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Last week, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that he would issue an executive order to implement guidelines on banning smartphones in Virginia's classrooms. This announcement follows a growing trend across the nation—from Florida and Alabama to Ohio, Arkansas, and Utah—of governors seeking to root out smartphones from K-12 schools.
Even on the international stage, world leaders have issued bans on smartphones, notably in the U.K. and France. This past week, Italian president Giorgia Meloni stated her intention to do likewise in 2025.
It's no mystery why state and national governments are enacting such bans. Both common sense and a plethora of studies demonstrate that smartphones are addictive, distracting, and corrosive to mental health. Instead of learning and making friends with their classmates, students are being emotionally and intellectually stunted as they mindlessly consume content from their smartphones most hours of the day. To make matters worse, this attachment was significantly strengthened by the COVID lockdowns four years ago.
I have personally witnessed this evolution (or devolution) in my own classes. While phone addiction was a problem before the pandemic, it was at least manageable. Now, however, the majority of students depend heavily on their smartphones merely to function, and they will mutiny against any teacher who tries to ban them from the classroom. More often than not, teachers are forced to compromise (i.e. allowing "brain breaks" where kids play on their phone for a few minutes during class) and pick their battles (i.e. going after the worst offenders).
Thus, it's now common to see talented students from otherwise stable homes underperform in class, disengage from school events, suffer from acute anxiety, and retreat to cyberspace at every opportunity. Sure enough, this trend is reflected in abysmal standardized test results, which is likely why testing companies like The College Board continue to revise and recalibrate the SAT and AP exams. If these tests stayed the same, the decline would be easily visible and precipitate mass outrage.
If smartphones are so bad for students, why haven't more places imposed bans? As my friend Jeremy Adams once argued, this would be a no-brainer for anyone interested in reforming our failing schools.
There happen to be a few objections—none of them good—to taking away phones. Many of them stem from a fundamental distrust of educators, but underneath the excuses is an unwillingness to see the truth and admit our mistakes.
Many people who support keeping smartphones in class claim that the devices empower students and provide an important check on bad teachers who push leftist propaganda or enable bullies and even mass shooters to run amok. Describing these arguments, AEI senior fellow Max Eden writes that phones "are the best protection and insurance against bullying and violence," "can provide a tactical advantage" against school shooters, and even hold "back a deluge of indoctrination that you'd otherwise never know was happening."
Implicit in this reasoning is the idea that children themselves should learn to control their phone usage. This excuse is increasingly popular among those who prefer a laissez-faire approach to parenting. The teacher will inform the parents that their child is on his phone all the time, and they will refuse on principle to confiscate it or even impose parental controls. True, their child might be failing their classes and suffering from poor mental health, but he needs to take responsibility for himself. And, it may very well be that he is actually developing a billion-dollar app on his phone and the teacher is a stupid bore who doesn't know how to properly engage his students.
With all due respect to those who make these arguments, none of them hold water. The vanishingly rare instances of catching bullies, much less psychotic shooters, in the act does not come close to making up for the mass affliction of tech addiction. Nor does phone usage really work to mitigate these problems. On the contrary, tech addiction leads to lower levels of empathy, precipitating more bullying and psychotic behavior. Moreover, all this now happens both online and offline, expanding the tool-set of those who take pleasure in torturing and brutalizing their peers.
The same goes for the infamous teachers accused of indoctrinating students. Often young and new to teaching, these types are themselves brainwashed by their screens to use their classrooms as a platform for propaganda. While a few of them are caught on camera and subsequently reprimanded for embarrassing the school, nothing else really happens to them. When so many districts are struggling with teacher shortages, it's unfeasible to come down on each and every educator saying something that a parent finds offensive.
And finally, the idea that kids can police their own phone usage ignores just how addictive smartphones have become. The devices are engineered to hijack users' brains and provide constant stimulation. Not only does smartphone design distract users to an extreme degree, but it incapacitates them from ever developing personal discipline. Expecting a teenager to stay off her phone is like telling a heroin addict or alcoholic to simply stop taking drugs and drinking. They won't, and they can't. Serious intervention becomes necessary, and the initial withdrawals are often severe.
That's what really lies at the heart of the general unwillingness to ban phones from the classroom or anywhere else. No one wants to be the bad cop, nor does anyone want his or her home or classroom to feel like a rehab clinic. It's much easier to excuse the phones and demand that some deus ex machina (maybe artificial intelligence?) comes along to save these kids who are clearly suffering.
But that simply won't happen, and the sooner everyone (not just a few fuddy-duddies in politics and education) acknowledges it, the easier it will be do the right thing and take the phones away. Not only should this happen at schools, but also at home. Even if doing so seems scary and unpleasant in the short term, it will be unfathomably worse to effectively lose our younger generations to the screens in the long term.
Auguste Meyrat is a high school English teacher in North Texas. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and a regular contributor to The American Mind, Crisis Magazine, the American Conservative, and the Acton Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
