Cellphones interfere with learning
Cellphones should be banned in elementary schools and in high schools for children and adolescents.
They are a distraction that interferes with students’ dispositions for learning (e.g. curiosity, initiative, motivation) and the habits of mind (e.g. positive mindset, emotion control, persistence) they need for effective learning throughout life.
Cellphones are addictive, have the potential to derail children’s social and emotional well-being and prevent and alter the brain’s architecture including the network of structure building and connections that continues to the mid-20s.
During the early years, children’s development of neural connections in the brain is rapid, intense and as divergent as the range of experiences they are exposed to, their freedom to explore interesting environments, and their access to a rich array of play opportunities that gradually become more complex and lead to sophisticated child-directed play. When they are able to engage in role play scenarios, creative productions, construction, problem-solving, project planning and following through, children lay a strong foundation for lifelong learning. The complexity and quality of play and experiences in childhood predict their likelihood of success in learning later on.
Parents who permit young children to play with devices instead of engaging in opportunities indoors and outdoors, exploring widely and tackling activities that challenge their physical, cognitive, and socialemotional skills, limit their potential to build the architecture of the brain. Teachers should plan activities and experiences that encourage children to practise and apply the learningto-learn skills that include the ability to attend and focus, the dispositions for learning, and positive habits of mind. These skills support children’s understanding of concepts, ability to express themselves, think flexibly, retain their natural creativity, practise resilience and perseverance, and be ready for more complex learning later on.
In adolescence, the mental structures and connections developed in childhood that are not used are “pruned”; that is, they disappear and children cannot as readily access them in later life. During the teen years, students are learning and practising to think abstractly, entertain several ideas at once (flexible thinking), find alternate solutions, and engage in abstract thinking to appraise issues, argue ideas and choose values.
When cellphones are permitted for students in high school, their capacity to use and expand their mental structures in active classroom learning is limited. They need in-class time to solve problems, form judgments and evaluate, discuss and debate issues, use and retain their creative instincts and invent. These are precisely the skills that children need to acquire for successful 21st-century life and learning.
It is not surprising that high school teachers are seeing reduced capacity in students to exercise age-appropriate cognitive and academic skills, engage each other and pursue challenging tasks and multi-stage projects. Cellphones should be banned in classrooms, but teachers should craft homework assignments that would permit students to use their devices appropriately at home to conduct research, formulate answers to questions, and compose clear explanations.
Most important of all, teachers need better training for their roles today than the past practice and pedagogies that were designed for the Industrial Age and not the Information Age. These are the issues that should be engaging school board trustees, ministries of education, faculties of education and provincial governments.