Get Phones Out of Schools

T eachers and students are filing back into school buildings. But unlike generations prior, many are shuffling through the doors with their necks craned down, staring into smartphones. For a number of years now, schools experimented with cellphone inclusion into schools and even classrooms. The experiment was a failure and it’s time we get phones out.

In 2009, before smartphones became ubiquitous, 91 percent of schools had some form of restriction on phones according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As phones became more popular, schools accepted various arguments for allowing them into the classroom. Schools need to help students develop healthy phone habits, some argued, and others considered their communicative capacity a boon for safety. Accordingly, by 2015, only 65 percent of schools put formal restrictions on phone usage.

But these arguments amounted to naïve and wishful thinking. Schools are not equipped to compete with the addictive power of social media and the smartphone. More teachers and administrators have come to this conclusion, and now the number of schools placing restrictions on phones has risen back to 77 percent.

It’s imperative that this number continues to rise. There are serious academic and social consequences to having phones in schools.

To begin, the academics. Learning requires attention, and difficult learning requires focused, forced, habituated attention. The harder the task, the more self-control it takes to stay on task. When a phone is lighting up in a backpack or buzzing in a student’s pocket, they leave students in what Teach Like a Champion founder Doug Lemov characterizes as a constant state of “half attention.”

“When students encounter a sentence or an idea that requires slow, focused analysis,” he explains, “their minds are already glancing around for something new and more entertaining.” Learning doesn’t happen by osmosis. It requires constant effort and self-controlled focus.

Our working memory, essentially the space for our conscious thought, can only process four to seven things at a time; it’s why we can only remember a few numbers at once. If students are thinking about TikTok or wondering what that buzz meant, they cannot concurrently ponder the math lesson in detail and so learn the content.

In my own experience, though, I’ve found the social effects of phones and social media to be far more concerning. Human beings need a mixture of what sociologists call strong ties — our close family and friends — and weak ties — the regular strangers and acquaintances in our lives that add a sense of normalcy and belonging. Phones interrupt both relationships.

In the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge succinctly summarize the problem:

It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating notifications.

Phones distract not only from academics but also social interactions. Kids hear and internalize fewer personal conversations with their friends. When they’re staring down at their phones between classes, they’re not making eye contact with each other and staff members in the hallway. This prevents the formation of both close- and weak-tie relationships.

Many high-school lunchrooms nowadays offer a depressing sight. From the stereotypical rowdy room full of food, chatter, shouting, and laughter, tables are now lined with students staring at their phone screens — perhaps only interacting when leaning over to share an amusing TikTok video.

Conversely, I worked in a school that had a strict no-phone policy. Kids made eye contact during lunch. They played more games during recess. Even students in younger grades would pass by and give teachers in older grades a smile or high five. It created a striking sense of liveliness that was lacking in other schools, where blue-lit apparitions ambled down the hallway mumbling to themselves.

But schools are reversing this trend — at times quickly and starkly. One school in Prescott, Ark., went semi-viral recently for its strict phone policy: Each offense brought with it a $10 fine, and the second offense garnered a suspension. Entire countries have reversed course, with France banning phones for students up to age 15 in 2018.

Recently, National Review magazine ran a compelling, albeit controversial, piece by Christine Rosen, wherein she recommended banning social media for all kids up until age 16 as we do with drugs and alcohol. Many libertarian-leaning conservatives, myself among them, were wary of such a top-down mandate. However, normalizing the restriction of phones in schools is a policy on which both traditional and libertarian conservatives could find consensus.

And, as a final note, let me emphasize: We need to not simply get phones out of classrooms but out of schools entirely. So long as students have the option of a phone at school, they are connected to it and disconnected from each other.