The new school year has begun, and 2024/25 will look very different from last year in some schools, as the provincial ban on smartphones in classrooms has come into force. Children in Grade 6 or below will have to put their phones on silent and keep them out of sight unless their teacher says otherwise, while kids in Grade 7 and above will not be allowed to have phones in class at all, again unless granted special dispensation by their teacher.
We’ll see whether this policy actually lasts. Some educators have said it’s heavy-handed (and also that they don’t expect to get support from school administration in terms of enforcing it). Notably, the Toronto District School Board did briefly ban cellphones in school as far back as 2007 before reversing the move in 2011. The TDSB was already debating the return of a phone ban before the province brought in its own policy.
Ontario’s ban is also happening at a time when there’s a spirited debate about whether children should even have phones — or social media more broadly — given the psychological impact they may have. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is possibly the most prominent argument against young people on phones and social media, though it’s important to say this isn’t an area where there’s a clear consensus.
Then there’s the narrower question of whether school phone bans are actually effective: a recent review of studies suggests that any positive impacts of phone bans are likely small, though there’s been a marked lack of high-quality research on this question. The likely harms also seem pretty small, and it’s a policy that will be easy to reverse if it doesn’t deliver on its promise. So for now it seems like Ontario’s cellphone ban can be sorted into the “worth a shot” pile.
But stepping back for a moment: it’s worth stating just how regrettable this all is. Internet-connected smartphones really are a miracle of technology and not just for those of us who first got online in the dialup-modem era. It ought to be the case that a kid with a smartphone is an unstoppable learning machine — the answer to almost any question a student could reasonably pose is only ever a few clicks away. And, indeed, some educators have insisted that phones play a role in the classroom for precisely this reason.
All my life, there’s been an optimistic vision of what computer technology can do for learning, as it allows students anywhere to have access to knowledge far beyond the resources of any single school or teacher. Some of the shine inevitably came off the idea of online learning after COVID, which saw millions of students forced into hastily constructed online-learning programs as a public-health measure — an experience few parents would opt to repeat. (Full disclosure: TVO has provided and continues to provide online-learning programs as part of its mandate from the Government of Ontario.) Online learning, however, is hardly the only system that failed during COVID, and we shouldn’t necessarily throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What’s more poisonous to the idea of a more tech-optimistic vision of education is simply the conduct of the tech industry itself. Phones that are, as I say, miracles of technology are also designed from the ground up to be distraction engines. They’re so powerfully addictive that some people advocate for reverting to ancient flip phones to restore our mental health. Both of these aspects of smartphones are inescapably wrapped up in the particular business model of surveillance capitalism: these phones largely exist as a means to put ads in front of our faces, so they need to be as intrusive and addictive as possible.
It's possible to imagine a world in which governments didn’t respond to smartphones with the sledgehammer policy of an outright ban. But it’s nearly impossible to imagine that in the world we actually live in, where the phones can never be educational servants for the simple reason that they serve different masters. Until that changes, our governments will be left responding to these problems with whatever means they have.
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