A friend recently commented on how wonderful it is that Ontario schools implemented a cellphone ban last September. I must have looked shocked because he asked, “Am I wrong?” Sadly, yes. It made me realize that anyone who does not have kids in public school may not know how ineffective the much-vaunted crackdown has been.
When the new rules were announced last spring, I felt hopeful, but not for long. According to the so-called toughest policy in Canada, students of all ages can still bring phones to school, but those in kindergarten to Grade 6 must avoid using them during the school day. Students in Grades 7 to 12 cannot use phones during class, but they can during breaks. All students are allowed phones if teachers permit it.
There is nothing tough about that. And I’ve spoken to several Ontario students and teachers who say phone-induced behavioural issues and distractions are as bad as ever. The Globe and Mail isn’t naming the teachers or students for professional reasons and privacy. Here are a few examples of what the phone ban looks like today.
In the absence of a consistent strategy, individual teachers (who already have a hard enough job) must make their own rules. In one teen’s academic-level math class, students are asked to put phones in an over-the-door shoe holder, but less than half do so. Some teachers are known for leniency; if you do your work, they don’t care if you watch Instagram reels for the rest of the period. Another teen said no phones are allowed in gym but kids can still listen to music with AirPods there, which suggests phones are nearby.
Meanwhile, there are numerous accounts of phones being used in changerooms, where kids play games, scroll on TikTok and film each other. Kids frequently go to the bathroom, only to stay there, on their phones, for the whole period. It’s not unheard of for kids to order pizza during class and pick it up at the front door of the school. In the cafeteria, kids will use AirDrop to send embarrassing videos to large numbers of students.
In fact, one teacher told me that if you were to go into the classroom last year and the classroom this year, you wouldn’t notice a difference. Another teacher said the administration wants to do the right thing but doesn’t know how.
While I applaud the guidelines’ intentions, they are based more on wishful thinking than science, pretending the human brain is wired differently than it is. We know kids cannot resist looking at highly addictive devices designed for compulsive use. (Neither can adults!) A 2017 study found that the mere proximity of a phone leads to a decline in cognitive performance, even when a device is silent and hidden.
It’s not enough to ask kids not to look at their phones. What’s needed is physical separation from the devices, either banned completely from school premises or locked in pouches for the duration of the day. Not only would this give kids a chance to focus on lessons and to socialize in person, but it would also offer a reprieve from an otherwise screen-saturated life. The average teen spends nearly nine hours a day looking at screens for entertainment purposes.
What’s stopping schools from doing this? Apparently, it’s the parents. Journalist Luc Rinaldi wrote in Maclean’s last year that school administrators “have decided that insulating themselves from risk – a broken iPhone, an irate parent – is more important than students’ education.” A teacher friend said the same to me, that administrators live in fear of an angry parent. It trumps everything, any day of the week.
There may be some parents who want to communicate with their children all day long, but I’d bet the majority do not. Most parents want their kids to have a good educational experience, led by administrators who put students’ academic success ahead of trying to appease a small group of clingy parents.
And yet, here we are. Ontario’s toothless crackdown isn’t working, the phones are as insidious as ever, and we’d be smart to revise the approach promptly. We’ve already fallen behind other jurisdictions, such as the Netherlands, that have made bold decisions to ban phones in schools altogether. The least we can do is try to catch up. Until then, the only thing banned in our schools is meaningful change.
Katherine Johnson Martinko is a Canadian writer and the author of the 2023 book Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. She writes about digital minimalism, parenting and technology in her e-mail newsletter, The Analog Family.
