With August upon us, the month most kids dread after summer vacation, Texas public school teachers like myself are singing a different tune. The Texas legislature has banned cellphone use on all school campuses during school hours. Thanks to this new policy, Texas students will no longer scroll on TikTok during lessons, Google answers during assessments, and violently clash with teachers who ask them to put away their phones.
For the first time in years, students will experience what school was like in the dark ages when kids talked to their peers face-to-face, did their work during class, and endured hours of boredom when that work was done. Perhaps students will discover the lost arts of doodling, passing notes, planning outings with friends, and reading actual books from the school library. They may even cultivate real personalities and introduce themselves to one another.
After all, the proliferation of smartphones has been extremely corrosive and deleterious for students in the last decade. These pesky pocket-sized screens have effectively ruined Gen Z, turning otherwise healthy, well-adjusted youths into ignorant, anxious, and lonely zombies. Parents may have kept their children out of trouble and trained them to be relatively tolerable in public, but this is only because they unwittingly sedated them with smartphones.
From a teacher’s perspective, competing with the smartphone was always a losing proposition. The best we could hope for was to convince at least some of our students to stay off their devices for their own good.
I reinforced this message by assigning at least a dozen articles on the negative effects of smartphones, in an effort to help my students reach their potential and recover a part of their humanity. They would often complain about my obvious agenda, but they could never argue that these articles — often loaded with research and expert testimony — were wrong. Once my case was made and my conscience was clear, I could then use different materials to help my students improve their reading, writing, and thinking.
As I discussed with my cousin and fellow writer Evan McClanahan on a recent episode of our podcast, the biggest source of my excitement is not the academic boost, but the social benefits that will emerge from a phone-free environment.
When I began teaching in 2007 (the year the iPhone came out), I labored tirelessly to keep my classes quiet and focused. I planned extra work, created an assigned seating chart, and kept the students in rows to establish a productive learning atmosphere. Once phones became ubiquitous, however, and schools stopped taking them from students, the whole dynamic of my classes changed. From managing a class of chatty students, I found myself urging students to get off their phones and actually talk to their classmates.
Over the years, I observed far fewer instances of teen pregnancies, students dropping out, and flagrant bullying behavior. But at the same time, I saw far fewer students making friends and dating, applying themselves to their schoolwork, and becoming self-advocates. I also noticed a steady loss of innocence, joy, and youthful energy. Yes, schools might have become less rowdy because of smartphones, but they are still stressful and dispiriting places, if not more so than before.
With the smartphone ban, this will change. And while I look forward to the change, it would be foolish to assume this transition will be painless and smooth (expect more panicked reports in the weeks to come).
For the first few weeks, if not months, of this school year, students will struggle with the massive disruption of their habits. Young people who binged shows and media content all summer long will be forced into a detox program for eight hours each weekday. The withdrawal symptoms will be intense, and teachers will not be able to enjoy any “honeymoon phase”— those first few weeks where students like their teachers after a positive first impression. Many kids will struggle to adjust and likely lash out in frustration.
Even after these first few weeks, it will take some time for students to build up routines that don’t include checking their phones every other minute. They will need to develop the vocabulary and patience of spoken communication and recover the lost art of empathizing with others. Older generations take for granted these basic practices of human connections, but so much of this will be new for the younger Zoomers and older Alphas. There will be plenty of awkward exchanges and misunderstandings.
But it will all be worth it. The inevitable challenges this year will require administrators to support this new policy and teachers to resist allowing students to use their phones.
We’ve already lost enough students through our lax policies with technology. The experiment has failed. It’s best to learn from this failure and enforce this new policy so students finally learn in their classes this coming year.