Popularity of Pride shows how a law can change a culture – so smartphone ban for children IS achievable
IHAVE had enough rows with my children over their smartphones to know that tackling usage in school is long overdue. Schools have been largely left to their own devices, if you pardon the pun, regarding the regulation of phones and their success has been patchy from my experience.
There are days when I’m bombarded with text messages from my offsprings telling me they’ve lost their calculator, need a new book or that they’ll be off early next Tuesday due to a major sporting clash.
Perhaps I’m missing a maternal gene but, barring an accident or sudden illness where admittedly smartphones have their uses, I don’t want a constant line of communication with my children, particularly when they are at class and supposedly learning.
For that reason I’m grateful for Senator Gerard Craughwell’s new Bill laying down firm rules for smartphone usage across all schools.
The Bill, which is going to committee stage, suggests that students hand over their phones before class and collect them at the end of the school day.
Sounds fair enough to me. Also, it follows similar legislation in France where all students under the age of 15 are banned from using a mobile phone in school. There have also been calls by UK culture secretary for head teachers to ban mobile phones in schools.
A sticking point of the new Bill revolves around sanctions: students who flout the ban will lose their phone for a day; if they breach it a second time, it’s confiscated for a week. On the third strike, they lose it for a term.
Education Minister Richard Bruton fears that these rules are too ‘prescriptive’, while the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (NAPD) maintains that even if the code of practice is workable in primary schools, it is not practicable at secondary level.
By that stage they argue students are much older, they are more reliant on their smartphones, not least when it comes to their studies, which are increasingly driven by technology and e-learning.
The gist of the NAPD’s argument seems to be that it’s more than their job’s worth to have teachers tackle truculent 17- or 18-year-olds about their smartphones.
It also claims that the problems engendered by smartphones such as cyber bullying, sexting, or online gambling are problems for society to remedy, and that it is not the sole responsibility of schools to do so.
It’s not hard to see where teachers are coming from in their resistance to take on the role of smartphone police.
They are trained to teach while keeping control of a classroom of up to 30 students. That’s demanding enough without adding into the mix the need to peer under desks or around corners to try to catch Johnny or Sally in the act of smartphone use.
However, the opposition shown by teachers also betrays a certain shortsightedness about how swiftly cultural change can occur, when it’s underpinned by effective legislation.
They forget how readily society adapts to a new order once the advantages become apparent, when attitudes shift from an intransigent ‘no way’ to wonderment at ‘why didn’t we think of this earlier?’
Smoking
How often, for instance, have we seen legislation that was dismissed as either draconian or impossible to implement become so much part of the fabric of life that it’s almost impossible to imagine how we coped before it?
Take Micheál Martin’s smoking ban. Remember the weeping and gnashing of teeth, not least from yours truly, when smoking was prohibited in workplaces and the rules were imposed under pain of a hefty on-the-spot fine? Our behaviour changed almost overnight. Thousands of smokers gave up the habit as it was simply not worth the trouble, while smoking in offices, in most houses or in train carriages became extinct.
Nowadays on the odd occasion that a feckless ne’er-do-well sparks up on the upper deck of my local bus, there is practically a stampede downstairs of passengers melodramatically gasping for air and demanding that the driver do something about the outrage unfolding above them.
The effect of the drink-driving ban was similar. Perhaps it’s different in the part of the kingdom ruled by the Healy-Raes, but driving while over the limit has become so stigmatised that it’s rare nowadays that anyone gets behind the wheel after a few drinks and risks causing carnage on the road.
Designated drivers have become commonplace and in isolated areas publicans often arrange lifts home for their regulars. In Cavan/ Monaghan, an evening bus service from 8pm until 12.30am, serving rural villages, is being piloted to examine its effects on breaking down rural isolation.
But perhaps there is no more persuasive case for the ability of new laws to mould public opinion than the extraordinary turnout for the Pride march on Saturday in Dublin.
According to organisers, a record 60,000 people turned out for the occasion. In the capital, every public house was bedecked in rainbow bunting ,welcoming revellers and touting their ties to tolerance and diversity. Even middle-aged tourists entered the flamboyant spirit, cheerfully submitting to having their faces decorated in paint and glitter
With happy crowds spilling out of pubs and cafes onto the sidestreets, the Mardi Gras atmosphere and a Government Buildings glowing with the rainbow colours, it was a million miles from the modest parades of yesteryear when a couple of hundred gays and lesbians would march and chant through the streets before returning for reasons of safety to their nocturnal ghettos.
Of course the baking sunshine played a part, but it’s impossible to deny the pivotal role of the Marriage Equality Referendum in bringing gay rights into the mainstream.
As Mary McAleese’s son Justin marvelled: ‘I couldn’t imagine, as a 13year-old child, growing up in the Áras, realising I was gay, that 20 years later myself, my husband, my parents and family would be walking in Dublin Pride.’
If the lessons of the past tell us anything, it’s that it’s often only by force of new laws that seismic shifts in social behaviour or attitudes are decisively brought about.
The resistance of teachers and public figures to legally enforced restrictions of smartphone use or for setting an age limit, as this newspaper campaigns for, is predictable.
It reflects our human instinct to distrust change and to rail against anything that interferes with habits that have grown comfortingly familiar and second nature.
But if an outright ban on smartphones in schools produces swift benefits, if children and young adolescents are liberated from addictive behaviour, and there is widespread parental support, then it’s very likely that enforcement will be seamless and that teachers will not have to police the new regime.
As with the smoking and drink-driving bans or gay rights, in years to come, we’ll all wonder how we were ever so unenlightened as to freely allow smartphones into the hands of young children.