Sadly, this will cause massive problems during school shooter events. Parents are hyper-focused on preparing the schools for such events. I can’t see parents being for this at all.
It’s been almost 30 years since I’ve been high school, so I won’t pretend to know what classrooms are like today. What do you mean they lack executive function?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/20/health/parenting-social-media-screens-gupta-wellness/index.html
In the age before smartphones, growing up was pretty boring unless you proactively sought out activities to keep yourself entertained. That’s not the case anymore. Kids can spend endless hours being entertained by just staring into their phone. They’re losing out on a lot of problem solving opportunities when they can spend all their time in the virtual world passively absorbing entertainment.
The level of impulsivity is through the roof. I just spent 20 minutes in a fifth grade room, and my only job was to keep kids from leaving the room while they watched a cartoon in preparation for their moving up ceremony. I got yelled at, threatened, and ignored, in a way that I never would have three years ago. Kids being like, “Bro, I’m just going to talk to my cousin!” as if the “stay in your classroom” rule meant “unless you can think of literally any reason to ignore it.” One kid was pulled to go to the office to apologize for smacking another kid upside the head when he left the room. A second kid followed him, ignoring both my direction and that of another teacher, and when I persisted, he started yelling at me, “I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU! I NEED SPACE BRO!”
I am not an amateur when it comes to classroom management; and I eventually got him back to his classroom. But the level of constant behavior like this is unbelievable. The classroom teachers are worn to the bone.
This is not an environment in which “Put your cell phone away” is an effective approach.
Okay, that kind of matches up with the limited experience I’ve had with teens in recent years as well as a few articles. i.e. I remember an article from years ago that many millennial teens weren’t too keen on getting their driver’s license when they turned 16. Some friend’s of mine kid just graduated from high school and only recently got his driver’s license and doesn’t seem to go out like I did when I was his age. I asked a coworker of mine who was in her 20s at the time if guys still asked women out face-to-face or if it was done via text and she said most of the time it was via text. Man, when I was her age the emotional devastation was face-to-face!
This is probably a bigger question than you realize.
Super simply, it’s a broad suite of intellectual and emotional skills that help you plan, make good decisions, and react appropriately to unexpected stimuli.
A lot of it is metacognitive. A lot of it is high enough up the hierarchy of needs that kids who deal with daily trauma don’t learn it.
Don’t want to humblebrag, but my own teen daughter doesn’t really fit that. She’s volunteering this summer at two different nature-nonprofits and raising money for a Spring break trip to monitor sea turtles, and always wants to go birding, and reads about four or five times more novels than I do; and when she had a day off of school, her friends organized a walking trip of a downtown area and hung out all day. And she has plenty of friends who are the same–delightful, engaged, funny, intelligent teens. Her main academic problem is her propensity to correct her teachers on their facts (no, “Jabberwocky” isn’t written in Old English) in a way that could stand to be a little more diplomatic.
I mention this only because a lot of folks–myself included here–are in danger of overgeneralizing. Yeah, there are some extremely serious issues, but it’s not universal.
To be clear, this isn’t a “kids these days” issue. It is a “this generation is getting ground down faster than it can reasonably cope” issue.
That makes sense. For our family, we’ve decided to limit what our daughter can do on her phone: she’s got limited game-play time and limited Internet access, and needs to get any new contact approved by us, but (during approved hours) she has unlimited time to read e-books or use Merlin or text friends. There’s no social media at all on her phone.
It takes a fair amount of time to set up curate phone use, but I definitely think it’s made a difference. At school, though, you’ll have kids whose phones are completely unlocked. And that’s devastating to a classroom environment.
In the UK mobile phones are already banned for the majority of the school day in most cases with schools taking a range of measures to enforce that policy.
In general, the kids are allowed to have them, but they should be switched off and out of sight. This has been the policy for several years now and as the younger kids rise through the system, they just accept the rule as “normal”.
Truancy is a bigger problem it seems: According to The Guardian, " A third of 15-year-olds have been persistently absent from classrooms in England during the current school year, according to research that shows absence rates remain stubbornly higher than before the coronavirus pandemic.
The analysis of attendance rates at more than 7,000 state schools in England found that 14- and 15-year-olds – pupils in years 9 and 10 – have been worst affected, closely followed by those in year 11."
One reason is that plenty of kids need phones either before or after school and not all schools have lockers or another secure place for a kid to leave a phone during the school day. You might say "Well , how did people function before cell phones? " and I know how I did back in the late 70-early 80s. There were pay phones in my high school and every block or two as I walked to the bus stop. There weren’t really any pay phones in my grade school ( there was one, but not accessible to students during the school day. ) but there was one every block or two on my way home. If I forgot about a sports practice or play rehearsal or if the bus didn’t show, I could call my parents. Neither school had lockers for student use. By the time my kids were in high school (2002 or so) , payphones were almost non-existent. If they didn’t have a cell phone while traveling to or from school , they wouldn’t be able to reach me. I live in NYC and no way was I sending a 14 year old to travel to a Manhattan high school in 2002 without a phone. But the combination of “need the cell phone before and after school” and no cell phones allowed in school ( not just no use in class, no cell phone in the building) led to a few different things
- store owners near schools would hold the phone during the school day (for a fee , of course). I even remember hearing about someone who parked a van outside of school for this purpose.
- some schools would say “phones aren’t allowed but wink, wink I can’t confiscate what I don’t know you have”. In other words, telling you the rule and how to get around it in the same breath. Which IMO, leads to a lack of respect for rules.
