disagree with this, just stating a fact) or own a gun. Etc... Etc... This is very normal.

That's how it is everywhere. Constitution gives rights, exceptions must be set by law.

You have free speech... then comes the list of exceptions, incitement of violence, defamation (libel and slander), Child pornography, perjury, speech integral to criminal conduct, copyright infringement, state secrets,

The US constitution doesn't give any rights. It restricts the power of the government to curtail rights that already exist.

I hope you understand that's just cute wording.

Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others. If you are robbed and nobody goes after the robber, the right to property does not de facto exist. The government must take an action.

The government doesn't need to take action when I already shot him dead, because they didn't infringe on my already-existing right to keep and bear arms.

The "cute wording" is important because the mindset matters. If enough of the population believes that rights are permitted to a person, they will attempt to revoke the permission. If they believe that rights are fundamental and inalienable, they wouldn't dare to think of trampling it in the first place. Of course, through the years, that perspective has shifted a lot away from the latter and to the former, to which I say "the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

> If you think that you have a right to shoot someone in the head, you're fucking nuts. Period. Go see a shrink.

To defend your life, liberty, and property you absolutely do have that right in most of the civilized world. Some places may put restriction on your ability to access a firearm, but self-defense is a basic necessity to have /any/ human rights. That said, I agree, trying to shoot someone in the head /is/ crazy, you should always aim for center of mass because it has a larger surface area which matters in difficult situations. That said, the person you're replying to never even uses the word "head"

Head, dead, I misread. Not the point.

You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone. A judge and/or jury will decide whether it was reasonable. If it wasn't, you broke the law. They did not "take away your right" to kill.

FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.

> You do not have a _right_ to kill anybody ever. However, you do have a _right to defend yourself_, within reason. That could in some situations mean that you take actions that kill someone.

You are trying to indicate a difference where there is none. It's not me that decides another person's life is less than what they're trying to rob me of, it's them by taking an action that necessarily forfeits their life when I must defend myself against their criminal act against me. A right to self defense is /necessarily/ a right to kill, because in many cases self-defense necessitates lethal force.

I have no desire to ever kill anyone, but the right to self-defense is absolute, it is the very basis of /all/ human rights and is based on a foundation of the simple principle of bodily autonomy.

> FYI most of the world do not allow you to kill someone to defend your property. That is a very American thing. If someone takes your stuff, you call the police.

You seem to be thinking that /property/ is the issue, it's the /taking/ that's the problem. How does someone /take/ your property? They use force. You have a right to defend yourself against that force, and in fact you MUST do so, or you will likely be killed or seriously harmed by the criminal through their use of force. Yes, you also have a right to defend your property, but the real issue is and always will be the force a criminal uses against you. Taking property is a forcible act. There is a false separation in the minds of some people between property crimes and violent crimes, property crimes /are/ violent crimes, in all but very narrow circumstances.

Thanks for putting this so clearly. The way you laid out the argument really helps us make our case here in Chile. Our laws are already more in line with Europe (proportionality, duty to retreat, that kind of thing...) but we do have parallels to yours like a Castle Doctrine of sorts.

The progressives' attempts to make it even more complicated, which btw started with them outright wanting to outlaw personal firearm ownership, all failed. And now that the rising crime has people crying out for order, plus their dismal approval ratings, they will be voted out this December for sure, they stand no chance.

What helps is how you framed the idea that the act of taking something by force IS the violence, which is what we’ve been trying to get across here, something that most people are indifferent to, until they experience an attack to their personal safety. Mindsets have shifted here in the last five years.

Are you for real looking up to the US in this case? That's so sad. There are things you can look up to, but over all they are fubar.

