Recently, I was cleaning out papers in my house and came across an endearing note from my son who was seventeen years old at the time. In the note, he had applied his AP Language rhetorical skills and constructed an argument for his father and me about why he “needed” a smartphone.
At the time, circa 2012, believe it or not, he had a flip phone. Smartphones became the norm around 2012 or 2013. He contended that he was literally the only student in his grade who still had a flip phone. I think he may have been correct. Perhaps we, as parents, were overly protective, but having the world at one’s fingertips is, well, distracting.
Ten years later, we see just how distracting the smartphone has become, and now there is pushback in some school systems. Some schools are now banning cellphones. Rarely, in my opinion, is Florida on the cutting edge of education – they are self-declared anti-progressives - but Florida may just have gotten it right this time.
Our impressionable young adults seem to be collecting their values from their cellphones now, notably TikTok, which is run by China, and Twitter, rather than from their parents, and the results are scary. Much of the rise in antisemitism on college campuses can be attributed to misinformation spread on social media.
Earlier this year, I shared my view that our high school students are not ready to learn to hone the powers of ChatGPT, countering the argument I hear often from teachers, that high school students need to learn how to leverage AI platforms to their advantage. Instead, I suggest that such mastery occur in college or even graduate school, not in high school, where students must first obtain and polish critical thinking and studying skills. I believe that position could well be extended to the use of smart phones by teens.
I understand that many parents may find banning cellphones in schools highly inconvenient and even barbaric. As parents, we would not be able to track our children 24/7, no sarcasm intended. In an age when a school shooting could break out at any time, the inability to track much less text with our children may be unfathomable. Yet, on the upside, cellphone bans reportedly reduce incidents of bullying, improve student engagement, and increase learning.
I concede that we do not want to curtail our children’s ultimate understanding of the power and breadth of technology. After all, our future will likely be driven by technology. Similar to artificial intelligence, though, I believe our children would be well served to cross a few thresholds before diving deeply into the technology, namely establishing personal values, under their parents’ nurturing eyes, and learning how to read and think critically. Thereafter, these more mature students can proceed with caution. In other words, using technology and accessing social media is a question of maturity – it’s developmental – and while some children mature more quickly than others, teachers and school systems should establish rules about when students should have unlimited access to such technology in the classroom.
Imagine if when we were young students, we walked into the classroom with a teacher’s edition of the text with all of the answers to the day’s questions accessible at our fingertips. Imagine if we also had the capability of passing a note simultaneously to all of our classmates taunting, maybe even bullying, one student among us. Our past teachers would never have allowed such a farcical situation. Why then are we allowing it in today’s classrooms?