The Washington Post has a story about yet another school that uses Yondr pouches to prevent cell phone use during the day:
Administrators said some of the changes among students have surprised them. Group vaping sessions where students would coordinate to meet in restrooms to smoke prohibited electronic cigarettes? Finished. Using AirDrop to share inappropriate photos during class? No more. Social-media-fueled arguments during school? Over.
Interesting! But what was more interesting was the anecdotal evidence that after a little while even the students themselves liked it:
Multiple students have told him they feel like they are making more friends. His gut also tells him that “the angsty intensity kids are living under” — he mimicked a person with head down, lost in a screen — has diminished.
Students confirmed that the disappearance of cellphones has, in turn, stimulated something old-fashioned.... When the pouches first arrived, “everyone was miserable and no one was talking to each other,” he said. Now he can hear the difference at lunch and in the hallways. It’s louder. Students are chatting more “face to face, in person,” Gabe said. “And that’s a crucial part of growing up.”
Some students hadn’t realized how much their phones diverted their focus....It turns out that being separated from your phone for the day isn’t as big a deal as some students feared. “People thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to miss so much,’” Nicole said. “You don’t miss anything. Nothing important is happening outside school.”
I have consistently argued that the evidence of cell phones causing serious problems among teens is pretty thin. That's what the evidence says. But I believe this even though my gut feeling agrees entirely with the anti-phone crowd.¹ This article confirms my gut feeling, but of course "we talk more" is hardly evidence that cell phones are genuinely causing depression or suicide or brain rewiring among teens.
In any case, the entire piece is worth reading. Aside from anything else, I continue to believe that the argument for banning cell phones during the school day is very convincing. Whatever else they may or may not do, they're certainly a distraction for kids who are supposed to be paying attention in class. And there's certainly no harm in teens having an oasis away from social media for a few hours every day.
¹I mostly attribute my gut feeling to the fact that I'm 65 and didn't grow up with cell phones. I suspect that this is responsible for a lot of anti-phone sentiment.
“Banning cell phones in school is a no-brainer“
Nvidia will sell you one for $200k though.
I'm 80, so obviously I didn't grow up with them either. Yet I feel terribly deprived when I don't have access to mine, but not for the same reasons as your example teenagers. I have never used any of the "social networks." No Facebook, Twitter, etc. So I don't have any feeling for what it's like to get disconnected from them, other than an intuition that I'm much better off never having been connected to them in the first place.
However, I work fulltime, so I don't have a TV or radio during the workday. I depend on my phone to occasionally look up information. I depend on my phone to occasionally keep up with sports events. I depend on my phone to occasionally communicate with my wife during the day, and less frequently to communicate with my adult children and friends. And I depend on my phone to get communication from our workers in the field when they need something (information or real things like equipment and supplies) from the office.
So when I lost use of my phone (unrecoverable failure), I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach until, at quitting time, I could rush to the phone store to get it replaced.
What can we do to convince more people that the value of the phone is the important services it can provide, rather than simply arguing with strangers and showing us cute pictures of cats?
"What can we do to convince more people that the value of the phone is the important services it can provide, rather than . . . showing us cute pictures of cats?"
You take that back, Sir. This is Drum country.
As a person of a certain age, I always take my phone with me when I go outside, be it ever so humble a peregrination as taking the trash out. Safety, you see, specifically of the medical kind. We're not quite to the point of "Help help I've fallen and I can't get up!" med alert bracelets ... but we'd be fools if we didn't avail ourselves of the technology.
I too like evidence, but with all things, and especially the social sciences, we have real problems of measurement. So yeah, the evidence doesn't show that phones and social media are bad for kids ... but then have we been measuring "face to face time during lunch" and "vaping sessions" and "how many photos of fellow students made you gasp".
Yes, there's a strong normative component here - vaping is bad, real human interaction is good, algorithmically controlled friendships are insane - and these seem to be considered signs of research bias and so we instead ask wispy questions of "Are you happy?" and "How many friends do you have?"
So ... as with so much social science we have evidence of somethings, and an utter lack of evidence on everything else. That is not a good basis for making decisions, and so needs to be informed by other disciplines, history and the much maligned common sense.
As you say, there is no direct evidence that cell phone cause great and long-term psychological harm to kids, though absence of prove is no prove of absence. But regardless, the simple idea that cell phones should be banned during the school day makes complete sense if the goal is to have kids stop texting and browsing during the day and pay attention to their class.
I just retired from teaching high school. Computers were a great resource in the classroom, especially for project-based collaborations and research. Cell phones changed almost everything for the worse. Imagine trying to compete for the interest of a bored teenager who has the entire Internet and their social life a click away. I lived it for years, and while it was worth pushing back against it, the struggle sapped energy better spent on more productive things like building positive relationships with students.
Read the comment by Rich 1812 below. It’s possible to just make the kids stop when enter the room.
Have taught at the college level for over 40 years and the biggest change I have seen in the classroom was the widespread use of cellphones before class. During class use was never allowed, at least in my classes. Before class, the room used to be abuzz with conversations; with the advent of cellphones the room became quiet with many/most students pecking away. I switched recently to a policy of no use of cellphones once you walk in the door. And bingo we're back to a joyous cacophony. Student reaction has been almost universally positive. I don't know about the impact on student mental health, but I think it makes for a much better classroom experience if only because they're talking to others pre/post class and that increases their comfort level in interacting during class.
I taught at that level for a few years. I absolutely love the phrase "joyous cacaphony". Yes, yes, and YES.
I mean, I deliberately did things that would get them talking to each other about my class outside of my class. Not because of an ego trip, but because they would learn more.
