Commentary
On Sept. 3, the South Carolina Board of Education approved a new policy to “create a phone-free environment” in public schools throughout the state. The policy statement is a road map for all districts to follow if they wish to receive state aid money.
It is altogether clear on the negative impact of phones in kids’ hands. They are “electronic distractions,” it says, a threat to “focus and engagement.” We have no talk here of how handy the devices are, how they bring the universe of knowledge to a teenager’s eyes with a few taps. Those rosy descriptions of equipped youth that were so common a dozen years ago are missing. The policy is blunt and firm. A kid who sneaks a phone into a classroom “will be subject to progressive consequences in the student code of conduct and disciplinary enforcement procedures.”
This is a remarkable development, a reversal of attitudes, and not just in South Carolina. The whole country, it seems, has changed its mind. I wrote in this space recently about the turn of events in Arkansas. Florida, Indiana, and Louisiana legislatures have passed bans, too. In July, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin sent out an executive order stating, “The necessity of implementing cell phone-free education in Virginia’s K-12 public schools.” Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom in California sent a letter to all schools decrying “the pervasive use of smartphones in schools.” Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York and New York City Public Schools chancellor David Banks are pushing bans, too, and 350 schools in the state have already established proscriptions of their own.
Legislation in other states is pending. The roster runs the ideological spectrum from right to left, liberal California to conservative Florida. It’s as if everyone now agrees that the phone is a problem, a loss of learning, the bane of teachers and the kids’ temptation. Ten years ago, the day on which a next-version iPhone came out was a celebration, an excitement, as consumers formed lines a hundred yards long to be one of the first to obtain it.
Today, the thrill is gone, the cheerleaders are quiet. The phone is not a learning tool; it’s an anti-learning tool. It doesn’t connect youths to one another in inspiring, productive ways. It enables bullying and gossip. (I am certain that many fights between students in school begin on social media and are ramped up by them.) It fills kids’ eyes and ears with youth culture, which is anti-intellectual and anti-eloquence. It overstimulates them and damages their literacy. It harms their mental health, too, as Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated.
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The national recognition of danger should not have taken so long. How much evidence did we need to realize that the phone and all its uses were taking away from reading time, interrupting homework and sleep, and tying teenagers too closely to one another at all times of the day and night? Who needed convincing that creating and managing a profile, walking around with 200 selfies in one’s pocket, and aspiring to be an “influencer” was a terrible condition for a 14-year-old? As phone use moved down the age ladder, test scores fell and emotional problems rose. The impairments were there for all to see 10 years ago. Only the titanic force of Silicon Valley marketing coupled with ordinary human frailty maintained the cachet of the phone long past its expiration date. Now that the awareness has reached the very top politicians, not just researchers and intellectuals of a skeptical bent, the truth is out and the right steps are being taken.
With schools banning phones, the burden falls on parents. We know that the device hampers a youth’s education. Let’s extend the phenomenon to time at home in the evening and on weekends. Education happens there, too, informally. Leisure reading, in fact, is an important factor in reading scores, as the U.S. Department of Education reports in its Long-Term NAEP studies. The more the phone fills their out-of-school hours, the less time kids spend with print and the more their reading skills suffer. The banning of phones in school should be an unambiguous warning to parents: If the teachers have to expel the phones from the classroom so that kids can better concentrate and perform, you should do the same, as far as possible. Consider, then, a ban of your own—no phone time at meals and after 9 p.m. Good results will follow, I promise.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
