The first time a cell phone disrupted my classroom was early in my student teaching in a Boston high school. It was the spring of 2000. My supervising teacher had briefly left the room, and a few students were soon huddled over a flip phone, ignoring my pleas to put it away.
The feeling of helplessness against tech’s lure I had that day dogged me to some degree throughout my two decades in education. Teaching middle school in the early aughts, it was pretty easy: school policy required students keep phones in lockers, smartphones were not yet ubiquitous, Facebook hadn’t yet taken hold, and Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok didn’t exist. By the late aughts, the die was cast. More students had all manner of devices they were using to access all kinds of platforms; schools tried to block particular ones but that was hardly a deterrent.
The message to teachers became: Don’t fight technology, embrace it! The rush to digitize, even gamify, education was on. Surely if we made our lessons more engaging, students would be less distractible, we were lectured. The high schools I worked in largely left regulating phones, texting, and social media use to individual teachers, at the same time pushing us to go paperless, contributing to a losing battle.
The implications for education go beyond the distraction and instructional time lost — a number that would likely boggle the mind. One of the purposes of schools is to make citizens. Social media can make that harder, as Megan Garber explains in The Atlantic:
“In the future, [20th-century science fiction] writers warned, we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed. That future has already arrived.”
At home, parents have also mostly felt left on their own to battle the social media juggernaut, offered some tech-controlling tech and advice on how to limit their children’s screen time and educate them on social media use. “Wait until eight,” meaning eighth grade, was until recently a common but difficult directive around smartphones; some experts have now thrown up their hands and started recommending parents provide their kids with them in sixth grade. Just as teachers can struggle to get students to focus on classwork on computers, parents find their children spending hours doing homework that could have been done in the fraction of the time in an analog age.
There is some good news. Awareness of the teen mental health crisis that pre-dated the pandemic — and social media’s contribution to it — is rising. More people have an understanding of why and how it can be so damaging, particularly for girls, as a result of their own observation and experience but also as the media has publicized study after study showing how greater social media use leads to higher levels of anxiety and depression in adolescents.
Recent events give me hope that we may be at a tipping point not just in awareness but in action by the institutions that can make a real difference.
Despite some pushback, more districts are making it easier for teachers to limit cell phone distractions in their classrooms by instituting meaningful school and district-wide policies and enforcement. In a surprising move, Seattle Public Schools launched a lawsuit this month against several social media companies alleging “misconduct” that has lead to teens’ addiction to social media and is contributing to a mental health crisis among children.
The state of Utah and its Republican governor just announced it plans to sue social media companies in an effort to force them to provide better protections for children. Last fall, Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom signed a law meant to protect children’s data and privacy online. On the national level, Utah’s Republican Rep. Chris Stewart introduced a bill last week in Congress to raise the minimum age at which children can create social media accounts to 16. Echoing the rationale for this piece of legislation, this Sunday, Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argued that 13, the current age that many of these companies officially allow children to join their platforms, is far too young. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, in a piece for the Bulwark last month pushed for better regulation of social media companies on behalf of children.
While some of the laws and proposals might seem inadequate to the problem, and we won’t all agree on exactly how to move forward, a new willingness to regulate the industry seems to be building under a rare bipartisan consensus.
It’s a good time to make contact with elected leaders with support for regulations that might help educators and parents help children. We’ve been forced to try to do it individually for too long.