Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is a contributing columnist, based in ChicagoThe idea of banning mobile phones from school classrooms has achieved the politically impossible: persuading many US Republicans and Democrats to agree on something. As the new academic year starts, California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has urged all schools in the state immediately to restrict mobile phone use in the classroom, while Republican Indiana banned phones in class this year. Several other states have also passed bans. At the local high school where I live outside Chicago, new restrictions took effect last week. Surgeon-general Vivek Murthy has said social media platforms should carry health warnings. I sense a new conventional wisdom brewing. Research shows mobiles in class distract students, reduce performance and can lead to cyber bullying. A Common Sense Media study of 200 11- to 17-year-olds found 97 per cent used their phones in school hours, receiving a median of 237 notifications a day and about a quarter during school time. According to Pew Research more than 70 per cent of US high school teachers say mobile phone distraction is a major problem. And phone distraction has been linked to lower academic performance: a 2016 study of UK schools found test scores of 16-year-olds improved when phones were banned — though not those of already high-achieving students. Some studies have found even a switched-off phone reduces cognitive capacity.“There is a deep hunger across the US and around the world: parents, teachers and teens themselves want . . . to roll back the phone-based childhood,” says Zach Rausch, chief researcher on Jonathan Haidt’s new bestseller, The Anxious Generation. He tells me this is a “collective action problem: if everyone else is on their phones and you’re not [teens are] in jeopardy of social isolation . . . but when you take away these devices at group level the incentive to use them tends to go down.” Dr Delaney Ruston, physician and campaigner for “Away for the Day” phone policies, points to research that found college students would pay to be relieved of the burden of using TikTok or Instagram — but only if their peers were without them too. So how much collective action is enough? Even before this year, many teachers at our local Evanston Township High School already banned mobiles in class. The new school-wide ban takes the pressure off individual teachers but it only operates during class time, when students must deposit phones in a caddy; they can use them during breaks and lunch. Haidt’s book says a ban limited to class time is “nearly useless”.Reine Hanna, director of communications for the school, admits there are ways around the new restrictions. When they were piloted in summer school, some students deposited a “decoy phone” in the pouch, and kept the real one. Hanna says the high school considered locking phones away for the whole day, “but we wanted . . . to let students develop healthy boundaries with technology”. Rachel Durango-Cohen, student representative on the ETHS board of education, says “everyone hated the idea” last year when it was mooted. Now, though, they “see it’s not as difficult as they thought, and they are just living with it”. One downside is that “there’s even less interaction than last year between classes, everybody has their head down, cramming to get their cell phone use in during breaks”. Lucia Contreras, a student at San Mateo High School in California, tells me she never knew a time before mobile phones — but she had never been allowed to use one freely in school. And Todd Chapman, a middle school principal from Wisconsin, tells me he has seen a “dramatic decrease in cyber bullying during the school day” because students aren’t constantly videoing each other. Ruston says it will take time to create a new culture and norms around mobile phone use. But she predicts, “we are going to look back and say: ‘What were we thinking?’”, about the days when phones were permitted in class. One day, she hopes, mobiles in schools will be like smoking in a public building: something that just isn’t done.
