All children deserve to learn in smartphone free schools
There’s no place for kids on today’s modern internet, with all the predators, illegal content, addictive algorithms and the sheer quantity of time and mental space wasted on junk. We should have created a different, safer internet for the kids. But making a different experience for children is a huge project that means fighting the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley, with all their political donations, libertarian extremism and alpha behaviours. Having just fought hard over the Online Safety Act, I am not confident this will happen anytime soon.
However, one battle we can win is to protect kids from smartphones while they are at school. Toilet cubicles filled with pupils’ doom-scrolling, lunch breaks spent bent over phones, schoolyard bullying supercharged by nudifying deepfake apps, and the sheer number of hours spent on digital devices. The evidence of harm caused by smartphones in schools is incontrovertible to any parent. But there are still plenty in the technology community who will deny the harm done due to phones and social media. Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated this uncompromising approach when he told a US Senate hearing, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”
The winning argument, though, is education attainment. This is measurable. There are decades of historical data. There are international comparisons. Worrying is that our children’s educational attainment is falling off a cliff. The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in maths than students whose eyes are glued to their screens for more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. And those schools that are putting in place hard, “locker” restrictions on phones are turning things around (Policy Exchange found that schools with an "Effective ban" on phones had better school performance than schools with partial or no bans). Kids from more deprived backgrounds are the worst affected.
领英推荐
This is the key battleground. Encouragingly, almost one in four countries introduced bans on smartphone use in schools in laws or policies from C?te d’Ivoire to Colombia from Italy to the Netherlands, according to UNESCO. Can we in the UK create breathing space from predators, fraudsters, filth and distraction for our children during the eight hours of school each day? I believe we can. Not because it is a panacea. But because it is a great start. And the winning argument is not the harm, even though that’s what exercises parents. It is the educational impact that will ultimately bankrupt the nation if we do not address the cause.
This article first appeared on the Smartphonefree Schools blog here. .
Co-Founder Atheni | StartUp Grind Top 100 | MIT Digital Transformation | Senior Strategy, GenAI & Human Capital Leader | Speaker | #femalefounder | Ex-int swimmer. Governor. Entrepreneur. GB/CDN. Lang ENG&FR. Mum x 3
5 个月Great perspective. I'm reluctantly with you on the ban, but it's a plaster on a bleeding wound. We find it helpful to look at tech like electricity (like Andrew Ng suggested, I believe). Just as we wouldn't let kids play with electrical sockets, we shouldn't leave them unsupervised with powerful tech. It's downright dangerous and, as you say, better to ban it altogether if we can't get our act together to teach them to use it correctly. However, banning is a dangerous and short sighted policy: digital skills are crucial for economic success, and AI literacy is soaring up the rankings as the most crucial skill of all. We can't shield kids from the digital world and expect them to thrive in it. This is not a positive future for Britain. We don't ban electrical sockets, we teach kids how to use them safely at the right age. The same applies to digital tech and AI. We need to step up as humans and guide the use of technology. We're building an AI literacy coach Atheni to be used in business and in education for this reason. We should unequivocally be empowering educators and students to use technology wisely, rather than avoiding it altogether. This approach could help bridge educational gaps instead of widening them.
Director at Kitty Hamilton Associates Ltd.
5 个月The importance of this is that while some have tried to blame covid for mental health, it’s been the perfect petri dish for testing out tech for virtual teaching. The results are in and the scores are poor. And of course there are other studies showing the impact on Early Years as well that just can’t be blamed on the pandemic anymore. To be clear most smartphone harms happen out of school hours. The importance of schools is that they can raise awareness amongst more “hard to reach” parents. When parents and schools work together we have the power to shift the norm. The more parents agree to keep their children smartphone free and the more schools back that with strong policy and action the sooner we’ll have no smartphones either at school or at home which will leave children free to play sports, practice music, draw, watch TV, hang out with friends, be with family and reconnect as well as decompress. Smartphone Free Schools is the first step to smartphone free childhoods where children are allowed to experience the life skills that will future proof them and society as a whole
Working towards a "Healthy Nation".
5 个月Here is our letter to the Secretary of State.