The theater was cheering; a 9th grade classmate had just recited a sestina about his favorite football team. As the applause died down and the next student stood and approached the podium, I turned to the audience – over a hundred teenagers smiling and waving glow sticks as they listened to the poetry recital. Not a phone in sight.
As you read this, school leaders from California to France are considering a complete ban on cell phones in schools, to take effect in September. Now in my 25th year as a teacher, I can say that it’s hard to make a case for unrestricted use of phones in classrooms. However, it’s also hard to imagine that a phone ban, as some suggest, is the cure for the anxiety, lack of participation, and general anomie felt by teenagers today.
As a society, we are still adjusting to the risks and rewards of technological advances over the past 25 years. We all remember how we were all told to turn off our cell phones when taking off and how we accepted the risk, but now we all know that the risk our cell phones posed to the plane was exaggerated. It was an (understandable) move to establish authority.
As teachers and school leaders, we need to consider the extent to which our policies are geared towards Learnwhat is liberating, or controlwhich is limiting. Cellphone-free classrooms can play a role in learning, but we should also create occasions for celebration and joy. There needs to be something for students to look forward to other than lunch, finals, and getting their phones returned.
The most vocal advocate of the mobile phone ban is probably Jonathan Haidt. Perhaps you have read his latest book, The fearful generation, at a staff meeting or in your class parents’ WhatsApp group. You may have seen an Apple Watch-equipped wrist reaching for it at your local bookstore. The goblin in Haidt’s book is not mobile phones per se, but social media and other “internet-based activities.”
Banning or restricting social media is a much more laborious undertaking and not something that schools should strive for (the US Surgeon Generalhas raised the alarm about taking action on the impact of social media on teenagers, for example), but banning cell phones is a measure that has already been introduced, or could soon be introduced, in a school near you. For those who haven’t read the book, this may seem like a simplified version of a complicated issue. It is – but from Haidt, not me.
In the conclusion of his book, Haidt argues that sometimes it is better to do one big thing than many small things, and that now is the time to do two big things. Then, without compromising modern attention spans, he summarizes his conclusions in bullet points: schools should eliminate cell phones and increase time for “free play.”
Oddly (or not), the first point gets much more attention than the second. Finding time and supervision for unstructured play—or a poetry festival—takes months. A new line in the student handbook takes minutes. Taking something away must seem easier to most readers than adding something new, so the reductionist argument is reduced even further.
I will not take issue with his simple solutions, not because I disagree with them, but because I take issue with simple solutions in general and the way simple solutions give rise to simple problems. The cell phone in itself is no more the problem than television, explicit music or video games were the problems. Teen mental health, the role the internet plays in our lives, the actions a school can take to make the world a better place: these things are vitally important, but certainly not simply problems. We cannot promote the well-being of our students by looking for simple solutions to complex problems, even though simple solutions are inherently very attractive.
Every two weeks for the past two years, I’ve used a simple online tool that asked students to rate their wellbeing from “Well done 😆” to “Overwhelmed ☹”. What was most evident was that student stress increased in the weeks leading up to important college exams and deadlines, which, unlike social media, are clearly within our control. This data helped my school frame the question of how we could support students by staggering exams and allowing more contact time with the college office.
As teachers and school leaders, we cannot shirk the responsibility that has been given to us. We must build the labyrinth and guide our students through it. We should listen to the wisdom of the explorers – and we should listen to the voices of young people. We must find ways to foster belonging and meaning.
Bullying, negative comparisons with others and feelings of isolation were not invented by the Internet, but it provides an efficient and seductive platform for these behaviors.
A search for “Jonathan Haidt” on the Internet proves that on the Internet, all kinds of ideas can spread quickly and gain popularity – especially those expressed in simple terms. As Andrew Solomon noted in a recent review of Haidt’s latest book:“Nuance brings uncertainty; in a confusing world it is easy to fall victim to almost any form of clarity.”
What a more nuanced approach to tackling student anxiety might look like will vary from school to school and year group to year group, but with a little effort, schools can instill as much joy as fear, if not more. If we can’t imagine that, let’s tap into our greatest resource: the creative potential that lies within the minds of students and teachers.
The poetry festival I described earlier was not only a celebration of student achievement, but also a way to strengthen community through sharing, support, and spectacle. In addition to sports (lots of sports), students read poems about hallway crushes, war, and the beauty of spring. Some of the prizes were chosen by the teachers, others by the students.
The cheers, applause, and stomping of feet brought us together in a sense of shared joy. I looked past the students focused on the poet in the spotlight, into a dark corner of the theater—in a cool, eerie light, stood an adult looking at something on his cell phone.