Yes. Very much so. We have to stand our ground against those who want to strip us of our freedoms, consolidate their monopoly on force, and leave us defenseless. This is no hypothetical situation, this happened in Chile during the 2019-2021 protests. The left tried to push like never before for drastic police reforms, including proposals to defund the police, remove their access to firearms, and dismantle units like the Carabineros’ special forces, all with daily chaos and violent riots on the streets. The outcome? It led to massive unrest, rising crime, and the erosion of public trust. Now we see a return to public outcry, with citizens demanding the restoration of law and order and reaffirming the role of police in maintaining public safety. The attempts to strip police power backfired, and now, the same progressives who pushed these reforms are facing the consequences of that political experiment. We are so back, we are coming back hard. This is the answer you wanted?

Extraordinarily based, and this is coming from a peruANO. We aren't generally a Western Civilization so much as we are a broadly Mestizo-Amerindian one, and our political history is closer to Asia or Africa in terms of instability. We need more Bukeles in Mestizo societies and more Mileis in more westernized states like the southern cone.

You are working under the assumption that everyone who takes property also wants to do physical harm. It's very sad. Most people who take property are otherwise peaceful individuals and more importantly, they are rational just like you and me. They do not want to risk a bigger penalty by using force. Your mindset is one that escalates any given situation. With your mindset you are putting yourself in much more risk than necessary.

I'm going to assume that you are American, and that many Americans agree with you. I can only say sorry. You can keep turning a blind eye to the stats, but it will not change the facts. You will need to change this way of thinking to save your country.

You are working under an assumption that someone who /takes/ by force is satisfied with the taking. I am working from years of data and my own experiences.

It is sad. Communities should help everyone within them so that nobody has a need to commit crime. Unfortunately many people commit crime because they don't care about others or have deep mental issues, not out of need.

On average 1% of the residents in communities in the US are responsible for >70% of the crime, including the most violent crimes. Who are those 1%? Repeat offenders. Those who have made crime their lifestyle and feel no conscience towards their victims. They are not "otherwise peaceful individuals".

I am American, but unlike most I am well traveled, speak multiple languages, and volunteer regularly in my community. No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact that a small portion of the population feels entitled to commit harm to others with impunity and they are unconcerned with killing or maiming decent people while in the process of their crimes. You should be prepared to defend yourself or all you have is hope that you get lucky.

Rather than trying to make me into a caricature so you can dismiss me, maybe you should also look at the data or go meet some of these people who commit crimes through volunteerism.

Statistically, thieves steal higher valued items compared to food or diapers for their kids. Such things must be rectified by harsh sentences and more vigilant police forces. This is why East Asia has such a low crime rate, compared to the West. This isn't facts you speak of, but your civilizational guilt after your forefathers destroyed so many societies like mine. Hopefully, this multipolar world will rectify Western guilt society dominance.

And to clarify, I'm not saying kill someone over $5. But if they attempt to steal something of high value (monetarily, sentimentally, etc.) and you attempt to prevent that or get it back, and they put up a likely-to-be-lethal resistance, you have the right to put up a lethal defense.

> I hope you understand that's just cute wording.

It's a difference in wording that reflects a fundamentally different conceptual model of what rights are and how they work, which in turn has wide-ranging implications for how law, politics, and social interactions are conducted.

> Individual rights exist only as far as they are protected by others.

That makes little sense, given that the concept of 'rights' is a normative framework we use to evaluate the legitimacy of people's behavior. The whole point of asserting rights is to make moral/legal arguments against behavior that does transgress against other people.

Construing situations where those transgressions take place as 'rights nonexistent' instead of 'rights violated' defeats the entire purpose of establishing a model of rights in the first place.

For the same reason, it also makes little sense to employ a model of rights that attributes the source of rights to human organizations that have the capacity -- and often the intent -- to violate them.

And hopefully the constitution sets some bounds on said restrictions...

Otherwise a constitution becomes ineffective at some point.

There are such things as unconstitutional laws and laws that should not be observed nor enforced...

I think it was phrased incorrectly and that's leading to this confusion.

