France did it in 2018. Italy followed suit last year. Finland wised up in June. England did it this week. The question American parents and teachers should be asking themselves is this: How long will it take for American school districts and states to ban mobile phones in classrooms here as well?
There are no new insights left about the pernicious power cell phones have on the attention spans and value systems of our children. It has almost become a banal discussion at teacher meetings and conferences — parents are going on a decade of complaints now about the life-sucking force of their children’s cell phones. Academics from both the left and the right have bemoaned their influence in the classroom. There have been thousands of essays and opinion pieces written. Research is now confirming what we have always known to be anecdotally true — for example, that banning phones leads to higher test scores, and heavy phone use correlates with lower GPAs.
There is a broad consensus across the free world that the moral, intellectual, and emotional development of our children is titanically stunted by digital monomania. Classroom teachers, myself included, noticed long ago that our younger students can’t focus long enough to even watch movies nowadays. They don’t talk or gossip or flirt when there is time at the end of class. Homework that used to take 30 minutes now takes hours. Reading is passé as students spend their teenage years debasing their intellect while scrolling through infantile
