Two years ago, Christina Barrington, the newly minted principal at Saint John High School in New Brunswick, surveyed her staff on the biggest issues facing the classroom.
Of the 62 responses she received, 59 of them painted a worrying picture about the impact of cellphones.
Teachers described looking out at a sea of lowered heads as students covertly watched videos under their desks. They spoke of kids taking extended bathroom breaks so they could spend more time lingering on their phones. And there had also been an uptick in cyberbullying incidents reported to school administration. She knew she needed to take action. “It needs to be all or nothing,” Ms. Barrington thought at the time.
In the days leading up to the start of the next school year, Ms. Barrington plastered posters along the hallways and in classrooms that read “Saint John High School Cellphone Etiquette.” And below that: “Cellphones and headphones are put away at the bell. Washroom and hallway use of cellphones is not permitted during class time.”
She placed cellphone “hotels” – repurposed hanging pouches for shoes – in each classroom. She even required that students remove smartwatches during tests and quizzes.
The new rules worked almost immediately. Ms. Barrington noticed fewer cyberbullying issues landing in the main office. At least one staff, a chemistry teacher, noted that marks were higher and there were fewer failures, which she credited to less time spent policing cellphone use and more time teaching the subject to students who were paying attention. And, educators noticed bathroom breaks were much shorter.
Principal Christina Barrington's posters caution students at Saint John High School to put their mobile devices away, and not to use them surreptitiously in the halls or bathrooms.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Barrington was ahead of her time. In recent months, the ubiquitous tool that we use to order food, check news sites and text family and friends has become public enemy number one in the education system – in Canada and around the world.
Almost one in four countries have now introduced bans on cellphones in schools. Here in Canada, where education is a provincial matter, governments in almost every province, including Ms. Barrington’s home of New Brunswick, have established policies that restrict phone use in the classroom starting this fall – and, in some cases, spelled out penalties that include suspensions for students who don’t comply.
In addition to the restrictions, several of the largest school boards in Ontario and two private schools in the province are suing the corporations behind Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, accusing them of designing addictive products that disrupt learning and harm the mental health of students. None of the allegations have been proven in court. Similar lawsuits have been filed in the United States by individual states and school districts.
Even U.S. Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy weighed in this spring, calling for phone-free classroom learning and asking Congress to issue warning labels on social-media platforms whose products, he argued, have emerged as an “important contributor” of the mental-health crisis among young people.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wants legally mandated warning labels on social-media platforms, like those on cigarettes.Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press
The U.S. Justice Department is also targeting TikTok and its parent company for allowing children to sign up, despite laws against collecting data from minors under age 13.Ore Huiying/The New York Times
The push against cellphone use in the classroom also comes from educators and child development experts who say the devices are a distraction that hinder learning, lead to lower marks and, in the case of social media, harm the well-being of students. In his best-selling new book, The Anxious Generation, U.S. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that the use of smartphones and social media are “rewiring” the brains of children and causing an epidemic of teen mental illness.
Others argue that the science on the effects of cellphones and social media isn’t settled and broad conclusions are being drawn from inconsistent data. Some teachers and students use it as a tool in their school work, and many educators feel they shouldn’t be responsible for confiscating devices that are worth thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, many parents give their children access to a phone so they can get in touch with them at any time, especially if youngsters are taking a bus from school or walking home alone – and they don’t want to be disconnected.
On a broader level, the fight against cellphone use in schools speaks to the troubled relationship many adults have with technology, and the difficulty of limiting their own time on phones. For those who didn’t grow up with social media, let alone in a world where everyone carried a smartphone, it’s tricky to teach their children about finding the right balance.
David Chorney, an education professor at the University of Alberta, said educators and policy-makers have only started wrestling with these issues.
“The tipping point has passed,” he said. “It’s now about what do we do to try to do things the best we can and to put in place policies that, frankly, are still going to be challenging – not impossible, but challenging – to regulate and monitor consistently.”
Since the anti-cellphone signs went up at Saint John High School, the rest of New Brunswick has followed suit. As of this September, the education ministry's Policy 311 gives teachers discretion to make students stow their devices in designated areas during class.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
Educators and principals often note that cellphone use spiked as students returned to the classroom after spending months in online schooling during the first waves of the pandemic.
Isolated at home during lockdowns, phones were a source of online games and TikTok dance videos that passed the time. Phones helped kids stay in touch with friends when they couldn’t physically be near them. For some, in particular LGBTQ youth, their phones helped them find support services and community. Education technology was a necessary part of online schooling and teachers didn’t abandon it when in-person classes resumed.
Today, roughly half of Canadian children aged seven to 11, and nearly 90 per cent of teens, have their own cellphone, according to figures from Statista. A 2021 survey from Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that 91 per cent of students in Grades 7 to 12 use social media daily, with about a third on it five hours or more.
