Can We Master Our Pocket Tyrants?

Iain Gray in the Newsletter is reporting on a pilot scheme that aims to tackle the scourge of mobile devices in classrooms.

“Around 8,000 young people attend the nine of the province’s schools involved in the government-run pilot scheme, which has pupils magnetically sealing their phones in special pouches at the start of every day.The pouches can only be opened with a specific unlocking device, meaning pupils can’t get at their mobiles. Education Minister Paul Givan says the scheme will allow officials to check if stopping phone use in the classroom could improve concentration and boost wellbeing.”

Many people are increasingly uncomfortable with the prevalence of mobile devices in an educational setting, seeing them not only as distractions but as contributing to a weakening of the discipline required for effective learning. And we are already seeing the possible results as this article by the anonymous college professor ‘Hilarious Bookbinder’ on Substack encapsulates his despair at the end result of an education partly shaped by the presence of the mobile

“Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either…”

Our good professor lists several behaviours that demonstrate the collapse in student discipline and even several possible causes (including the pandemic) but emphasises that

“It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.”

So what do we do? The Department of Education’s scheme will be useful in gathering evidence proving what many of us suspect in our guts, that having a connection to the internet in your hands at all times is disastrous for young learners (and that’s as the impact of Artificial Intelligence becomes ever more apparent). Yet we may be as effective in stopping the march of the mobile as the Luddites were in stopping industrialisation. Sometimes something is just simply too useful to too many that otherwise immense downsides are normalised or ignored.

Hopefully, the Department of Education’s scheme will show we are not helpless before our technology.

Slugger Team

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