I love the phrase “joyous cacophony,” but I imagine it’s something the Kristi Noems of the world would shoot you for exhibiting in her demented presence.
Lots of kids don't really like all the cell phones at school either. They resent all the time teachers spend trying to get the attention of other kids, they find it hard to get to know other kids, they dislike all the rumors racing around school, etc.
I often hear them tease each other for being screenagers or obsessed with their phones. The only place that phones seem to do some good is on the bus, where social media use seems to have edged out the desire to engage in in-person bullying. Elementary school buses, where kids don't have phones, seem to have many more behavior problems than the buses with older kids.
How do the elementary school buses not have phones? Every parent I know seems to think every kid above the age of maybe 8 “needs” a phone in case of another Uvalde. (Yes I’m darkly aware that the phones didn’t actually help any of the Uvalde kids.)
Re: Uvalde. My thoughts, too. Sure, if some extremely rare emergency situation results, all the kids can then punch in "911". But what 911 operators will give any credibility to kids?
And how to screen out the actual emergency calls from the bogus "Active shooter!" calls, the SWATting, bomb threats, etc. Isn't it enough that probably all the teachers and office staff have access to some kind of telephone device?
Distractions are not conducive to the learning process, phones are very distracting in a multitude of ways, and students are in school to learn, so makes sense to me, as long as reasonably carried out without violating student privacy or person.
Generally, I think they should just ban cell phones at school. But there are two items that make me hesitate:
1) Emergencies/safety: If there were, say, and active shooter situation, I would prefer it if my kid could call/text me (if it were possible.) Obviously, not a common occurrence, but it's become common enough that I thought about it. There are lots of lesser emergencies where being able to text me would be nice.
2) Philosophical: If the kids are entering a world where phones and devices will be an integral part of their lives, maybe it's a mistake to exclude them from school rather than to embrace them. I don't really believe this, but it does seem strange to educate kids excluding a tool that adults believe is essential for modern life.
Most adults also think knives are essential tools for modern life but they don’t let their kids have one. There are probably many tools without which modernity would be difficult that we have no problem keeping kids from having access to in schools or anywhere else.
(1) Why would it be more important for your kid to call you in an active shooter, fire, or other emergency? And given a school-wide emergency, don't the innumerable teachers and administers have access to phone, either cell or landline?
(2) Learning to use phones. Which apparently outweighs their need to learn to speak the language, write clearly, do basic maths, know something about history, be somewhat aware of various sciences, maybe even stuff like the arts? All must be subsumed in "cell phone app familiarity"?
I think one of the greatest challenges in learning to use a smart phone is learning when to put it away.
I do hear the pro-phone-in-school arguments, but I have to fight my gut reaction of "how is this even a question???"
And schools can teach them that. It would help if parents were better role models though
Because otherwise police will be inundated with demands to know if the kid is okay when they should be eating the bullets.
Do on-duty police carry cell phones with numbers that are published to the public?
If there were, say, and active shooter situation, I would prefer it if my kid could call/text me
AFAIK there's overwhelming evidence cell phones not only don't help, but are likely harmful in such a situation, because the noise and light they generate can give away the position of students who are hiding. Moreover, during any such incident, several dozen school employees are likely to possess working cell phones, so the police can certainly be contacted. Also, there are tens of thousands of K-12 schools in the US and only one of these active shooter incidents every few years* or so. That's one too many, of course—and the headlines are terrifying—but perspective matters.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01/violent-deaths-and-shootings
it does seem strange to educate kids excluding a tool that adults believe is essential for modern life.
Why? Do children need to be taught at school how to use cell phones? It seems they manage to pick up the skill of using this "essential tool" on their own. Meanwhile, they need to learn how to solve geometry proofs and conjugate Spanish verbs. Less distraction surely helps this effort.
*The number obviously rises if we're talking about "ordinary" shootings, ie, one 16 year old gangbanger capping his 17 year old rival. But even here the evidence pretty clearly shows public schools in the United States are a very safe environment compared to general society. IOW your kid is safer at school than at the mall or on the street.
My anecdotal testimony as a high school and middle school English teacher in Los Angeles schools since 2005 is that the smart phones have completely destroyed the learning environment. It isn't just that students are on their phones almost constantly. It isn't just that social media chisme leads to at least one fist fight per week. It isn't just that students are willing to fail a class rather than simply put their phones way till the end of class. It isn't just that their parents call and text them with trivial bullshit during classes. It isn't just that math can never be as fun as fortnite to a 13 year old. It isn't just that when the teacher is forced to be the phone police it puts the teacher into a constant conflict relationship with students that is inimical to teaching. It is all that and quite a bit more.
I would say all of those are quite enough.
As long as it doesn't penalize kids who can't hand write long notes or are better readers than listeners.
I always did better in classes if I could use a laptop.
Cell phones are not the same as laptops, particularly in middle schools and high schools. Schools can control the laptops with software; the phones hardly at all. Where I worked, students were required to use the school-issued laptop, which prevented a lot of mischief. Better-off students brought their own, of course, and the rule against doing so was rarely enforced because the school-issued laptops were so inferior to even a moderately-priced Windows machine. Because most of the students' social lives are resident on their phones these days, and because school monitoring of laptops can be so robust, eliminating cell phones and allowing use of laptops only when the teacher authorizes it takes care of most of the distractions, IME.
Well, after they ban slide rules and calculators, what's left?
Banning cell phones in school may be overkill. Banning cell phones in class seems like a no-brainer.
Being in a bad mood is not the same thing as being depressed. Improving a students mood can improve their quality of life without it being about depression.
Anyhow as long as they set it up so if there is an emergency kids can use their phones I'm fine with it.
Otoh there may be students who find it stressful to be in a louder more crowded situation.