I applaud the Greenfield Recorder’s July 14 front-page treatment of the story “School officials weigh locking up phones,” but the problem is mislabeled and the response wrong-headed.
The for-profit solution under consideration, California-based Yondr, would be impractical to enforce (how do you compel students to sleeve their phones?), wasteful, and fails to address the underlying problem: addiction to digital social interactions. (Phones are pulled out when they buzz with message notifications. Nobody takes selfies for themselves.)
Instead, our schools should create an educational response that involves the students themselves.
The previous week, the Recorder shared some My Turns written by Evan Josephs and Zachary Rutherford, Four Rivers Charter Public School students who named the underlying problem as social media engineered to create addiction. We adults are not immune, but teens are more vulnerable and fragile. The pull of phone notifications distracts them from activities that better support healthy adolescent development, and plunge many into mental health crises.
Our kids need our help resisting social media addiction, but not just during the school day. If we can’t teach students to turn off notifications during school, we consign them to their current average of 7.5 hours on their phones after school (as reported by Common Sense Media and verified by my own students’ surveys).
Evan and Zachary did not need to watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix to know social media and text-messaging are addictive and dangerous. But they did need teacher Alex Wilson’s media literacy unit to connect the dots and channel their concerns into civic actions, like writing these opinion columns. This is what schools can do: educate and empower students to investigate and address problems, helping them develop into responsible adults.
I believe there are many, many students who would want to join the fight against social media app addiction like Zachary and Evan did, and in many other ways as well. I reckon that a new weekly student-created PSA could close out morning announcements on the PA, always ending with “Now power off your phones.”
Compare that to sending money and responsibility to Yondr: All students start their school days passing through metal detectors like prison visitors being screened for weapons. How would it work? Those who don’t surrender phones for sleeving get redirected to holding rooms, or sent home? All this to save teachers the time it takes to say “OK, put it in the basket until class is over?”
Greenfield Schools, do your job, please! Educate our young citizens to take action to build a better world.
Bram Moreinis teaches digital literacy at the Springfield Renaissance School, and helps teachers like Alex Wilson develop media literacy units that conclude with civic action projects. He is also a member of the Four Rivers Charter Public School Board.