In March 2024, in response to New Governmental mandates that all state schools (publicly funded schools) ban all mobile phones from classrooms and playgrounds during school hours, I wrote a blog piece for the Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand. It was a balanced for-and-against piece, highlights arguments for both perspectives.
My actual views, my personal views, are somewhat different. I have no insight into the government policy space but it worries me that this is the first stage of what should be a three stage policy implementation when noone has got passed stage one.
The mobile phone as a means of making or receiving voice calls and phone messages, possibly even SMS text messages, are not likely to be overly intrusive. However, even this argument doesn’t survive even a cursory glance at recent history. It stands up about as well as Trump’s suggestion that without total immunity all US Presidents would be continuously harangued by their successors, as though he was the first rather than the forty-fifth to hold that office. History tells us that students survived before the advent of the mobile phone. As they had indeed survived before the introduction of the ball-point pen, the ink pen, and the chalk board.
Stage One: removing social media
The distinction to be made is not whether students NEED to have access to a mobile phone in order to learn, both knowledge acquisition and associatedcognitive skills, and social interpersonal and affective skills, (spolier, they do not), it is rather a question as to WHETHER mobile phones are an appropriate means of exposing progressive generations of students to emerging technologies andthe power they harness.
Until mobile phone manufacturers take their responsibility for limiting most egregious damage created by young people’s addiction to social media andintroduce some form of ‘airflight mode’ for schools, ideally accurately GPS mapped and enforceable, the onus will be on school management, teachers and parents to enforce a ban. (Heads up to any of the major handset manufacturers, having a youth-safety mode function is a market share winner.)
Here in New Zealand, there is strong, though largely still anecdotal, evidence that playgrounds are noisier, more energetic and happier places sincethe ban was introdced, and that in-class attention is more sustained and better managed. There are even suggestions that there is a detectable reduction in cyberbullying.
Stage Two: infuse technology
So, on balance taking the mobile phones, as an instrument of constant social distraction rather than as a tool for communication, out of schools makes sense. However, I would personally like to ensure that schools are supported to infuse technology throughout the curriculum. We need to consider what a technology infused school looks like, free of social media distraction. Schools might consider providing tablets for each student to ensure digital equity. Students need to learn how to manage their digital profile, articulate what a digital-twin persona might look like, express themselves digitally as well as learning just to be confident surfers, clickers and users of a wide variety oftools.
In less economically prosperous areas of the world the mobile phone provides a personal gateway to resources and interactivity and the price we pay, as a society, is the corrosive, addictive behaviour that social media creates. In wealthier areas I believe we can throw away the baby (social media handheld devices) without losing the bathwater (digitally immersive tools).
Stage Three: lobby handset manufacturers
Given that there is no incentive for the social media companies to face upto their responsibilities and curtail usage of their apps, they will simply to continue, as the tobacco industry did before them and the food industry does today, to deny and deny, and obscure the worst of their excesses under the banner of ‘user choice’. We need to lobby leading device manufacturers, Apple,Samsung, Google, Sony, Motorola, Huawei, OnePlus, Nokia, Blackberry and LG,to step up and introduce serious zone based protections. And aggressively market them!
We don’t need social media apps in schools but we do need to enable access to technology in our classrooms.