Time to hang up!
‘Gillian Keegan, the schools minister, has issued “guidance” to head teachers to encourage schools to prohibit mobile phones in classes. Some schools already do it but a lot don’t. So the question has to be “why not?” Isn’t it a no-brainer? Well, obviously not, otherwise the state wouldn’t have to get involved. And while I don’t normally agree when the government bans things, on this, I applaud it. In fact, it should have been done years ago. Kids should hand them over as they enter school and get them back at the end of the day. Can you imagine being a teacher with a classroom taking no notice of you because they’re staring at their phones? No wonder they leave school unable to read or write. Parents try to justify them with “safety reasons” and some teachers laughingly claim they “help with learning”, which is ridiculous. How, exactly? They don’t say because they can’t say, because they don’t.
Jason Elsom, chief executive of charity Parentkind, summed it up brilliantly: “The government is right to be taking decisive action on the use of phones in schools. Society has sleepwalked into a position where children are addicted to harmful ‘electronic drugs’, and have no escape from their digital dealers, not even within the relatively safe grounds of schools.” Personally, I don’t think kids under 16 should be allowed to have mobile phones full-stop. In my view they are bad for kids in just too many ways. They encourage bad posture, cause attention deficit, and can affect the self-confidence of developing minds through social media. They can also be used for mass bullying, which can seriously damage mental health. If I had kids, there’s no way they’d be allowed one, no matter how many times they tell me all their mates have them. In fact, if I were a kid now, I wouldn’t want one either. I wouldn’t want my helicopter parents tracking my every move. They should trust their kids and allow them to live without the need to control them through devices, because that surely is storing up problems for the future as well.’