While the vast majority of students are happy to comply, a school obviously cannot frisk its students nor pass them through airport-style screening devices to ensure phones aren’t secreted in pockets and then used in private – in toilet blocks and so on.
However, if the “why” is understood and valued by our young people, this will hopefully only ever be a minority of students.
Our own state government introduced a similar ban recently and, while restrictions and bans are helpful, we need to be realistic about the challenges of enforcing this.
But that’s no reason not to do it.
A government-defined uniform approach helps reduce disparity across schools while also sending a powerful message to our youth about what our state values – schools with a strong sense of community, where people are engaged in face-to-face relationships with one another.
Parents, similarly empowered by a clear and unequivocal message from our leaders, including increased age limits on social media, can also unite in their position regarding phones.
With tightened rules regarding social media access, there will be no point in giving children smartphones. Cheaper, basic phones designed only to make phone calls will suffice.
Then, we are all in a much better position to focus on the actual and upstream cause of the reliance on virtual networks among our young people, the loss of community.
For it seems we’ve forgotten what “community” means.
A community provides a set of shared values and norms for its young, a common sense of identity.
It is made up of a network of overlapping relationships that reinforce one another (parents supporting school rules, for instance), it contains role models, respect is shown for authority figures who guide the community, and it models a high degree of inclusiveness to ensure all members feel visible and valued.
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The decline of community witnessed over recent decades has, unsurprisingly, resulted in us losing trust in our own neighbourhood and this has subsequently seen the loss of a traditional play-based childhood for our young ones.
Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, warns that parents today are over-protecting their children in the “real world”, where so much invaluable learning occurs, while leaving them significantly under-protected in the virtual world taking the place of the once joyful play-based childhood.
We have allowed the rise and rise of the phone-based childhood.
But schools and parents can’t address the decline of community and the ensuing rise of, and reliance on, virtual networks alone.
While schools work hard to ensure they embody the many essential characteristics of community, we obviously exist in a wider ecosystem where many of these characteristics have been lost, sadly causing schools to feel increasingly counter-cultural.
Parents and schools need a unified approach about what is important in our community, and that starts at the top.
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Restrict phones and social media, but let’s not lose sight of the real issue in our schools