- the rule just being ignored
Every year my company makes a big deal out of our summer internship program and for two of those years I was in charge. I worked with managers to find out what they were looking for, I went out to job fairs to recruit, I interviewed people, and I helped manage the intern activites during the summer. (It’s a paid internship by the way.) For the most part, I’ve been very impressed by the young people who have interned with is. And at this point I’ll have to acknolwedge that a work environment is very different from a school environment as the candidates I spoke to are a self-selecting group.
Over the years, we had one intern who exhibited some of the behaviors you mention in a previous post and they all revolved around the phone. Our interns participate in a group community project, and during ours, this kid wouldn’t get off his phone. Either he was talking to someone or he was watching videos. At one point he spent about 20 minutes just doing nothing but talking on his phone, and when I asked him if everything was okay he just kind of blew me off. And then he asked if he could leave early. “You’re an adult,” I told him, “If you’ve got to leave then go ahead just let your supervisor know you left early.”
I wasn’t there, but the VP of his area took all the interns in her area out to lunch one day. This guy spent most of the lunch away from the table talking on his phone. Then I had to talk to this kid’s manager because he wasn’t giving me an accurate picture of how the internship was going. The long and short of it was that this kid just wasn’t ready to work in a professional environment.
Just to contextualize this… I follow the author of this article on Substack. He’s writing a book about how terrible cell phones are for kids’ mental health. In his most recent post, that appears to have been at least partially reproduced in the Atlantic article, he advocates schools using mandatory cell phone lockers or locked pouches that are used all day long, not teachers taking away phones in the middle of class.
His arguments about the correlation between cell phone use and teen mental health are interesting, at times compelling and at times not so much. He seems to be missing a lot, for example when considering mental health, he doesn’t address the high rates of sexual assault of teen girls, increased harassment, racism, climate change, the economy, school shootings or other issues that make teens these days feel completely overwhelmed. I would guess that cell phone use significantly exacerbates the feeling of overwhelm because you encounter more of everything on the Internet, but the root cause appears to be, you know, society.
So this article and anything else he publishes is based on the idea that we can solve the teen mental health crisis by denying them access to phones. While I’m no fan of social media and think all this stuff is pretty terrible for teens (it’s terrible for me and I’m 40), I think this is oversimplifying the problem. It’s not one thing, it may not even be the most important thing. At one point he uses Pascal’s Wager with a straight face and tries to claim his research should only be held to the civil legal standard of “preponderance of evidence” in order to justify sweeping policy change.
All that said, nobody needs to be using their phone in class and I do wish schools were cracking down on this.
It was. in our school district phones were banned completely from campus until 2014. Then they were required to be in lockers during the school day. Neither had the slightest impact on phone use in school. Teachers were in despair, they spent far too much time policing the policy to no good end. The principals got an earful from the parents who had to come to the office after school to pick up the phones. At board meetings parents would voraciously condemn phones in school until it was their kid in trouble. Then the policy was dangerous and unreasonable. Now we are trying and failing to get the phones kept in the book bags instead of pockets.
You’re absolutely right, and he’s wrong: social media and screen use are certainly issues, but there’s no way that banning them will be a panacaea.
That said, I’ve yet to meet the middle- or high-school teacher who is content with how students use cell phones in class.
Cell phone jammers would seem to defeat the reason parents want their kids to have phones, so that they can always reach them, even in the case of an emergency. Taking away their phones would seem to be similar.
And then there’s just that cell phones are often used as a defense mechanism now. I’ve definitely seen at least a few videos from kids filming a teacher or other kids going off and doing bad stuff, with the video basically the only proof.
I really think there would be tons of backlash in trying to get rid of them at this point.
What would be wrong with the policy that the school has an ombudsperson or assistant who parents can contact, and who can pass on messages in case of mild to moderate emergencies?
The other thing are claims students prefer fewer interruptions in places with stronger policies. Is this accurate?
If parents can call the front office during the school day, they should be able to arrange communications in an emergency. Access to video cameras might have some advantages in terms of keeping people honest, but the downsides of allowing filming of fights in the bathrooms and such seem to me to outweigh those benefits.
But if the student is following the rules, they’re not checking their phones in class anyway. Students should not be available for phone calls in the middle of class, and not once in fifteen years did a parent of one of my students demand it.
The camera thing is a more reasonable concern. My response us that if we didn’t have a busted-ass society and educational system that treats teachers like garbage, we’d have fewer shitty teachers and fewer well-meaning teachers who snap under the pressure.
Cell phone jammers are a non-starter since they are illegal to buy, sell, or use in the US with microscopically few exceptions.
I think we need to be realistic as well about what a modern classroom looks like. Since 7th grade my son, who attends public school in one of the countries largest school district, has had a school issued laptop on his desk for every academic class on which he takes notes, does assignments, takes tests, and reads his text books. For math classes he also has a programmable graphing calculator. The laptop is connected to the internet to allow him to do research and submit assignments.
If you get rid of cell phones you aren’t returning to a world of kids sitting at their desks with their notes and a text book. You’re just eliminating one electronic device from the stack of devices used in modern pedagogy. I agree students shouldn’t be using their cell phone in class but I doubt eliminating them will take us back to a golden age when students lacked distractions. (And I can’t be the only one who had an extra book of “fun reading” open on my desk back in the golden age for when the lecture got boring).