Cell Phones in Schools

The Social Dilemma

I saw a well-known Ivy League professor speak this summer.  After his talk, one person asked him about what he had changed in his teaching over the past 20 or so years, and whether the students were much worse today than back then.  He said the students were not worse, but the one thing he felt he needed to change was the amount of reading he assigned.  When even the very best students in his classes couldn’t finish it, or couldn’t comprehend it deeply enough, he said, he realized he had to relent on that a bit.  What was the cause of this?  To general agreement: smart phones. 

Doug Lemov had a great piece in Education Next earlier this year explaining his take on cell phones in schools.  Short version: they’re terrible, and we need to get a handle on this problem.  I think he doesn’t go far enough.

Lemov argues what lots of others have noticed: that kids are being trained to think differently, but that different mode of thinking is actually bad for them.  We jump around between apps and posts much more quickly than we changed our attention in the past.  Lemov writes:

“…young people practice switching tasks every few seconds, so they become more accustomed to states of half-attention, where they are ever more expectant of a new stimulus every few seconds. When students encounter a sentence or an idea that requires slow, focused analysis, their minds are already glancing around for something new and more entertaining…The more time young people spend in constant half-attentive task switching, the harder it becomes for them to maintain the capacity for sustained periods of intense concentration. A brain habituated to being bombarded by constant stimuli rewires accordingly, losing impulse control. The mere presence of our phones socializes us to fracture our own attention. After a time, the distractedness is within us.”

This distractedness is killing off the reading of actual print.  Jean Twenge, the author whose book iGen and Atlantic article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” helped kick off this bigger discussion five years ago, told the Wall Street Journal in 2021,

“Complex ideas require sustained attention…The idea that you’re going to be patient and sit down to read a book for two hours and do nothing else is kind of mind-blowing to an iGener.”

According to that piece, “The percentage of high-school students who read books or other long-form content every day has dropped from 60% to 15% since the 1980s.”

Nicholas Carr’s really good book The Shallows was onto this topic over ten years ago: “It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”  It’s a lot harder to think deeply while online though.  It’s not just a different kind of thinking; it’s worse thinking. 

An Overreaction?

Plenty of others disagree.  We have all heard many times (or said or thought it ourselves) that with electronic devices and kids, “It just depends on how they use them,” or “We have to teach them good habits” or something like that.

This study for example, limited students to 10 minutes of social media per day for an academic term (Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat).  They found no changes in students’ wellbeing or academic success.  So maybe these social media apps aren’t hurting them one way or the other?  But this may be in part because the students just switched to other social media formats (like WhatsApp).  The takeaway from one of the authors is that restricting doesn’t improve anything for students, that “You can take social networking away from the students, but you cannot take students away from their social network.”

Put aside the fact that it’s hard for kids to regulate their cell phone use.  It’s hard for *everyone* to do that.  We all probably have bad habits related to our phones or tablets that we didn’t have before smart phones showed up.  They’re a constant distraction because they’re designed to be a constant distraction.  Tech companies don’t just work to make their products cooler; they conduct psychological experiments constantly to make it harder for us to get away.  We all tell ourselves comforting lies about how we have these things under control.   Another new paper, though, finds that just the *presence* of devices near us is enough to damage our attention.  The authors of that paper write,

“Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity.”

That alone has huge implications, for schools and for all of us.  It’s not enough to have students put their phones away in their bags during class; this paper suggest they need to have no access to them at all.  And we adults are not different.  Nevermind creating smaller devices that let us stay connected; We may need to consciously put ourselves in situations where we really can’t access our phones, for our own health.

So I submit a different take: the problem is even worse than we want to admit, and the solution has to be even more tough.

Doug Lemov offers some practical advice in his EdNext piece:

“The first step in responding to the dual crisis of learning and well-being is to set and enforce cell-phone restrictions. An institution with the dual purpose of fostering students’ learning and well-being cannot ignore an intruder that actively erodes a young mind’s ability to focus and sustain attention and also magnifies anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Cellphones must be turned off and put away when students walk through school doors. Period.”

Lemov argues that ideally he would have students put their phones in their bags for extended periods of the day.  They could keep them, but the phones couldn’t be out during the day.  I don’t think that is enough – I don’t think students could resist the temptation.  (I don’t think adults could either; I don’t think I could).  At a hybrid school I have worked with, all of the phones are taken all day, every day, on racks like this:

This is possible because it’s a smaller school, and the leadership has built a culture among the families that this approach is something that will be accepted.  Maybe every school doesn’t feel like they can do this.  But many, many more of them can than currently do!  And if the problem is as bad as Twenge and Lemov and others suggest, maybe a better solution is to create more small schools that can foster this kind of culture, rather than throwing up our hands and seeing how this psychological experiment plays out on future rounds of kids.   (I am not immune either, not at all, although I have successfully avoided Snap Chat, Instagram, and of course CCP Spyware TikTok). 

The Stakes

And the stakes are high, for schools, for us as individuals, and for society in general. 

Mary Harrington’s recent Unherd piece about the relationship between long-form reading and democracy explains how:

“Delving into the interlocking histories of print, Christianity and democracy, the author argued that all three of these combined to create a particular type of subject well-suited to democratic governance. And, he suggests, the principal means by which such democratic subjects were shaped was long-form reading…

Long-form reading builds up an interlinked base of knowledge, held in long-term memory, that you can use to think with. But sustained engagement with long-form text also creates the capacity for abstract thinking, inner life as such, and a shared belief in objective standards and the value of deliberation…

More than Trumpists, censorious students, anti-racists or whichever other group you view as political enemies, to my eye it’s the end of the print era that is the greatest threat to “democracy”. And the time to have done anything about it was around 30 years ago, when the first commercial ISPs launched.”

Everything in society is pushing against anything that looks like “long-form reading.” Every social media app.  Every activity that makes life more convenient and less time-intensive. And it’s all pushing harder every single day.  Literally the only way kids are going to be able to swim against this tide is if there are schools that consciously push them toward slower, deeper work.  Many classical schools do this.  Lots of homeschool families do too.  We can startup loads of hybrid and microschools to do the same. 

I am not – necessarily – calling for a Butlerian Jihad against smart phones.  Certainly there are ways tech can be a support in schools (in some cases, it did help get hybrid schools through COVID more easily than other schools). But we have to do something different about screen addictions, for all our sakes. Tech in the classroom has been grossly oversold for years.  It’s past time we move the other way, and it may take little startup schools to get us headed in that direction.