Recent studies show removing smartphones from classrooms doesn't magically fix grades or mental health. But as I recently explained to a terrified middle schooler, evidence has never been a prerequisite for making a child's day worse.
Over the weekend, while sharing a lovely sea bass with several prominent tech executives in Aspen, I was handed a rather irritating piece of news. A new wave of comprehensive educational research has revealed that banning smartphones in schools—the policy I and countless other thought leaders have spent the last three years championing—does not, in fact, drastically improve test scores, nor does it magically cure adolescent anxiety.
The data is, as the researchers delicately put it, disappointing. GPAs remain largely stagnant. Bullying has simply migrated from the internet back to the locker room, where it frankly belongs. And teenagers, stripped of their digital pacifiers, remain deeply, stubbornly miserable.
To which I say: good. It is time we stop letting empirical data distract us from the fundamental purpose of primary education. We do not ban phones to turn children into scholars. We ban phones to remind them who is in charge.
The fatal flaw of modern educational researchers is their naive assumption that school is a place of joy and enrichment. It is not. It is a vital, twelve-year training program designed to prepare the human spirit for the crushing, inescapable boredom of the modern corporate workplace. When I sit in a windowless conference room listening to a synergy presentation, I cannot simply pull out an iPhone and watch a thirty-second video of someone power-washing a driveway. I must suffer. And if I must suffer, so must a seventh-grader in pre-algebra.
I discussed this exact phenomenon last month during an off-the-record panel at Davos with several leading administrators. We all agreed that the true value of a sweeping technological prohibition cannot be measured by a standardized math test. It is measured in the beautiful, uninterrupted silence of a teenager being forced to stare at a cinderblock wall for forty-five minutes because they finished their worksheet early.
If we only implement policies that demonstrably help students, we lose one of the last acceptable avenues for exercising petty authoritarian control over the young.
When I was in the eighth grade, if I wanted to dissociate from a lecture on the Articles of Confederation, my only option was to count the acoustic tiles on the ceiling until I achieved a state of mild hypnosis. Today’s youth have the audacity to bypass this crucial developmental milestone by quietly watching a stream under their desks. This is a catastrophic failure of discipline. The American economy is built on a foundation of workers who know how to sit quietly in a room they desperately wish to leave. If we do not teach our children how to stare blankly into the middle distance while an authority figure drones on, who will staff our mid-level compliance departments in the year 2040?
Naturally, a vocal contingent of coddling parents has weaponized this new data. They argue that if the bans aren't improving academic performance, confiscating the devices only serves to cut students off from their support networks during emergencies. To these parents, I ask: have you considered simply not liking your children as much? I send my children to a very expensive, phone-free boarding school in Switzerland specifically so I do not have to hear from them during the business day. The idea that a fourteen-year-old requires a direct line to their mother simply because they are having a panic attack in the cafeteria is a symptom of a deeply unserious society.
Some naive reformers suggest that if phones are not the root cause of poor academic performance, we should look at systemic issues like underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, or the fact that teachers are paid roughly the same wage as an assistant manager at a frozen yogurt stand. This is exactly the kind of bleeding-heart distraction I warn my readers about. Why would we undertake the monumental, expensive task of restructuring the foundation of public education when we could simply yell at a fifteen-year-old for checking a text message from her grandmother? The bans provide a low-cost illusion of decisive action, which is the cornerstone of all effective political leadership.
I will not apologize for demanding that children experience the exact same flavor of analog misery that I endured in 1986. If we allow disappointing data to dictate how we treat our youth, we risk creating a generation that expects policies to actually make sense. And as any successful columnist or CEO will tell you, that is a far more dangerous threat to our society than a teenager scrolling through the internet during study hall.