Notes from My Knapsack 12-28-23

Notes from My Knapsack 12-28-23
Jeff Gill

Media tools and mental development in 2024
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I'm continuing on the question I last started with: Should school age students have access to their phones during school hours?

Teachers and principals in general say no. Most school districts and each building has a policy of one sort or another about use of smartphones or internet devices during class time; often that has to do with a requirement to keep the device in the locker, and accessible only between classes or during lunch.

There's variation out there, but what I hear an increasing academic chorus plead for is some way to treat phones on campus the way we do handguns, and they're not kidding. Many think they should be banned, in no small part because of the hazards they represent.

Parents often feel otherwise, and that's what has top administrators and school boards in a bind. How to support parent and guardian concerns while also doing what's best for the students. I have a few, tentative ideas, which I'll lay out in order of feasibility and practicality.

First, to those parents and families with school age children: to me, the biggest unambiguous challenge with smartphones is how they carve into sleep time. I know there are other issues (fights, self-image, bullying) people think of around students with phones, but in my experience out around our schools, that's the driver for many, even most of the negative effects. Your child's phone should not be in their room at night. Period. Charge it on the kitchen counter, or better yet in your room. No phone after bedtime. Lack of sleep could be creating or magnifying most of the negative issues Haidt and Twenge describe in their research (see previous column).

Honestly, I think that could help our schools and our students more than anything else. Having laid that on the table, I support the idea that phones be deposited in a secure space or blocking bag on arrival and only get it back at last bell. I'm also aware of the opposition that will impede ever getting there.

But I'll take it a step further. I think it would be of interest for some school, or even a district, to declare online tools and internet devices and screens to be limited to only certain parts of the day, in certain classes under clear restrictions. That's not a simple request, because the trends are overwhelmingly to ebooks and online texts and to be fair, that's the world they will live in after graduation.

If I had a million or two laying around doing nothing, I'd be tempted to set up a charter school that was explicitly book and paper oriented, all but one period a day, just to see how learning happened in that setting again. There is so much we don't know yet about learning on screens.

Yet I'm teaching a graduate level course three times a year online myself, to students I mostly never meet. It's amazing. It's not all bad. We just still don't know so much. Which makes me wonder…


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's quite serious about the sleep thing, which is a boat anchor on students today. Tell him how you're sleeping at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.