There is a movement in the field of education, one that proponents say is long overdue. Local professionals who are on the front lines say that it can’t get here soon enough. Schools across the country, having seen test scores plummet and student discipline spiral out of control, have begun to ban the use (and, in some cases, the actual possession) of cellphones by students during school time.
One local teacher told me of a male student who would constantly look at his cellphone during class. The teacher had to tell him to put it away. “One time,” as the teacher tells it, “I told him to put his phone away, and (the student) said, ‘I’m not on my phone.’ He absolutely had been on his phone. But it’s weird. He’s a good kid; I don’t think he would lie to me.”
The next day, the teacher asked the kid’s best friend, who sits nearby, to keep an eye out. Sure enough, the teacher tells the kid to put his phone away, and the kid swears that he wasn’t using the phone. His friend laughs and says, “Yeah, you were. I was watching. I even took a picture of it.”
The teacher says, “I certainly didn’t ask the friend to take a picture, but it kind of freaked (the student) out. I sincerely think that he didn’t know that he was on his phone. It’s like breathing for some kids.”
Several European countries have banned cellphones in educational settings, and the results have been quite positive. Spain has measured a precipitous drop in cyberbullying, while countries including Norway and Belgium have seen test scores rise by as much as 20%. UNESCO did a study that showed that young people who aren’t even using a phone themselves are distracted by others who are using a phone. According to that study, it can take as long as 20 minutes to refocus on the academic task at hand.
Schools across the country are now providing all students with tablets or Chromebooks with which to do online research, so there is no valid reason to have a phone in the classroom.
Some states, including Virginia and Pennsylvania, are taking a patchwork approach to the problem. Stunningly, nearly half of all kids between the ages of 8 and 12 own smartphones, as do 90% of all kids between 13 and 18. Many school districts are banning cellphones altogether at the elementary school level. Kids who do bring a phone to school have to put it in a special locker or in a magnetic pouch.
The pouches used to be used at concerts, allowing the owner to always maintain possession of their phone but unable to use them. So obsessive is the behavior of some kids that there are reports of students under the age of 10 bringing burner phones to put in the pouch so that they can keep their real phone available.
Surprisingly (or, if you think about it, in this day and age not surprisingly at all), the biggest opposition to banning cellphones in schools is coming from parents. Many cite banal reasons for wanting to constantly be in touch with their kids — e.g., schedule changes, time and place for pickup after school. But many play the emotionally charged school shooting card.
The fact that a school shooting happened even once is a black mark on our nation. The fact that they continue to happen should shame us all into action. However, the odds of any one school being hit with such violence is infinitesimally small, and to use the possibility of it someday happening is an irrational excuse for allowing students to have unfettered access to their cellphones during school.
Districts back East have been successful in the banning (or, at the very least, the sharp curtailing the usage of) cellphones on school grounds by presenting the out-of-control current situation as a mental health issue. For many young people, the attachment to their phone certainly meets the definition of an addiction. Thus far, the courts have been siding with the schools.
One of the determining factors as to how this mission to save a generation of our young people proceeds will involve conflicting hatreds on the part of Republican politicians. To wit: Which do they hate more — big tech or public education?
If it’s big tech and its trillion-dollar cellphone industry, they’ll probably first try to do something stupid and unconstitutional, like the pols did in Montana when they tried to ban TikTok. But when that fails, they may try to limit cellphone use, which would make them temporary strange bedfellows with people who actually give a crap about kids.
However, they’re probably more likely to embrace their go-to hatred of Public Education, that which allows them to demonize unions, criticize the teaching of the fact that slavery once existed in the United States, and have a fake bogeyman that they can use to argue in favor of their socialist voucher program. If they let the phones stay in schools, that will help keep post-pandemic test scores down and allow the further maligning of public schools.
The pandemic severely damaged the learning curve of an entire generation of young people. Those young people are now using their own phones to hammer the final nails into their educational coffins. We need to stop it.