More accurately, I think, it's that children have rights under the law that must be respected. This changes the law and sets specific situations where these rights are specifically restricted. Outside of those situations, those rights still must be respected!

No more strange than existing laws being reimagined to provide rights for those previously denied them. The strange idea would be that rights are cosmic and unchanging and not the result of a constant negotiation between individuals, groups and the state.

Well ethics aren't absolute. If it wasn't this way we would be stuck with a set of rules for all eternity, even when deemed incorrect at a later point.

This is also a question of balancing the different rights. The Finnish constitution also states that everybody has the right to free basic education.

You should have seen what happened a few years ago during a thing called covid

Yeah the first thing isnt 100% true, there is no law here in Denmark, but in many many schools, kids hand over their phones in the morning, and get them back at the end of the day. Is up to the schools how they want to handle it

No.

Kids must attend school to get basic education. When government mandates attendance, it does not mean that they can use it as excuse to take other rights away.

In voluntary activities no related to necessities, there possibility to make stricter rules, because people don't have to be there.

Staff are expected to use phones and other digital tools in order to do their job, so I don’t think this comment is as witty as you might think.

I wasn't trying to be witty at all. I was legitimately curious.

I didn't know teachers needed to use their smartphones for work. What do they need their phones for? Do they have landlines in each classroom to call parents or the office? Do teachers get laptops or PCs these days or are they expected to use a personal mobile phone to google things?

At my daughter’s school, they use a phone app to check the kids in as they arrive, and check them out as they leave. It replaces the paper list they used to have. Don’t ask me how it’s an improvement. I suppose they are able, in case of fire, to get an accurate head count that way.

The apps are often a part of some larger platform -- some of my friends have their kids in schools or daycares that do something similar, but the parents can also see the checkin/checkout info. I'm guessing at your daughter's school, the data is centralized in some way, which the admin can use for things like school-wide attendance statistics, which are often also tied to funding in some way.

Another use case is documentation - as they do activities, the teacher will use their cell to snap photos of the kids doing stuff. They can then use the school's app ("platform", I suppose) to send out a short note/summary at the end of the day, which parents can read on their end in the parent app. Also, reminders about things to bring tomorrow, notices about upcoming activities, etc. I am assuming they use these documentation items at the end of the year for grading, etc.

Pretty sure if a teacher in a school is found to be scrolling TikTok when they're meant to be teaching a lesson they're going to lose their job pretty quickly.

Have you interacted with humans anytime in the last five years?

People scroll TikTok or equivalent scrolly things as they drive, eat, poop, cook, as they "talk", as they walk, as they queue, as they "watch" movies and tv shows, during their down time, up time, in the bed until the small hours of the morning, people wake up on their day off and have a big plan and then... scroll the whole day. People go to the beach and scroll, they climb a mountain and scroll. They cycle and scroll, I've seen them do it.

If they can't hold it - showering, exercise, love-making (sometimes) - they get the thing to pump audio and/or visuals in their general direction, sometimes propped up, sometimes just strewn there. It's a riot.

And yes - people also scroll on these devices, if you can possibly imagine it, when they work. In schools, even! And in post offices, betting parlors, nail salons, cafes, while they do their only fans performance, you name it.

I've never been to Finland, don't speak a word of Finnish, and don't know much about Finnish culture, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if I had a 20c coin for every time a teacher in Finland scrolled TikTok for a minute or two during work hours, I'd have, roughly, a completely ridonculously large bag of 20c coins.

Yes, you're right, we should ban smart phones (or at least certain types of apps) for adults, too. But sadly there is no political majority in favor of that opinion, in Finland or elsewhere. (Wait, maybe they're banned in North Korea or somewhere? Not sure.)

(This is irony/sarcasm, please don't downvote. Haha only serious.)

Who is saying we ban smart phones for adults? I don't get how this is a response to what I'm saying.

What next? Are they going to let the teachers drive cars and smoke cigarettes while forbidding students to do the same?