This nationwide, bipartisan trend is one conservatives should embrace.
W hen D.C. Public Schools start up again tomorrow, their students will be going back in time — though not that far. That’s because they will no longer be allowed to use their cellphones during the school day.
By making its public schools phone-free, Washington, D.C., has joined a nationwide, bipartisan education trend. Unlike many such trends, however, this is one we should embrace. It’s good for students. And it can help contribute to a society in which technology serves us, not the other way around.
One reason not to be skeptical of this particular countrywide schooling development is that it hasn’t come from nowhere. I was among the last cohort of students to have memories of a school environment in which phones were virtually absent. To be fair, that was largely a product of the fact that most phones students would have had access to were blessedly primitive. Oh, for the days when accidentally pressing the “internet” icon on your phone’s few-pixel screen was a frightening prospect, the inevitable prelude to a huge charge on the monthly bill. I couldn’t have used my phone for much back then, anyway, other than texting, and most of my friends would have been in school with me.
That all began to change with the debut, in June 2007 (just before my freshman year), of the iPhone. Soon, the magic of the market ensured that the simultaneously ingenious and insidious device and comparable smartphones proliferated, even among younger people. Ninety-five percent of teenagers now report having access to one, up from 75 percent in 2014–15, according to Pew.
Even older people, who experienced the smartphone revolution at a time when their habits were more settled, have been changed in its wake. Some effect on youth, whose still-developing brains are already more given to impulsive behavior without a constant source of stimulation accompanying them everywhere, is undeniable.
Maybe it is just a coincidence that the kids started to become increasingly not right around this time. Perhaps it is entirely correlation, with not an iota of causation, that depression and anxiety skyrocketed in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019, as did the suicide rate, while teens began to report a significantly greater degree of social isolation. It could well be completely unrelated that tests of their academic standing began to show worrying regression. But I doubt it.
If extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, then certainly monocausal explanations do as well. But really, the evidence has already begun to pile up. Much of it points to a specific negative effect in the classroom. It would probably take the transformation of the minds of another generation or two to resolve any lingering uncertainty about the connection, which is a rather unappealing prospect.
Many jurisdictions have proven unwilling to wait for that. Since Florida’s pioneering ban in 2023, more than half of U.S. states have at least some restriction on in-school phone use in place. More may soon follow.
The wisdom of such restrictions may be indicated, in part, by the deficiency of arguments against them. They invoke emergencies such as school shootings. But it’s far from certain that the benefits of having a phone in such a situation would outweigh drawbacks. Others, like the reliably wrong Taylor Lorenz, allege that taking phone bans beyond the classroom amounts to a “wider effort to cut young people off from the internet and open information” and discriminate against “the most marginalized kids.” The wisdom of restrictions may also be indicated by the fact that some places have already seen positive effects from them.
A better argument against phone restrictions is that they are inadequate. As much sense as they make, and as much time as students spend at school, it is a simple fact that kids are not there 24/7. Outside of the classroom and beyond the campus, there is nothing to keep them from going right back to their devices beyond school hours.
The insufficiency of such policies, however, is hardly reason not to undertake them. Rather, it should compel further attempts, by families and civil society, to ensure that phones, screens, and other means to remove people from reality itself remain our tools (even if they can be useful ones, properly handled), not our masters. Doing so would not only help save childhood; it would be consistent with timeless conservative wisdom: Change may be inevitable, and some of it can even be to the good, but there can be wisdom in an older way of doing things.
Going back to the antediluvian era of . . . 2007 would be a good start.