Confiscated phones in Orlando, Fla. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times
By David Leonhardt | The New York Times
A turning point?
Several times a year, I visit a high school or a college to talk with students about how I do my job and how they see the world. On a typical visit, I spend a few minutes in the back of the classroom while the teacher is conducting another part of that day’s lesson. These experiences have shown me what a dominant — and distracting — role smartphones and laptops play in today’s schools.
From my perch behind the students, I can see how many of them are scrolling through sports coverage, retail websites, text messages or social media, looking up occasionally to feign attention. It’s not everyone, of course. Some students remain engaged in the class. But many do not.
I would have been in the latter group if smartphones had existed decades ago; like many journalists, I do not have a naturally stellar attention span. And I’m grateful that I didn’t have ubiquitous digital temptations. I learned much more — including how to build my attention span — than I otherwise would have.
Above all, my recent classroom experiences have given me empathy for teachers. They are supposed to educate children, many of whom have still not caught up from Covid learning loss, while in a battle for attention with fantastically entertaining computers. A growing body of academic research suggests it isn’t going well.
Twister and pickleball
In Orlando. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times
But school officials and policymakers have begun to fight back. It’s probably the most significant development of the 2024-25 school year.
At least eight states, including California, Indiana and Louisiana, have restricted phone use or taken steps toward doing so. They are following the lead of Florida, which last year banned phones in K-12 classrooms. Other states, including Arizona and New York, may act soon. (My colleague Natasha Singer, who’s been covering this story, discussed these policies on an episode of “The Daily.”)
At the schools that have restricted phones, many people say they already see benefits. In a Florida school district that Natasha visited — and that went even further than the state law requires, banning phones all day — students now have more conversations at lunch and play games like Twister and pickleball. Before, children mostly looked at their phones, one principal said.
Of course, there are still some hard questions about these policies, including:
- How do schools enforce the rules? And what is an appropriate punishment for breaking them?
- Should schools ban phone use only during class time or for the entire school day? To put it another way, is a more social lunchtime worth the downside that parents can’t easily reach their children?
- How can teachers incorporate technology into lessons, as the new laws generally allow, without undermining the policies’ benefits?
A mixed blessing
Even with these difficult questions, the new policies may represent the start of a broader shift. For much of the smartphone era — which began with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 — Americans treated the rapid spread of digital technology as inevitable and positive.
Now people view it as more mixed. “Smartphones have brought us a lot of benefits,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, told me yesterday. “But the harms are also considerable.”
Children’s mental health has deteriorated during the same years that smartphone use has grown. Loneliness has increased, and sleep hours have decreased. In surveys, both teenagers and adults express deep anxiety about their own phone use. By many measures, American society has become angrier, more polarized and less healthy during the same period that smartphones have revolutionized daily life.
Social scientists continue to debate precise cause and effect, but many policymakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, argue that the country can’t wait to act. Murthy agrees. “There’s an urgency to this,” he said. “What we need now is a great recalibration of our relationship with technology.” As encouraging examples, he cited schools’ new phone policies and the student-led Log Off movement.
If the country ultimately looked back on unfettered smartphone use as a mistake, it wouldn’t be the first time that a public health campaign took years to have an impact.
Russell Shaw, the head of Georgetown Day School, an elite private school in Washington, D.C., recently wrote an article for The Atlantic explaining why he was banning cellphones in all grades. Shaw described the ways that constant phone use had harmed social life and learning during his 14 years at the school. Yet he began the article with a historical anecdote on a different subject: When his parents attended high school in the 1960s, they received free samples of cigarettes on their cafeteria trays.
“I believe that future generations will look back with the same incredulity at our acceptance of phones in schools,” Shaw wrote.
