Going Phone Free
My reaction to the announcement about Ontario schools going phone free in Fall 2024. Here's why I agree with the decision... somewhat. Plus, how phone free schools might reinforce social disparities.
Well… it happened.
Ontario has officially banned phones in schools.
In Fall 2024, smartphones will not be allowed in the classroom.
For the past two years, I’ve been working with educators, students, and parents on this very issue. Let me start by saying I’m excited about this announcement!
But, I’m skeptical…
Five years ago, the Ontario government tried to do the same thing at the School Board level without success; they reversed the decision soon after, citing feedback from parents who pushed back due to communication gaps with their kids, some teachers who wanted to use devices for education, and other teachers who struggled to implement the rule. The result? Kicking the responsibility back to individual students, individual parents, and individual teachers. With growing research and attention mounting, let’s hope this implementation is more successful.
“We have heard loud and clear from parents and teachers alike that cellphones in classrooms are distracting kids from learning,” said Education Minister Stephen Lecce in an announcement on Sunday morning, April 28th. He called their approach “the toughest policy in Canada.”
It may be the toughest policy in Canada, but it certainly isn’t fully sufficient, in my view. For the youngest learners in K-6, phones will need to be silent and out of sight for the full day. This policy aligns well with the research and I think that’s the right call. For the middle and high school students, in grades 7 through 12, phones must be silent and out of sight in the classroom only. This is where they lose me.
In order for us to see a measurable difference, I strongly believe phones need to be out of mind and out of reach for the full school day for all grades. Firstly, I think phones should not be in middle schools. In grade 7 and 8, where social and emotional development is on fire, a middle schooler’s job is to learn how to build relationships. When they have their phone at recess or during the lunch periods, their mental and emotional health is interrupted by addictive apps and algorithms and their social development is stunted by social (in)validation features. Plus, we know that when kids don’t have their phones at recess, it increases their physical activity and enhances their development.
Secondly, I also think we ought to treat certain features of smartphones like digital drugs, namely the addictive apps and algorithms that hack our brainstems, reduce our self-control and decision-making, and erode our ability to focus and sustain attention. For these reasons alone, I think it’s worth it to remove smartphones from high schools too. Just like in middle school, giving students access to their devices during unstructured times, like class changes and lunch periods, means we’re only partially addressing the issue.
Plus, we’ve already seen the benefits of going fully phone free in other schools: there are less distractions in the classroom, kids start making more eye contact, and (my favourite), teachers start hearing laughter in the halls again.
If we just take the “silent and out of sight” approach, we can expect to see many kids taking long bathroom breaks, hanging out in hallways on their phones, and barely engaging with one another during the lunch hour. These are already happening in the modern school climate. When you only remove phones from the classroom, but not the school altogether, many kids will still opt to get their fix of dopamine or give into their impulses to check missed notifications at the expense of face-to-face social time and classroom learning time.
The big elephant in the room is that removing phones from schools is costly because you have to invest in phone lockers or pouches that prevent a student from accessing their device. This means many public schools are simply unable to implement the most common sense solution, which is to lock the phones up when they’re on campus. Instead, the alternative is to go back to the individual action approach, where individual students will be required to tolerate the stress of not having their phone and risk punishment for being unable to quell their impulses and individual teachers will have to decide whether to look the other way when Brittany and Jessica are in the back keeping their Snap streak alive.
Even when teenagers are at their best and brightest, impulse control is still in development. I’m not sure a punitive approach will be enough to ensure compliance here as it doesn’t set kids up for success— especially the 97% of kids who are online “almost constantly” or at least “several times a day,” and will therefore almost certainly be experiencing symptoms of physiological withdrawal.
All of this is to say… I’ve been eager to finally have this conversation again and I’ll be excited to see how this goes. I do worry that this places even more burden on teachers and students to bear the burden being foisted upon all of us by the developers of these digital drugs.
I’m afraid this issue is a lot more complex than it is simple. It makes a lot of sense in theory— just tell kids not to bring their phones to school and put it away during class time— but we’ve been here before.
The kids are going to need a lot of help in the coming years. Making the investment to get phones out of schools (for real) is worth it in the long run. I worry that this will create even more disparities in education, as the schools who can afford to get phones out of school will pay the price because they know it’s necessary. If we poorly implement this policy in public schools, this could lead to even further disparities in terms of the attention spans, emotion regulation, and social development of a whole generation of kids.
In any case, these are my preliminary thoughts. Next week, I’m going to talk about the cost of chronic screen use on our attention spans. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get next week’s newsletter, Taking Action in the Age of Distraction, straight to your inbox.
P.S. Bring back the flip phones!
Take good care,
Jake