LIke a lot of nervous parents and frustrated teachers, I read the article entitled “A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears” in this morning’s New York Times. It says that American kids are importing cell-phone ring-tones from England, which ring at a frequency of 17 kilohertz. That’s great for kids, who can actually hear such things — but not so great for young adults (including young teachers) in the 18-24 age range, whose slightly less sensitive ears only allow them to hear noises in the 2-16 kHz range.

To make matters worse, adults aged 30-39 can typically hear sounds in the 2-15 kHz range; adults aged 40-49 can hear sounds in the 2-13 kHz range; and old-timers in the 50-59 age range can only hear sounds in the 2-12 kHz range (to put this in perspective, the highest note generated by a piano is at 4 kHz). Bottom line: if you’re a teenager with such a well-equipped phone, you can safely assume that most adults will not be able to hear it ring. This presumably allows you to operate your phone in situations where it would otherwise be noticed and confiscated — e.g., the classroom, the dinner table, or the long, tedious church sermon.

Parents and various other adult authority figures are aghast: “How can we let them get away with this? We’re losing control!” Well, fellow adults, it’s a little late; we lost control 15 or 20 years ago, depending on how you measure such things. Before cell phones appeared, an earlier generation of teenagers discovered pagers — and immediately found ways to move around town while (a) staying in constant communication with one another, so that every member of the teenage clique knew where ever other member was, while (b) preventing their parents from knowing exactly where anyone was. When the Internet came along, most teenagers were miles ahead of their parents (and their teachers, and various other adults) when it came to creative uses for e-mail, accessing porn sites, downloading plagiarized school reports, and hacking into supposedly secure corporate computer centers.

Obviously, there are still some klutzy kids who fumble their attempts to circumvent parents and teachers with contraband technology; but these are the same kids who, 20 years ago, couldn’t make up a credible story to explain why they were late for their curfew (”My watch just stopped, Dad, honest! I don’t know how it happened!”). And there are still some extremely clever (and/or paranoid, and/or oppressively intrusive) adults who can outsmart the average teenager when he or she attempts to exploit technology for some unauthorized purpose.

But by and large, the kids have got the upper hand by now. Indeed, I think they’ve had it for almost an entire generation — since the mid-1980s. I think the attempts to leapfrog the kids and outsmart their clever exploitation of technology are doomed to fail: there will always be newer technology, and the kids are simply more motivated and more clever than we slow-moving adults. And they’re far more likely to spread the news about clever, slightly audacious uses of technology through “viral” blogging/Internet mechanisms; meanwhile, their older-generation parents are still using smoke signals and telegrams to communicate their concerns to one another.

It seems to me that, rather than wasting our time inventing an “anti-ringtone” gadget, we’d be better off spending some time re-evaluating the rules we’ve arbitrarily imposed, and then organizing some frank discussions with the kids about the purpose and objectives of all the rules that society imposes. That’s no guaranteed solution, and it doesn’t mean that we should abolish all of our mechanisms for controlling technology (it drives me bonkers when a cell-phone conversation shatters the mood of a movie or a Broadway play, and I really don’t care whether it belongs to a kid or an adult). But let’s not kid ourselves about who’s got the upper hand.

Oh, by the way, here’s the web page where you can play the kids-only cellphone ring sound. And no, I couldn’t hear it at all, even after concentrating very hard and trying three times. Fortunately for all concerned, all three of my kids are grown, and I have no interest in where or when they might be using their cell phones.