Colm Fitzpatrick
Colm Fitzpatrick asks whether phones should be banned in schools
If you had said 40 years ago that someday children will be walking around with small portable electronic devices whereby they could communicate with their peers, create their own personal profiles, and find the answer to any question with just the tap of a button, you would have been denounced as some wacky, future optimist.
Yet, in just one generation technological giants have managed to create such an invention: the mobile phone. And it’s certainly caught on. According to Statista, a website the collates statistics and studies from more than 22,500 sources, the number of mobile phone users in the world is expected to pass the five billion mark by 2019 – that’s about 70% of the population.
Alongside this radical new consumption, serious concerns are being raised about how phones affect people, physically, emotionally and cognitively. Nowhere has his problem been raised more than in the context of schooling, where phones are said to distract children from learning and developing wholesome friendships. Indeed, given the bad press phones have faced, French school students will be banned from using them on school grounds come September in the hope that the new law will act as a ‘detox’ for younger generations. 2010 legislation meant a prohibition from using phones in the classroom, but this new act expands to a ban for their use at break and lunch times.
Of course, the Catholic tradition has often warned about an over-reliance on material goods, and more recently Pope Francis warned in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ that use of technological products are not neutral but rather, “they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups,” adding that technology should serve humanity in a positive way.
In other words, the information consumed on phones may be orientated in such way that doesn’t actually allow for the flourishing of the consumer and may in reality have negative impacts. In fact, given that Irish users on average check their phones about 57 times a day, it’s no surprise that educators are worried about the distractions they can create. But is a phone ban in school really the correct recourse?
Model
According to Bro. Martin Bennett OFM, a teacher in Rochestown, Cork, their school policy which bans phones during classroom time and breaks, much alike the French model to implemented, is very effective.
However, he points out that children often get a bad reputation for wearing technology-tinted glasses, whereas many of them aren’t interested in phones and are acutely aware of the damage that dependence can have.
“I was running some projects during the year in the school on social media, and some of the projects were related to phone use. One of the classes were surveyed, and 20% of the class put their hand up and said ‘I have no social media account whatsoever’.
“There is a change even within the group itself, I think they are recognising that this stuff can be damaging and this stuff can be addictive and there are some kids out there who are putting these things [safeguards] into place themselves,” Bro. Bennett explains.
He adds that there is very little resistance towards the ban, and it would be rare for children to sneakily take them out during learning hours. Even at lunchtime, teachers supervise the 700-person student population, leading to little frequency of phone use. Although he notes that educators in other schools may be struggling with this issue, Bro. Bennett suspects that children may actually enjoy the phone-free zone, which has become such an intricate part of their life outside of school.
Culture
“They just managed to create a culture that this is the way we do things…to be honest with you, I think they might even enjoy a break from it,” he notes adding there have unfortunately been occasions of bullying in school with phones.
“Again, I can’t vouch for other schools. I’m sure there are certainly problems in other schools and maybe across the board the norm is that their teachers are fighting against kids using their phones. It is there.
“We have had some incidences of bullying and messages being sent around because each class has its own WhatsApp group. The kids communicate with each other on the WhatsApp group which is great for them in a way because they can share homework, and all those kind of things, but there’s a downside to it as well,” he explains.
Given the ease by which good or harm can be created using phones, Bro. Bennett also tries to teach students the role of “responsibility”, and that ultimately there are consequences for incorrect use of powerful devices.
“But we try to teach them the responsible use of these things [phones] as well and that these things are good. This the Franciscan approach to education anyway, this stuff is good but when you have a right to use it, you also have a responsibility and the responsibility is to ensure that you use it well and you use it safely and you’re not doing any harm to yourself and you’re not doing any harm to anybody else as part of using it.”
He notes that teachers will also follow this rule in order to act as an example for the kids and they will usually ask for permission from the children to take their own phone out, reinforcing the notion that phone use shouldn’t be a common occurrence during school hours. But says, Bro. Bennett, teaching about the importance of responsibility shouldn’t just be a school initiative, but should also be taught at home by parents.
“There’s been a lot of this stuff recently that the responsibility going on the school to sort it out – it’s up to the teachers to sort this out – but teachers can’t do this on their own. Schools can only do so much,” he says, stressing that parents need to get involved with their children on this issue early.
Although Bro. Bennett is open to the suggestion that older students could feasibly be given more liberal phone rights in school, this option should be closed to much younger students, as the learning space should be “ringfenced” for optimal use. Above all however, he gets the impression that parents are much more concerned about technology than the children using it.
“From talking to the kids, I think that, the way that they put to me anyways – the first and second years – is that parents and older people are more freaked out about this stuff than they are, and they don’t seem to trust them but they seem to think they are trustworthy. It’s a funny kind of thing.
“…Parents are more freaked out about this and if you meet them at parent teacher meetings, they seem to think this is a big problem. You have to say to them, it’s not a problem in school but is at home for them – that’s the problem.”
Realising that advances in modern technology will not be stopping any time soon, perhaps it’s about time that parents accept that phones and alike will continue to play a more intricate role in the lives of the generations to come. Instead of treating phones as monstrous devices that must be destroyed, a better way of approaching the topic is not to “patronise” kids about them, as Bro. Bennett puts it, but listen to them and offer some knowledge, wisdom and guidance.