Phone ban a smart move

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/09/2023 (971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

All right, that’s quite enough — put down the phone and look to the front of the class.

That’s the message students are receiving in Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine, after the division decided to ban the use of cellphones during class. (Prior to this move, teachers had the discretion of setting their own classroom phone policies.) The ban comes into effect next month.

It seems like common sense. Cellphones have come a long way from the brick-sized monstrosities of the 1990s. Ubiquitous and multi-functional, they are pocket-sized distraction machines, guaranteed to keep students from focusing on the lessons of the day.

Students, however, may disagree. That’s only natural. With many millennials now pushing 40, most people one might consider “young” were either born into or have spent most of their lives in a post-smartphone world. The devices have been such a constant in day-to-day life it must be difficult to imagine what the problem is with using one during class.

But there are in fact consequences to unrestricted phone use in class (and elsewhere). DSF cited in-class distraction and bullying concerns as reasons for its ban. But it goes beyond that.

A 2017 paper published by the University of Chicago Press, titled Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity, offers a sobering portrait of the effects smartphone use has on one’s cognition.

The effects on cognition are wide-reaching, the authors state. People have a finite ability to process all the environmental information with which we are constantly confronted, and people instinctively filter out various environmental elements depending on what is most demanding on their attention.

Since they serve as a gateway to family, friends, and a wealth of information and entertainment, smartphones alter the way our brains allocate resources in order to prioritize the phone, with the phones exerting a “gravitational pull on the orientation of attention.”

Prior research, the authors say, show people “spontaneously attend to their phones at inopportune times,” with the distractions affecting performance and enjoyment in myriad facets of life.

Let us be fair to the students who were born into the digital world and offer a word of caution to school systems either enacting or pondering smartphone bans: the phone doesn’t necessarily have to be around to be a distraction.

The University of Chicago paper also states that because smartphones present such a temptation in terms of access, even when the phone is not in use, its mere presence serves as a distraction.

“We propose that the mere presence of one’s smartphone may impose a ‘brain drain’ as limited-capacity attentional resources are recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone, and are thus unavailable for engaging with the task at hand,” the paper’s authors state.

In other words, even when the phone isn’t on hand to provide a distraction, people become distracted by deliberately trying not to think about the phone.

Certainly, there are lessons for adults to take away here as well. Smartphone addiction is hardly constrained to students, and we would all do well to learn to put them down and (try to) not think about them for a while each day. But schools do have a responsibility to prepare their students for life outside of the schoolhouse walls, and the fact is not everything can or should be done while being simultaneously engaged with a group chat or online stream. It is mundane, but also crucial, to learn to just do something in the real world, sans phone.

Hopefully other school divisions will follow suit with returning classrooms to their pre-smartphone state.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, students of Manitoba — it’s for your own good. Promise.