JONATHAN JANSEN | Banning phones in the classroom is not the answer to an age-old anxiety

Around the world, education authorities are grappling with a new question: should schools ban cellphones? My answer is ‘no’, but let’s hear the other side.

Cellphones are a distraction in the classroom. They are addictive. Mobile devices give children access to unsavoury sites. They open the door to cheating. They render young people vulnerable to predators. Those exposed to excessive screen time show behavioural problems such as aggression. Attachment to devices deprives young people of sleep.

All of this could be true if, for example, learners are simply given a cellphone without any guidance or restrictions in use. But think of the upside.

A cellphone gives you access to hundreds of sites designed specifically to enhance learning. If a teacher did not explain the periodic table well enough, or you did not learn instantly how to balance chemical equations, just imagine the many YouTube lessons a learner (or teacher) could benefit from simply by accessing those sites using a cellphone.

Seldom spoken about, the cellphone can network young people and overcome one of those dangerous pandemics among youth around the world, loneliness. There are myriad other advantages; I use my cellphone to store emergency numbers, perform complex calculations, and listen to classics and jazz to lift my spirit on a down day.

South Africans like banning things that on first sight seem to bad for kids. It’s our history. We banned books, movies, comic strips and anything that troubled the sensibilities of our apartheid masters. Banning is us.

This debate about the value of cellphones should have been put to rest during the Covid years. It was the only ways in which teachers could distribute notes to learners via downloads on WhatsApp especially in the case of poorer children without textbooks. The cellphone was how parents on WhatsApp groups could receive school notices in those days about educational matters.

South Africans like banning things that on first sight seem too bad for kids. It’s our history. We banned books, movies, comic strips and anything that troubled the sensibilities of our apartheid masters. Banning is us. So before thinking, our gut reaction is to ban these new technological devices. Far-fetched?

There was a time when South African teachers wanted to ban the lowly (by today’s standards) calculator. These dangerous machines would make children lazy in the maths class. Instead of exercising their brains in doing a calculation, they would rely on the calculator to do the job. Today, children are reprimanded for forgetting to bring a calculator to the maths class because the teacher now has to find one for the test.

A friend of mine, a professor of information technologies in education, keeps count of the length of time between banning and requiring devices in education over the past decades. That gap is becoming smaller as people realise that every technological innovation has its downsides and that the secret lies in managing how a device is used within a classroom or for that matter, on a plane, where one is routinely asked to switch to flight mode.

Of course, as a teacher I would not like my students to be fiddling with a cellphone while I am teaching. That is a problem for effective classroom management. But I would certainly want them to pull out their cellphones when I wish to show them images of adaptive radiation to illustrate Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The possibilities are endless.

Nor do I worry about cheating because in my university classes I have asked students to use ChatGPT to generate an assignment on a topic in education policy and then ask them to apply the principles of policy analysis that I taught them in class. In other words, rather than holding anxiety about the abuses of these language models, turn the problem on its head.

Ahead of us lie further explosions in the growth of education technologies alone and their enormous value for teaching, learning, assessment and classroom management. Embrace the change and use these technologies wisely.

At my current high school attachment, during every interval, there are learners sitting in hotspot areas playing computer games and soccer competitions. Yes, I would prefer them to play soccer or netball (some do) and reduce the chances of becoming obese. But then I remember that they could well be selling or using drugs (some do) and placing their very lives at risk.

I must confess that I am somewhat addicted to Wordle and Scrabble, which destresses me after a long day even as I learn new words every day. Then I stand up, go to my computer, and write this column about cellphones before taking a long walk in the forest. OK, OK. The forest walk is not true.