Keeping cell phones at bay in classrooms

You want kids to always have access to something that might help them stay safe. Those concerns came up in survey responses. But is there a way to keep them safe but not let them stream movies instead of learning how to do something?

Gov. Ned Lamont’s call to keep smartphones out of classrooms has me thinking about space junk.

Space junk, as in an unwanted consequence of progress. On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union started the space race with the launch of Sputnik. Nearly 70 years later the skies are crowded all day.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,500 is what I’ve found when it comes to satellites. A recent CNN report put space junk, otherwise known as “objects bigger than a softball hurtling a few hundred miles above Earth,” at 30,000.

As the proliferation of space junk suggests, technology advanced while we weren’t looking, or at least not paying adequate attention. Tech can take hold fast and grow faster. Today a smartphone is regarded as fundamental, but it wasn’t even around not all that long ago. The list of things we can’t live without includes things we’ve lived without for ages.

The proposal may be focused on younger pupils, but the question applies to students of all grades. You could say that if for centuries humans got along just jolly without smartphones, why can’t you? But that argument might not impress those trending toward the here and now, which is where the school-aged tend to trend. There’s a world within smartphones that is hard to set aside.

But there’s also a world within every individual, and that’s the world schools are tasked with cultivating. One world is getting in the way of the other, is one way of looking at it. Can’t smartphones be just set aside, the way you hang your jacket in the closet? Or in a Yondr pouch?

The governor, in his State of the State address, said “increasingly kids on the smart phones are tuning out each other, tuning out learning and tuning into unfiltered images which can be fun or disturbing.”

A recent CT Insider survey that collected more than 100 responses found support for the governor’s point of view. A New Haven teacher called it a “very good idea to address an impossible situation.”

There have always been distractions when it comes to schooling, but phones and their alluring distractions have set the grown-up world on its heels, offering little clarity when it comes to use in schools. We are still discussing taking the devices out of the classroom, for example.

Another teacher responding to the survey said that without regulations protecting from harmful technology “we are left with little else than perhaps maybe putting a band-aid on at the schoolhouse door to address a systemic disease.”

A disquieting argument for keeping the phone with the young person, whenever, is also the most compelling. You want kids to always have access to something that might help them stay safe. Those concerns came up in survey responses. But is there a way to keep them safe but not let them stream movies instead of learning how to do something?

Since I went to school at a time when pretty much all you had was a No. 2 pencil to bring into the classroom, there’s no personal experience from which to take on the smartphone question. So, I asked for help. Phone use was an integral part of the high school experience in Milford for Madeline Papcun, a former RecordJournal editorial page intern. Twitter, now called X, was used for schedule updates, lunch menus and announcements throughout the school day. “It honestly was hard to know what was going on at school without being able to look at the notifications,” she told me, in an email. “I made my first Twitter account specifically to follow my high school newspaper’s account for the updates.”

Papcun, the editor-in-chief of the The Daily Campus, the University of Connecticut’s student-run newspaper, called it a “toss-up” with phones. They can be tools for learning “but certainly have the potential to distract.”

From all this you gather that following the governor’s call, whether it’s about grade school, middle school or high school, is going to take more change than checking phones at the door.

It’s a complicated planet. Satellites and smartphones entail consequences not easy to clean up. With space junk it seems impossible. Does it have to be that way with phones?

HNP