All that time spent scrolling on a phone has consequences on learning, said Louis-Philippe Beland, an associate professor in economics at Carleton University who conducted one of the earliest studies on the topic. In 2013, he and a colleague surveyed high schools in four British cities – Birmingham, London, Leicester and Manchester – about their cellphone policies, and looked for any correlation with standardized exam results.
In a paper published two years later, they found that high-school students in schools that had banned cellphones performed, on average, 6.4 per cent better on standardized tests. What’s more, the research showed that while high achievers were barely affected by the phone restrictions, the low-performing students saw their marks climb by more than 14 per cent.
“It’s a very low-cost policy to remove distraction,” Prof. Beland said. He was heartened by the restrictions that provinces have instituted starting this fall.
Since the advent of tablets, many educators have used them to make lessons more interactive and engaging.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
The rise of phone use in school is not all bad news, though. A UNESCO report found that technology can support some learning. For instance, captioned videos, audio books and touchscreen apps can assist kids with disabilities. For anxious students, listening to music on their phone can calm their frazzled nerves.
However, the report also stated that the devices can be a detriment when “it is over-used or inappropriately used.” One study the report cited showed that it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus on what they were learning once their attention is drawn away by a notification from their phone.
Prof. Chorney at the University of Alberta was particularly interested to learn at what age children had access to their own phones. When he surveyed 264 students in Grade 5 in Edmonton Catholic schools four years ago, more than half said they had their own cellphones – and the vast majority of those who didn’t have one expected to get a device within a year. He was particularly surprised to learn that close to a third of students who owned a phone got it as early as Grades 2 or 3.
Many of the children he surveyed used the phone to stay in touch with their parents, but the device was then being used for playing games, texting, taking pictures, or watching videos on YouTube.
“For some of these kids, they’re never disconnected. And I worry about that.”
Some psychologists claim there is a link between social-media use and mental-health disorders, but their findings are in dispute.CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images
But while it’s clear from the science and the classroom experiences of teachers that cellphones distract students from their learning, researchers are divided on the link between smartphones and the mental health and well-being of children.
U.S. psychologists Mr. Haidt and Jean Twenge have argued that teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders – and in their writing they cite an array of studies to make this point.
But others academics, like Candice Odgers, a professor of psychological science and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, have questioned those conclusions. Prof. Odgers has suggested in her work that the data is mixed, and that some of the research cited in Mr. Haidt’s The Anxious Generation may show a correlation, but not causation.
“[T]he book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science,” Prof. Odgers wrote in the March issue of Nature. “Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.” She said researchers have also cited the opioid epidemic, social isolation, school shootings and discrimination.
In the United States, some school districts rely on smartphone apps such as Share911 to warn pupils of active shootings.Richard Vogel/The Associated Press
Alexia Polillo, staff scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, noted that studies up to this point have focused on young people self-reporting the amount of time spent on their phones and on social media in an attempt to find associations with anxiety and depression. The self-reporting method, she suggested, could be fallible and their responses open to interpretation.
Dr. Polillo acknowledged that, anecdotally, teachers are seeing more dysregulated behaviour in students, and that there are rising rates of anxiety and depression in the general population. But she stressed that the teen years can be a vulnerable time for young people because of social changes and that it’s a common age for the onset of mental illness – regardless of cellphone use. Like Prof. Odgers, she listed other issues that need to be considered, including despair around geopolitical conflicts and climate change, and a feeling of hopelessness about future job prospects.
Only now are researchers embarking on more rigorous studies, both in the U.S. and in Canada, where they follow children over a longer period of time and use technology to scrape cellphone data in order to retrieve more accurate data on social media use.
Dr. Polillo noted that the negative impacts of cellphone use on young people are balanced by the fact that the devices allow them to connect with each other at a time in their lives when that is crucial to their development.
She compares the anxiety around cellphone use to other worries from the past. “For me, back in the day, it was rap music, and then there was the video game phase and so I think that there is a bit of moral panic happening right now,” she said.
This high school in Orlando, Fla., has a specialized safe for phones confiscated from students. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis enacted policies in 2023 that restricted not only cellphone use, but access to TikTok on school districts' wifi networks, citing security concerns about the Chinese-made app.Zack Wittman/The New York Times
Under new rules coming to Ontario schools this fall, students in Grade 6 and below must put their cellphones away, powered off or set to silent mode, throughout the school day, unless they receive permission from the teacher. Students in Grades 7 to 12 must do the same, but will be able to access their phones between classes or during lunch.
In Alberta, all students will be required to turn their cellphones off and keep them out of sight during instructional time. Similar limitations take effect in British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. (In all cases, exceptions will be made for students needing the device for medical reasons, or if a teacher specifically asks for it to be used for educational purposes).
Chloe Kim, a 16-year-old student in Toronto, isn’t sure if the restrictions are necessary, or if they’ll even work toward their intended purpose.
“If students are being told not to use cellphones in classrooms, that will just make them want to use them more or they’ll find ways to get around the ban.”
