Back to School
In a rare bout of common sense, British schools have banned smartphones for kids.
Twenty times each day, my betters pity and ridicule me. With every cigarette, they remind me I am weak-willed, wretched, poxed, and hazardous to the pink lungs and sound minds of those forced to share my air and earth.
When not clogging my arteries with jaundiced gunk, I tar the lungs of innocents. By the grace of my filthy habit, I am an ambassador of limp dicks, clogged hearts, sooty lungs, and social filth. And those are my good points.
Though it may be unsayable, stigma can be a wonderful thing. When I was a teenager, smoking was not yet social leprosy. Did you see the chain-smoking Brad Pitt in Fight Club? Exactly. Today, my sinful little love affair invokes pity and scorn.
On the London Underground, I witnessed a troubled man pretzel his bare, encrusted foot into his mouth. He chewed off his manky suppurating toenail and spat it onto the carriage floor. Crickets. Leaving the station, I sparked up a fag. “A vile habit—disgusting,” said a fellow witness to the toenail scene.
I long for the day when gawking at one’s phone like a lobotomy patient invokes derision. Don’t you know your filthy addiction pollutes every atom of our society? You selfish bastard. You perverts should be ashamed of yourselves, etc. That day is on the horizon.
This week, British lawmakers banned smartphones in schools. Those pocket perils are lobotomising those whom sentimentalists call ‘the nation’s future.’ Denied their devil devices, schoolchildren will endure hours of reading, thinking, and writing. Heaven forbid, they’ll talk to their friends and teachers in flesh and blood.
In these matters, I am militant. Children are not vessels of wisdom and wonder corrupted by a cruel world. They’re ignorant. By teaching them how to think and live, adults civilise children. That bleeping burping buzzing beehive in their pockets renders that civilising mission impossible.
Many disagree. But their knee-jerk reaction to this ‘knee-jerk reaction’ crashes against concrete evidence. Smartphones erode concentration, dull critical thinking, blunt memory, and shred retention. The monstrous equation: Smartphones plus face-hugger apps equals ignorant, depressed, anxious youths.
Yes, technology invites moral panic. Plato worried that the written word would mulch minds into mush. But this is serious.
Last year, Dr Vivek Murthy, the United States surgeon general, issued a rare public health advisory. Across 19 pages, Dr Murthy warned that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were ‘not fully understood.’
“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” he said.
And what did we say? Not much. We had more important matters to attend. If I remember correctly, on that very day, Kim Kardashian revealed on Instagram her latest arse or her newest boyfriend.
However, serious people think this is a serious problem. Dr Benjamin Maxwell, a director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by a study linking social media and poor mental health. That “highly stimulating environment” may corrode “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.”
The UN’s education, science, and culture agency says the more young Jack scrolls through TikTok and the like, the lower his grades sink.
Countless studies show smartphones and their face-hugger apps—designed by behavioural psychologists to addict and milk the user—worsen anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Not to mention lining up children for the predation of bullies 24/7.
Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are the canaries in the cultural coalmine. They say HMS Progress is crashing toward the icebergs—rising rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety. To them, the evidence is almost irrefutable. Turn back now, they say, or the ship sinks.
That’s all well and good. But what about the rest of us? Yes, children’s brains are still developing. But we now know that development stretches far beyond sixteen and right into one’s mid-twenties.
Besides that, the radioactive effects of psychically stitching our brains to iPhones don’t magically cease once you step outside the school gates or reach age sixteen.
To be blunt: smartphones are a licence to be an arsehole. Our culture teems with legions of snitching, snivelling permanently outraged traffic wardens. In the palm of their hands sits the great leveller, a device to correct all that nature so cruelly denied them. The result is cultural road rage. Threaded through this theatre of the literal-minded—from cancel culture to outrage culture to Main Character Syndrome—is that device welded to your palm.
Although curmudgeon and hyperbole are my bread and butter, to say smartphones dumb us down hardly warrants a Nobel.
The evidence piles up. Swedish schools are reviving pen and paper. Why? Researchers found their hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing—if learning is your thing.
Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words—the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little.
Other studies claim writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it. If that is not a reflection of our culture of condiments and no food, I don’t know what is.
By prizing the instant and titillating over the mature and measured, digital culture dissolves our critical faculties. Glance at any social media feed for the results.
And yet, you won’t hear that from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. Tech giants sell drugs. Do you know why their products are free? Because you are the product. The longer one tokes on that dopamine crack flute the better. For them, not you.
Like tobacco honchos in decades gone by, their business model is addiction. They know, too, that their products are hazardous to health. At least the tobacco giants could claim the individual knows the risks and harms only himself. Zuckerberg has no such concession or evasion. Smartphones and social media damage everyone’s health.
For the last decade, we’ve carried in our pockets a cultural crack pipe. Our culture has cracked up. Correlation doesn’t always imply causation. True. But put two and two together. For now, two and two still make four.
I whole-heartedly agree. I'm also reading this and commenting on my smartphone, so there it is.
HMS Progress? I don't know maybe I'm flying too high, but in the big scheme of things we are hardly making any. Our "civilization" was never renowned for its ability to nurture critical thinking skills (or, for that matter, for promoting mental health). A few kids would always figure it out but most -- the "masses" -- won't. The ratio appears to be oddly stable across the times and cultures.
"For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it."
Otherwise, what is the issue? That the social media would threaten the stability of the Matrix that holds our societies together? For all we know, the smartphones only make its grip stronger. And its goal (our goal) -- to teach every kid to think for themselves -- remains as elusive as it has been since the beginning of history.