How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools
This fall, when Suzanna Kruger walked into her biology classroom, she
noticed something strange: Two dozen students were staring back at
her.
"They were willing to make eye contact," Kruger, a 55-year-old high
school teacher in Seaside, Oregon, told me. "They even said hello."
It was something she hadn't seen since before the pandemic. "If a kid
had their phone in class, I could just simply walk up to them, and
they would hand it over," Kruger said. But by the fall of 2021, when
students returned from a year of distance learning, she said she had
started feeling like the teacher from Charlie Brown.
"They looked at me like I was just going 'wah, wah, wah,' " Kruger
said, adding that most kids in her class were either asleep with their
heads on their desks, wearing headphones, or doing a "dead-eyed
scroll" through TikTok. And when she asked them to turn over their
device, she said most students just "refused."
"I'm 55, and I was like, 'I don't know if I can do another 10 years of
this.'""
This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in
Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing
kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until
the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide
in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows
they're linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental
illness. This January, just over two million students will return to
phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and
South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School
District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.
https://www.thefp.com/p/jonathan-haidt-school-phone-bans-anxious-generation
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