Chloe admitted to being attached to her phone. Her eyes dart to the screen when it lights up with a notification. She listens to music on her phone, texts her friends or scrolls through Instagram. Occasionally, she’s been caught looking at it in the classroom and teachers have asked her to put the device away.
Some teachers are strict around cellphone use, Chloe said, while others are more relaxed. And some, she added, don’t even seem to notice when students are using their phones. “If they really truly want to be on their phones and they do not care about school work or the lessons, then I don’t think a ban will stop them.”
Lily Halton, 15, hopes for a more collegial classroom atmosphere under Alberta's cellphone bans. Her mother, Carissa, agrees with the intent of the policy but has questions about its implementation.Kelsey McMillan/the Globe and Mail
Lily Halton, a 15-year-old Edmonton student, said about half of her class gets distracted from lessons by notifications from their phones – and that teachers are constantly reminding students to silence their devices. She and her friends are not among those who have to be asked, though.
“We’re the nerds, I guess,” said Lily in describing their cellphone habits. She doesn’t have social-media apps on her phone, and she leaves it in her locker all day, both because she doesn’t see any use in bringing it into the classroom – “There’s nothing to do on it” – and she’d rather pay attention to the lesson.
Her mom, Carissa, believes adults find it just as challenging to manage their cellphone behaviour, and hopes restricting cellphone use in the classroom will help young people down the road.
She wondered how successfully the restrictions can be managed in the classroom. “But I would say the intent for me feels right,” she said, “as long as we’re not limiting kids who use phones for educational purposes because of disabilities.”
This fall, Lily hopes for a more interactive classroom environment because, with their phones tucked away, her classmates will participate more in discussions and be engaged in group work. And she hopes to see teachers less frustrated when their lessons aren’t interrupted.
But, she’s also uncertain whether the new policy will be effectively put into place. “I think for it to work, it would have to be ‘hand me your phone in the beginning of the class.’ It would have to be literally taking away the phone and then giving it back after.”
Almost every province will have some stricter form of anti-cellphone policies this fall. Students and educators alike are anxious to see what penalties are meted out to those who break them.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
In places where schools had already put cellphone restrictions into place, challenges around phones still persist.
Carrie Hughes-Grant, the head of Holy Name of Mary College School, an all-girls private school in Mississauga, Ont., found that the use of cellphones and social media “exploded” when students returned to in-class learning during the pandemic. The school had already restricted social-media platforms on its WiFi networks, but it wasn’t enough. Many students figured out ways to bypass Internet filters.
“We had to go, ‘Wait a second, this is not the way school was before COVID. So how do we get back to that?’”
In the months that followed, they issued strict rules: Students in Grades 5 to 8 were asked to leave their cellphones in their locker; those in Grades 9 and 10 had to keep their phone in their backpacks and could only bring it out if a teacher requested they do so. Older students were afforded more freedom, in order for them to learn how to responsibly manage time on their devices.
But then Ms. Hughes-Grant found that, despite the rules, some students in Grades 9 and 10 were accessing the phones in hallways and lunchrooms, or even pulling them out during some downtime in class. She and her colleagues also had to deal with what she described as “mean girl behaviour” that stemmed from what students were watching on social media, particularly around body image.
In response, the school hosted speakers to discuss respectful behaviour and body image with students. And then in the spring, Holy Name joined a group of Ontario school boards and a Jewish day school in Toronto that sued social media companies.
The school boards, which include some of the largest in the country, are advancing claims of around $7-billion, accusing the companies behind platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok of negligently designing products that disrupt learning and negatively alter student behaviour.
The social-media companies have defended their platforms in part by pointing out that they have invested in technology that safeguards children and teens.
Whatever the outcome, Ms. Hughes-Grant hopes it draws attention to the addictive nature of the products. “I believe it has become that bad,” she said.
Instagram and its parent company, Meta, are among the social-media giants being sued by Ontario school boards for the distracting effects of their products.LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images
Compared to Ms. Hughes-Grant’s school of 180 students, controlling cellphone use in a public school system with hundreds of thousands of students is a more daunting prospect.
Melissa Abela, a high school teacher in the Windsor, Ont., area who has taught for two decades, can attest to the challenges.
A few years ago, she noticed a handful of students at the back of the class texting or playing games on their phones. But when students returned from pandemic-related online schooling, the change was dramatic: More than half the class immediately reaches for their phones when she’s done teaching a lesson and supposed to focus on their assignment or group work.
“It was almost like second nature to them: there’s a break, you take out your phone.”
Most times, she doesn’t take it personally. Who wouldn’t prefer to play an interactive online game or check their social media over working on a grammar worksheet? Nor is Ms. Abela opposed to a technology break.
There are times, however, that she has been forced to take a phone away if a student is missing work or not completing assignments. She’s sent students to the main office who don’t comply and are disrespectful.
Some educators, she said, have incorporated the phone in their classwork, but they’re a minority: “I think that if you were to ask a group of us if it was hindering or helping learning, it’s more hindering. It’s a distraction more than a tool.”
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