It’s easy to believe that cellphones are just tools. Tools are for our convenience, like a screwdriver for a clogged drain or a pressure gauge for wonky driving. Whatever their benefits, cellphones can no longer be classified as such for all the ways that they so deeply inconvenience us. Many have experienced some sort of phone-related inconvenience: someone running into you while glued to their device, anxiously waiting for the ticket inspector because your phone is about to die, or most insidiously, the collapse of valuable social customs.
Each individual practice of these customs had just a small positive effect, but now that they are slipping away, our culture is changing for the worse. The diminished attention spans, the social ineptitude, and the phantom phone signals are not just bugs of technology, but the reality that we need to address.
At least, Governor Kathy Hochul thinks so. In announcing her statewide phone ban, Governor Hochul said that “young people succeed when they’re learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling.” I spoke to local teachers to see if they really find this to be the case.
The question of the role technology ought to play in our lives is a polarizing one. Among teachers however, there seems to be a consensus that phone usage has adversely altered their classrooms. Lauren Norkus, an Ithaca High School teacher, said that a couple years before the ban she would tell students, “I just want you to turn and talk to your neighbors about anything at all. Just don”t gather by the door and stare at your phones. And inevitably, that’s what they would do, because they didn’t know how to do anything else.”
Teachers are beginning to see differences post-ban. Cait Rejman, a Southern Cayuga High School teacher, sees it in her study hall: “Last year, every kid was just sitting on their phone. Now, they talk to each other, and that’s something that I didn’t realize was missing until this year, now that they’re forced to interact face-to-face.”
The greatest pushback to cellphone bans has been the parent coalition. Their most salient argument is that they must have access to their children during an emergency. While this concern is sympathetic, many emergency response experts contend that cellphone use is to the detriment of emergency procedures. Ithaca Teachers’ Association president Kathryn Cernera agrees.
“Last spring, we were meeting a lot of resistance on this phone ban from caregiver groups talking about school safety,” Cernera said. “It was actually the police unions and the public service unions that handle emergencies coming forward and saying that ‘in a worst case scenario, every student getting on their cell phone would make our jobs harder,’ that got this ban over the finish line.”
Another reason that parents oppose blanket bans is because they are accustomed to having unrestricted access to their children. Now that our culture makes it possible for parents to check in on their kids at all hours of the day, many relish in the comfort of constant communication. But for every parent who used their access line to find the pick-up spot with ease, there is another placing inordinate domestic responsibilities on their child. The ubiquity of phones has eliminated the possibility of adolescents getting a break from their family lives in school. Perhaps with blanket bans, that may change.
Why weren’t districts regulating phones before Hochul’s ban? It’s not as easy as it sounds.
“Schools have tried to take it on themselves. But what always became the real sticking point was consistency of expectation,” Cernera said. “A lot of our students have their friends from dance, friends from soccer that don’t all go to the same school. So when every school has the same expectation, that pressure to join the group chat isn’t there.”
Some argue that in our rapidly technifying world, they must prepare their students to use their devices effectively. But for today’s students, technology is their first language. “They’re still all very tech savvy, so I think they’ll be fine communicating in a world that is so tech-based,” said Rejman.
However, the wider battle about adolescent phone usage goes beyond the schools. Some have pointed to a recent study to argue against phone bans because they do not reduce overall screen time or lead to better test scores. But learning better does not only mean better grades. It can also mean better class discussions and student attention, which is just as important, albeit less quantifiable. What these results do indicate is that to combat broader adolescent phone addiction, there will have to be parental regulation.
Kimberly Kopko directs The Parenting Project: Healthy Children, Families & Communities at Cornell University. Her research demonstrates that parents are often overwhelmed with the amount of advice for regulating their children’s social media use. She found “that parents need fewer, not more, reliable resources,” as research demonstrates both negative and positive impacts of social media use. “There’s a lot that parents don’t know about what their youth are doing on social media, and they’re looking for guidance,” says Kopko.
She encourages parents to broach the subject: “When parents have conversations with their youth around social media use, sometimes that’s very effective, because youth also are not aware of the various healthy ways to engage with social media.” In order to limit adolescent social media use in a broader context, parents will have to treat it as a problem.
But right now, over at Ithaca High School, Cernera’s office window looks onto a lawn where many students take their lunch period. Where she used to see students on their phones, now she sees them “playing cornhole and lawn games, interacting with one another, laughing, being social, being teenagers in a really beautiful, collaborative, community-building way.” The future of adolescent phone usage is still uncertain. But in New York, we’ve decided that cellphones don’t belong in classrooms. In Ithaca, students are starting to reap the benefits.