When my friends and I walked into homeroom on the first day of school this year, my teacher told all of us to put our phones in a black plastic box on an old desk by the classroom door.
Handing over our phones during class is an official school policy, and my teachers always make this announcement at the beginning of the school year. But teachers would usually forget about the box by third period on the first day, never to be mentioned again by the second day of school. This year, however, the policy stuck that entire first day — and every day since.
I asked my Latin teacher why the school was suddenly getting so strict on phones. It turns out that over the summer most of the teachers had read social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ehtical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, argues that a phone-based childhood leads to mentally unhealthy kids who are unprepared for life and, in my Latin teacher’s words, it “really freaked us out.” Teachers were serious about taking our phones now.
It’s not just causing trouble at my school. Some 72% of public high school teachers in the United States say that cell phone distraction among their students is a major problem, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center in April. In high schools that already have cell phone policies, 60% of teachers say that the policies are very or somewhat difficult to enforce, the same study reported.
Several states have passed laws attempting to restrict cell phone use in schools, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation requiring school districts to regulate cell phone use. At least seven of the 20 largest school districts in the nation have either banned phones during the school day or plan to do so.