No doubt about it
Students and smartphones were a failed experiment. The state must end it.
It’s been one of the great social experiments in history. What happens when we give children the gift of perpetual connectivity? Connectivity with each other, with their parents, and with strangers. Connectivity with the news, with the marketplace, with influencers and advertisers. Connectivity with the entirety of human knowledge and experience, including violence, pornography, hatred and lies.
This is the gift bestowed by the smartphone. While it is ultimately up to parents whether and at what age their children receive this gift, it is up to the institutions that educate those children — and which serve in the parents’ place for those educational hours of the day — whether and how that gift should be used on their time.
The results of the experiment are clear. Smartphones must be banned in classrooms.
Widespread concern
Legislation to require that mobile devices be locked away during school hours is progressing in several states, and has been passed into law in Florida and Indiana. Pennsylvania is catching up: House Bill 2034, introduced by Rep. Barbara Gleim, R-Cumberland, would provide that “a student of a public school entity may not possess or use a mobile device during the school day.” The Post-Gazette’s Ford Turner reports that similar legislation is being prepared in the Senate.
While the first movers in the U.S. have been red states, cracking down on in-school cell phone use is hardly a conservative or right-wing concern. Support for these measures has come from both parties, and the Senate of deep-blueVermont has recently sent a billto that state’s lower chamber.
Meanwhile, several European countries have blazed a trail Pennsylvania, and all states, should follow. While the details vary, Italy, the Netherlands, France, much of Spain and now the United Kingdom either have or are close to implementing school cell phone bans. UNESCO, meanwhile, reports that about one-quarter of the world’s nations have such rules, including Colombia, Bangladesh and Singapore.
But it was a Norwegian study, published in February but disseminated late last month, that supercharged the phone-free school conversation. After three years of banning mobile devices in 400 schools, both boys and girls experienced a decline of nearly 50% in bullying. Other results, however, were particularly strong for girls, whose grades went up, and whose visits to mental health providers dropped an astonishing 60%.
Collapsing mental health
Rates of teenage anxiety, depression and suicide in the U.S. have spiked precisely in alignment with the widespread adoption of smartphones. Suicide rates for youth and young adults are up nearly twothirds since 2011. One in five teenagers struggles with anxiety or depression.
Any statistician will tell you that correlation between two factors does not mean that one causes the other. But when such a clear correlation is present, we are free to use common sense to derive a causal relationship. For phones, kids and mental health, it only takes a passing understanding of the nature of smartphones, and of human nature, to figure out the problem.
Constant access to the internet, and social media in particular, supercharges all the weaknesses of the young psyche: credulousness,
through advertising and propaganda; self-doubt, through the constant invitation to compare oneself with the perfection portrayed by others; casual cruelty, through unceasing access to classmates (and strangers) who can be teased and taunted and gaslit; curiosity, through the badgering temptation to explore the darkest corners of the internet and of human nature.
Growing up is hard enough. Smartphones give kids access to the world and each other that even many adults struggle to cope with in a healthy way.
And there’s no escape. A generation ago, a victim of bullying could avoid his or her tormentor by not being in the same place at the same time — and, in all likelihood, by being at home for a solid 12 to 16 hours of the day. Now, everyone is only a text, a snap, a post away. No one is ever free.
Adults in the room
Parents can and should take the data and their common sense and makethe decisions they deem are right for their families. But public schools have the right and the duty to make rules about what does and doesn’t advance their educational missions. Pittsburgh-area schools that have locked up smartphones during school hours have seen steep declines in distraction and improvements to discipline. The Norway results speak for themselves.
But moving against phones as an individual school or district can be hard. Much better for there to be statewide rulesthat apply to everyone.
Most of the arguments against banning phones amount to circular reasoning: namely, the idea that they are essential to social communication, with both friends and family. But they have only become essential because adultshave allowed them to become essential. They can just as easily become non-essential,at least during the school day,once again.
In fact, many teachers say that the people most likely to be sending distracting text messages to kids in class are their own parents. It’s clear that parents, as well as students, need to be weanedoff constant connectivity.
What about emergencies? The consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services strongly discourages student cell phone use, arguing that in an emergency scrambling for smartphones distracts students fromfollowing life-saving instructions; contributes to rumor generation and spreading; and can hamper first responders by summoning parents to a scene before it is safe. In fact, the organization points out, rightly, that phones in schools are more likely to be use to send and receive threats than to helpin a true emergency situation.
School leadership can and must develop proper communications strategies that keep everyone informed and safe.
There’s no good reason for Pennsylvania to continue to allow the experiment of smartphones in schools to continue. Children are hurting, and the adultsmust take action.