When our children were young and in elementary and high school, we had a tried-and-true way of reaching them during class hours if we felt we absolutely needed to: we phoned the school and had the secretary go to our son’s classroom to relay a message or bring him back to the office to speak to one of us directly.
It was rare that it happened.
This, of course, was before mobile phones became the ubiquitous Great Big Thing they are today. Still, the way of reaching our kids if we needed to worked just fine at the time. And there is no reason it couldn’t work just as well today.
The reason I bring this up is because parents (a minority I believe) are among the most vocal groups opposed to bans being invoked on smartphones in the classroom. What if they need to reach little Sally in the middle of the day to remind her that a neighbour is picking her up after school, not Dad?
Thankfully, schools, school boards and provincial governments in this country are finally standing up to some of this lunacy and saying, enough. Cellphones have become a hazard in the classroom, full stop. And that hazard outweighs the insecurities of parents who need to be a text message away at any given time with their children.
How is the child to decide what order to pick from Skip the Dishes? How will they know when said food has arrived at the school? These are the vital matters some parents struggle with today. How dare the provincial government consider banning devices that allow their child to declare they’d like a ginger-beef box delivered to school, and not chow mein?
Alberta became the latest province to restrict cellphone use in classrooms, joining Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and B.C. in instituting restrictions around the use of the devices during school hours. At this point, it appears there will be a hodgepodge of policies across the country, stretching from restrictions to outright bans.
I first called for a full ban six years ago. At the time, I referenced numerous studies that showed that the ability to concentrate was one of the best predictors of future economic success for a young person. It was deemed more important than the socio-economic status of a person’s family. As one professor said: focus is the new IQ.
Which is why smartphones in the classroom are anathema to an environment that allows a person to concentrate fully on the material being presented during a lesson by a teacher. Cellphones are a menace, at almost any grade. But they are increasingly a threat because of the cornucopia of material one can harvest on their phone. Including pornography.
I spoke to one elementary school teacher who told me about fifth graders who were watching stuff on Pornhub during a classroom lesson. Yes, Pornhub. It may not be as popular as TikTok, but the fact it’s being watched at all while a teacher is trying to communicate a lesson is not only disturbing but infuriating.
Maybe more exasperating are parents who, despite these goings-on, still push back on a cellphone ban because they want to be in constant communication with little Johnnie.
It’s bizarre that some parents insist that their child have their cellphone with them while sitting in class, but would never think of demanding that same child have their phone with them for football or volleyball practice or a piano lesson.
Talk to any teacher who has stood at the front of a classroom in the past 20 to 25 years, and ask them what the biggest change has been. Most will answer the cellphone. (A close second would be the increasingly hostile and confrontational attitude of some students.) Yes, phones can be used as a teaching tool in some cases. But those opportunities have been sullied by the greater distraction that phones create, not just for the student holding one, but for others nearby as well.
Students texting each other in class has become a common occurrence. The snickers that those text exchanges can sometimes produce disrupt an entire class, not just two people. UNESCO recently cited research on phone use in classrooms that said it can take up to 20 minutes to refocus after being distracted by a cellphone. The same research showed that removing phones improved learning outcomes.
It seems so obvious that studies don’t even seem necessary to underscore the point. The baffling thing is that we, as a society, have been so reluctant, so afraid, to do the right thing and ban phones from the classroom entirely.
Finally, some governments are showing the guts that were needed years ago. Better late than never.
Gary Mason