This week, in a time-honoured tradition, kids across Canada will pack up lunches and pencil cases and, with some combination of trepidation and excitement, head off into a new school year. But unlike any generation before them, most of them will also pack a cellphone.
Roughly one in four countries has introduced some form of cellphone restriction in schools. China mandates that no more than 30 per cent of classroom instruction can involve technology. France banned cellphones in schools through Grade 9 in 2018, and in the Netherlands, no cellphones or tablets will be permitted in classrooms starting in 2024.
But four years later, the board changed its mind. In the context of “21st century learning,” it believed the cellphone could be a “tool to enhance student learning and support curriculum delivery,” as it stated on its website. Chris Spence, director of education at the time, compared cellphones to calculators – initially verboten in schools, only to become staples of the modern classroom.
My kids, now entering Grades 8 and 10 at Toronto schools, text me throughout the school day. I can watch one of them selling and buying things on an online marketplace . They don’t deny that they’re on their phones in class; it’s normal, they say. In some classes, they’re incentivized to work fast, because they can go on their phones when they’re done.
The problem here is twofold. For one, students are not getting the education they deserve. For another, they’re learning that the rules don’t matter. Although cellphone bans have been discussed in the British Parliament, none have been put in effect and it is up to individual schools to determine the terms of their use. At the Michaela School, these are clear. Incoming students are encouraged to swap their smartphones for “brick phones” that the school provides. Smartphones that are seen or heard on school property are confiscated for up to three months. Ms. Birbalsingh makes no exceptions.
“Drama is by definition social and participatory,” she says. “Once the phones are out, kids are consumed. They’re sucked into the screen. They can accomplish very little.” Kids behave differently in the presence of phones: more inhibited, more conscious of how their peers might judge them. It’s no coincidence that her class is one of the most popular in the school.