Get Cellphones Out of Schools: A Brief Plea
Teaching is a complicated business. A seemingly infinitesimal number of decisions go into the running of a successful school, and some of these can be quite perplexing. What sorts of books belong on the curriculum, and what must be left out? What sort of daily rituals will give shape to the school day? What will be the grading policy? The discipline policy? The transportation policy? Any and all of these decisions might be approached sensibly from disparate perspectives, and determining which approach is right for one’s respective school can present significant challenges.
Banning cell phones from school, on the other hand, is not difficult. It is not complicated. It is hardly a matter for reflection. Nothing could be more evidently appropriate, more black and white in its clarity, than the need to keep phones out of school. They don’t belong there. Full stop. They offer nothing – absolutely nothing – to the educational endeavor, and serve only as a distraction from its work. In an academic environment, they are the source of all bad things, and no good things. Keeping them out of the school is the easiest possible decision that any administrator or faculty could make.
And yet most don’t make it. I know of very few schools where they are banned outright, and even those which place major restrictions on their usage are rare. It is quite common to see students roaming all over campus with their screens in front of their faces, or tucking their phones behind a textbook in class to catch up on their social media feeds, or sitting at lunch with a torrent of noise pouring into their brain through their earbuds. It is hard to fathom, for those who have not witnessed it, how much the ubiquity of the phone interferes with normal social interaction between young people, nor how much the relentless pull of distraction erodes their intellectual development. If it is the duty of educators to steer their pupils away from pernicious habits and towards enabling ones, then the obligation to break their mental dependence on their phones is clear as day.
The failure of schools to act decisively in this regard obviously results from our culture’s embrace of the phone. It is hard for educational institutions to buck trends and habits that are ingrained in a society, and a blithe acceptance of children’s fixation on screens is now an established feature of life in our day and age. Visit any public space and you will be certain to find toddlers being pushed around in their strollers with a phone in their hands, or sitting at a dining table engrossed in a cartoon playing on their iPad. Experiences which should provide opportunities for these children to discover the world around them or to absorb ordinary patterns of conversation become instead mere occasions for distraction. The impairment caused to children’s mental development by this sort of thing is incalculable, as is the cultural impoverishment obviously resulting from that impairment. The same sort of people who allow their children to stare at screens for hours on end will still wonder why our schools produce such poor results, why our culture becomes ever more moronic, or why our political discourse is so rancid and fruitless.
Clearly, it is this prevalence of phone usage among children in the larger culture that constitutes the one real obstacle to schools taking the sensible step of banning them. But then, it is surely obvious by now that in this, as in so many other ways, it has become incumbent upon schools to become centers of countercultural energy at this stage of our history. In a period of vitriolic ideology, it is necessary for schools to become training grounds for rational discourse. In a period of artistic brutality and degradation, it is necessary for schools to become havens for beauty. And in an age of mindless technological distraction, it is imperative that schools establish a realm of concentrated study. The general failure of schools to ban phones is really only one manifestation of their far more general failure to stand as a counterweight to the degradation of our culture.
Yet somehow in the case of phones, this dereliction appears all the more egregious, because the deeply pernicious influence these devices exert on young minds is itself so egregious. The rise in all sorts of mental pathologies among adolescents that corresponds with the widespread use of phones – a rise in feelings of depression, isolation, in suicide attempts – has been well-documented (see, for instance, Jean Twenge’s iGen for some of this documentation). There are abundant anecdotes about children being harassed and bullied on social media, which in its worst cases has led to suicides, and of predators lurking in dark corners of the internet to lure in naive minors. A torrent of nastiness and degradation proliferating in online culture and music, which would shame the mind of a Caligula, can be summoned in study hall by the click of a button. How is it possible, given these undeniable realities, to regard the presence of phones in schools as anything but a clear and present danger to our students’ well-being?
But put aside the nastiness students are likely to encounter online – the most pervasive ill effects of phones in schools are not to be found in any particular content they might come across, but in the constant, relentless sense of distraction these devices exert over their minds, and the insuperable barrier to learning this obviously presents. The medium truly is the message, and the message sent by the medium of the phone is that only the most superficial, most meretricious, most unedifying forms of communication demand our attention. In contrast, any course of study worth its time asks students to pore over texts, to tease out the lines of argument and symbolism intertwined through them, to articulate their comprehension of these forms of meaning in their own words. Long habituation to consuming meaning through the flash and ephemera of the phone screen simply leaves students incapable of discovering it through the slow, meditative processes required by their studies. No teacher who has worked in our schools for over a decade or so, and observed the general trends of student performance, would find it possible to deny the attrition of attention spans, reading ability, and writing fluency that has resulted from their students’ habituation to their phone screens.
No less evident are the effects of phones on children’s ability to socialize. It remains astonishing to me – and would be regarded as a positively dystopian sight in any culture less awry than ours – to see large groups of adolescents gathered together, each one entirely engrossed in his or her own screen, without communicating or even acknowledging the presence of those around them. When they do communicate, it is almost always with reference to what one of them is seeing on their screen, so that the phone and its ephemera remain the mediator through which all conversation must pass. Among the things young people now have a hard time recognizing in their world are one another; in a true sense, their friends’ avatars have become more real to them than their friends. It does not take great powers of discernment to recognize the way this mode of socialization (or de-socialization, as it were) is implicated in the pitiless forms of communication so common online these days, and the rancor in our political culture it has abetted.
So if it is the duty of schools to tend to the intellectual, moral, and emotional flourishing of their students, and if it is demonstrably and undeniably true that phones present a grave impediment in the way of that flourishing, then what excuse do those charged with the supervision of our schools have for not banning them outright from campus? What possible good is being derived from their presence that could offset all of the perils that presence carries in its train? In fact, nobody even pretends that there is any sort of advantage that students receive from having their phones on their person during the school day. The one excuse I have heard repeatedly – that students need them in the case of an emergency – is transparent nonsense, since in the case of an emergency, when clear communication and prompt adherence to directions are all important, the last thing in the world you would want is for every student to be talking separately into his or her phone. The fact is that the presence of phones on campus does not serve any beneficial end, but is simply endured as a kind of surrender to the ills of our culture. It is extremely rare for a school policy to lead to all bad things and no good things, but in the case of phones, that is exactly the result of permitting their usage on campus.
What would a sensible school phone policy look like, then? I suppose schools could erect giant domes over their buildings, preventing any wifi signals from entering, thereby rendering all phones inside the building useless? Or they could dip the hands of students caught using phones on campus in quick-setting concrete, to prevent recurrent infractions for the day. Or they could pile all confiscated phones on the lawn and burn them while performing rites of exorcism over their ashes. Any of these seem like mild, moderate expedients, given the nature of phones and the threat they present to the souls of our children. The one outlandish, preposterous, inconceivable policy in this regard just so happens to be the policy that almost all schools take nowadays, which is to permit students to use their phones during the school day. No wilder, more egregious offense against all that an academic environment is supposed to stand for could be imagined.
The reform of education should begin by addressing the most glaring demerits of our current schools. It should begin with what is easiest and most obvious. There is nothing more obvious than the unambiguously deleterious effect of permitting phones on campus. This is the place to begin. Remove them entirely from the school day. Remove the ubiquitous source of distraction, dumbness, and inhumanity relentlessly deforming the minds of our children. Then, and only then, can we as educators go about forming those minds appropriately.