SMARTPHONES IN SCHOOLS

UK boarding schools should lead the way and free their pupils from their grip

I recently attended a conference on AI in Education. A perplexing mix of breathless excitement and existential doom, it featured speaker after speaker eager to tell the audience just how ‘radical’ and ‘disruptive’ this new digital revolution was set to be.

The headline speaker, a distinguished headteacher and writer on the subject of AI, took us through slides that depicted a future vision of schooling he saw as inevitable. The traditional classroom and school library were out, condemned as ‘20th Century’; instead, children were depicted sitting in front of screens that tracked their eyes and wearing headsets that monitored their brain activity, both of which served up a ‘personalised’ education informed by data in the same way that Spotify serves up playlists.

The conference was held in a centuries-old building adorned with beautiful handiwork and the school, set within many acres of woodland, radiated a positive, humane sense of tradition. And yet not one speaker felt confident in saying what was so obvious: that the vision that Big Tech has for our schools represents a profound debasement, and that we should therefore resist it with all the powers at our disposal.

The related question of smartphones in schools strikes me as a similar problem. On the basis of common-sense, let alone aesthetics, the sight of teenagers hunched over their smartphone must surely strike many school leaders as self-evidently a diminishment from the typical school’s culture of only half a generation ago.

As smartphones began to tighten their grip on the nation’s youth from 2012, it was understandable that educators might have deemed them a harmless social lubricant or seen in them an answer to the perennial problem of student engagement. Such an assessment is alas no longer possible. Attention deficit, instant gratification, addiction, dependency, anxiety, depression, loneliness, not to mention sexualisation and sexual exploitation, have all been strongly correlated to teenage smartphone use. The work of Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge has catalogued the same. Our optimism – or naivety – of the early noughties must be updated to a sober coming-toterms with how destructive these devices are.

With successive UK governments giving so little support to families and schools on this question (in contrast to countries like France) the issue of smartphones is a great opportunity for UK independent schools, especially UK boarding schools, to establish a united front and offer parents and children smartphone-free environments. For the many parents concerned about this issue but unwilling or unable to be the only ones to make a stand, the positive peer group effects of a boarding school commitment to limit smartphones – at the very least to under 16’s – is a unique gift.

It will be said that boarding school pupils are those that require smartphone most for communicating with distant relatives and for organising travel arrangements. Plenty of non-smart phones (e.g. the LightPhone or Boring Phone) work just as well. Likewise will some argue that wily teenagers will hand in ‘burner phones’ instead – surely an indication, if one were needed, of the unhealthy levels of teenage addiction and nothing that an experienced boarding school pastoral team, used to stamping out other pathologies, would not be capable of dealing with. It is not too late.

The horse has not bolted. Boarding schools should think less about ‘banning’ these devices so much as ‘freeing’ their pupils from their grip and creating positive cultures that ‘rally the really human things.’

To end with a quote from one of the best writers on this topic, L M Sarcasas,

“We should recognize that with all the talk of automated labour and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from “getting things done” to living.”

Will Orr-Ewing is the Founder of Keystone Tutors and a Director of Concept Education. You can follow or connect with him on LinkedIN here.