Mass. School Bans Smart Phones, which Triggers 'A Complete Transformation'
Signs and wonders, courtesy of The Guardian, of all papers…
To further follow-up on the digitisation/screen time issues we discussed earlier this year, I shall point you to an interesting piece in The Guardian, which appeared yesterday (emphases mine):
What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation
By Tik Root, The Guardian, 17 Jan. 2024 [source]
When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.
As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake). It was, in most ways, a typical teenage afternoon – except that no one was on their phones.
Buxton was wrapping up the first year of a simple yet novel experiment: banning cellphones on campus. Or, rather, smartphones.
Instead, the school gave everyone on campus—including staff—a Light Phone, that is, a ‘dumb’ phone with limited functionality. The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps. They are about the size of a deck of cards, with black and white screens.
As one student put it: ‘It’s like the demon baby of an iPad and a Kindle.’
Most everyone agrees, however, that the school is better off with these hell devices. (And yes, that includes students.) There are fewer interruptions during class, more meaningful interactions around campus, and less time spent on screens.
Bottom Lines
That piece is much longer, and I’d encourage everyone to read it in full.
While the piece also mentions ‘questions’ like, ‘why are smart phones so addictive’ and the like, it falls, predictably, short of mentioning the elephant in the room: kids must wear helmets when climbing trees, but they’re permitted to go online without restrictions, a contradiction, if there ever was one.
There’s a bunch of other blind spots in the piece, most notably the sex discrepancy in self-harm and/or suicide rates, which shot up since 2012 (the year social media became available on smart phones), with teen girls suffering much higher rates than boys.
And then there’s the issue of addiction in general, which is reinforced by such devices. We could also discuss the notion of drugging children (for, e.g., ADHD) during the school years while letting them off during the summer break. Or online exploitation of minors. You get the point.
None of these other ‘issues’ of concern with the internet and smart phones have been discussed here; but, at least in terms of bringing up ‘alternatives’ to ‘the system’, it’s a quite hopeful piece.
One last thing to mention: that this is a private boarding school might have had something to do with these choices. It’s high time to either fight for such oversight/influence over public schools or discuss alternatives, such as home schooling (on an individual level) or school choice models (society-wide), incl. school vouchers or the like.
In other news, when you stop "stimming" the senses, the brain can level out the dopamine, epinephrine, cortisol and so on and actually start to function.
You gotta be some kind of eggspurt not to understand that. . .
Let's wait for the next experiment: what happens when a school bans the actual state education program and obliges the students to receive only the "limited functionality" education that was available in the 1950s?