Podcast Host / Acast Announcer (17:53)
All right, that is it for what some supporters and opponents are saying about phone bans. Which brings us to my take. A few weeks ago I was talking with my father in law about this very subject. He retired last year after teaching in public schools for about 20 years and he said two things that really struck me. The first, and maybe most disheartening observation was just how much the lunch periods and time between classes had changed. Before, he said, you would see high school kids socializing, fighting, flirting, and generally just being kids together. Now between periods, most kids would roam the hallway zombie like looking down at their phones and barely interacting with each other. He found the change in behavior incredibly sad. The second was his description of being a teacher in this environment. In effect, he said, you are competing for every kid's attention with their favorite TV show, video game and best friend at every moment. He put it like imagine a teacher trying to deliver a lesson while a TV behind them blasts every student's favorite show. This is what it's like trying to teach when kids can just look under their desks and break out their phones. And preventing that is not as easy as just telling them to put it away. I'll be honest, these two points alone make me think we should support phone bans in school. I just can't shake the idea that we are both losing something deeply human, this critical period of social development for kids, while also asking teachers and kids to do something impossible, which is focus and learn when students have the biggest, most intrusive distraction possible right there in their pocket. While some data from overseas shows no improvement in grades after these bans were implemented, other findings from the US show students moods, focus and health all improve with less screen time. But to be honest, I'm less interested here in the research than I am in common sense. We know what phones are like. We all use them. We know how distracting and addictive they are. Think about your own smartphone usage and habits. How would you have done in school if you had that with you at all times? I have a theory that we're starting to see a generational shift toward less screen time and less phone time. Millennials, the last generation to experience an era before smartphones. My generation are now parenting toddlers and children entering adolescence, and they're seeing their kids lose out on many of the experiences they remember fondly. So many of my friends who have kids are horrified at the inclusion of tablets and phones in school. They're saddened by watching their kids spend too much time inside playing video games or scrolling social media. In response, I've observed a growing movement to push kids away from these technologies and toward outdoor play, individualism, and real life experience. Right now, I think this movement is mostly contained to wealthy, highly educated homes, but I can see it growing. We may not see the force of that movement paired with these policies for years, but I do think we'll see that impact with time. This is a challenging position for me to hold personally, because it is antithetical to many other views I have. I'm generally skeptical of government bans on anything, and in this case would be making an exception for one of the most ubiquitous technologies on the planet. I acknowledge the weakness of these inconsistencies here. But also we know don't we just look around? Do we need a book like the Anxious Generation to see that far too many teenagers and adults are addicted to their phones? Do we need double blind studies to understand that a 16 year old is going to pay more attention in class without a dopamine pump in their pocket? Does anybody doubt that attention spans are plummeting and that teachers have an impossible job in this environment? Still, in the interest of some ideological consistency, and because it's probably the right way to think about this too, I'll caveat my position in a few ways. First, these bans should not come at the federal or state level. Instead, they should be decided locally by individual districts and school boards. They are very different issues, but this view is similar to my argument that individual governing bodies of specific sports should be able to make their own rules around trans athletes rather than have those rules dictated by Congress or even state government. Here too, the solution is to empower local governments to regulate. I think and hope school boards across the country will enforce such bans. And if my kids were in a school district and I had a vote, I would certainly support a local board member who ran on a platform calling for phone bans. Second, parents must understand that a phone ban in school is not going to unlock a cultural shift away from screen time and social media obsession by itself. That has to start at home and actually with parents. When I read some parents argue that it's important for them to be able to contact their child in the event of an emergency, my immediate thought is, well, is it? What are the circumstances where a kid being able to text their parents in the middle of an emergency at school, or vice versa, is going to actually solve much of anything? In the nightmare scenario of something like a school shooting, kids are still bound by emergency protocols at school. They'll be locked down or evacuated. The school will be swarmed by police and cordoned off, and only after the situation is stabilized will kids be reconnected with parents. If the goal is to just know your kid is safe, that's possible without a smartphone, Apple watches or dumb cell phones or updates from the school can do the trick. And the examples of parents having the ability to intervene are vanishingly rare. The upside is mostly just contact, the illusion of access and protection. Is that trade off worth allowing phones in school at all hours? This is actually a key part of the entire story. It's just as much about the parents anxiety as the kid's addiction. Karen Gross argues under what opponents are saying that if parents know they can reach their child in an emergency, that helps them let youth have increased freedom. Actually, what would give kids genuine freedom is not monitoring their every movement, obsessing over their location at all times, and expecting be able to contact them instantly. This is after all how kids were raised for millennia. It's how I was raised as a high schooler just 20 years ago. Are we really so far detached from that era that we can't remember kids can be okay on their own without instant access to parents for eight hours a day? Third and finally is that most schools should think about this with a student first approach, one that includes students in the policy and facilitate some kind of buy in trying to strong arm students, especially teenagers inherently risk eliciting rebellious behavior. If phones become forbidden fruit the same way alcohol or marijuana are for teenagers, then we know what's going to happen. Kids will just misbehave and deceive in order to use their phones. High schools could, for instance, create a list of options about how to approach a phone ban and then allow a student body to vote on the finer details. Do you get X amount of hours of phone access a day or get your phones only between classes? Do you have to put them in lockers or can you not bring them to school at all? Honestly, I don't think anyone has the best answer yet, and if we let the kids drive the ship just a bit, then they'll probably commit more to these changes. However these bans play out over the next few years, I'll say this I'm glad to see the backlash against screens. I'm happy to see so many parents rallying behind the call to get their kids offline and get them outside. I'm happy we're identifying and pushing back against the detriments of reliance on this technology. For the last decade or so, we've been conducting a massive experiment on what happens when you give millions of kids with underdeveloped brains unlimited access to intentionally addictive social media platforms where they can go from watching fight videos to accessing porn, to bullying a classmate, all with a few swipes. It turns out the results aren't great, and now we want to chart a different path forward. I for one am happy to see the change. I just hope more parents start embracing it. All right, that is it for my take. Today's staff dissent comes from our editor at large, Camille Foster. Camille wasn't available to record this, so I'm just going to read what he wrote. Camille said, quote I'm generally fine with small scale restrictions by individual schools, and I share the general concern about phone usage among teenagers. But I've long been skeptical of abstinence oriented approaches. Developing a healthy relationship with these ubiquitous technologies is not only possible, but essential for teenagers, and I worry that leaning on bands may hinder their development of the cultural antibodies they'll need to participate and thrive. In a modern world, adaptation, not prohibition, seems like a more appropriate disposition. We'll be right back after this quick break.