On December 31, Quebec became the second province to limit the use of cellphones in public schools. It joins Ontario, which in 2019 mandated that mobile devices could be used only during lessons for directed educational purposes, health reasons or special education needs.
Quebec and Ontario’s leadership in this area is laudable, but stronger action is needed. All provinces and territories should ban cellphones — not just in classrooms but on school premises. And for the bans to be meaningful, they must be consistently enforced.
If the provinces need a kick in the pants to take action, they need look no further than Canada’s performance in the 2022 PISA survey, released in December. PISA, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science skills to meet real-life challenges.
Canada first participated in PISA in 2000. With few exceptions, Canadian students’ performance in all three categories has been falling ever since.
Reading and mathematics performance fell precipitously during the pandemic years. But as the report notes, “the recent drop did, in fact, mostly reinforce and confirm a negative trend that began earlier.”
The report identifies digital distraction as one of the principal culprits for Canada’s decline. It notes that 43 per cent of Canadian students get distracted using digital devices, compared to an OECD average of 30 per cent.
What’s more, digital devices don’t merely affect the device holder. They also impose negative externalities on other students, with 33 per cent of students reporting being distracted by other students’ use of digital devices.
“On average across OECD countries, students were less likely to report getting distracted using digital devices when the use of cell phones on school premises is banned,” PISA report adds.
Go figure.
Asian countries, led by Singapore, scored highest in PISA’s assessment. Other top performers included Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
Cellphone bans are common in Asian countries, notes a 2023 Global Education Monitoring report by UNESCO, the United Nations’ education, science and culture agency. Elsewhere, they are less common: only one in four countries have implemented full or partial bans on the use of cellphones in schools, the report says.
In addition to excessive cellphone use being associated with reduced educational performance, it is also associated with poor physical and mental health, the UNESCO report notes.
This finding will surprise no one who has been following the growing controversy over Meta and other social media platforms’ harmful effects on young people.
As Canadian Affairs noted in a previous editorial, numerous studies have identified a sharp escalation in health problems in youth — including major depression, self-harm, eating disorders and loneliness — since social media platforms became ubiquitous around 2010.
Kids’ ability to spend excessive amounts of time on social media is a direct function of their ability to spend unrestricted amounts of time on their phones. If young people were prohibited from using cellphones during school hours, social media use would be naturally curbed.
Whack-a-mole
For bans to be meaningful, they should start at the school doors, not the door to each classroom. This is a practice that some schools in Canada and the US have already started to implement, to positive effect.
Requiring teachers to bear the burden of getting students to put their phones away in class risks wasting precious education minutes on a whack-a-mole exercise and gives students ample opportunity to break the rules. What’s more, it results in inconsistent application of school policy from one classroom to the next.
Indeed, in December, Rachel Chernos Lin, chair of the Toronto District School Board, filed a notice of motion to create a policy at the board-level to address cellphone use in schools.
“What we have is not working,” Chernos Lin is reported to have said. “Teachers tell me they need more support, in terms of policy, in order for this to truly be enforceable.”
She also noted the board needs consistency from class to class and school to school.
It is worth highlighting what is at stake here.
The skills that PISA measures for — such as the ability to solve complex problems, deal with abstract or counterintuitive concepts and distinguish between fact and opinion — are the skills required to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce.
Increasingly, humans are competing with sophisticated machines. The way for Canada to remain a productive, competitive nation — and for workers to find fulfilling jobs — is for young people to acquire the complex problem-solving and analytical skills machines can’t displace.
Policymakers are doing today’s kids a great disservice if they allow the ephemeral pleasures of constant cellphone access to get in the way of them acquiring the skills needed to live purposeful lives tomorrow.
I personally think ALL social media should be banned for children under 18. Make it a law. Hand out flip phones with no data to the children so they can call each other or their parents, and can still be “tracked”. Using flip phones would be a good visual for law enforcement.
The problem is not just cell phones in schools, it is an addiction, disease, vise, what ever adjective you would like to use. LOOK AROUND–sad state of affairs.
AND NOW—with the advent of AI being introduced and pushed on to the public faster and faster because some one HAS to win the race.
ASK YOURSELVES—-WHO IS GONNA LOSE !!!