Phones in School: Friend or Foe?

I believe that phones for students at school should only be allowed under specific circumstances.

In Edinburgh, Scotland, students are now required to lock away phones during school, and so far the impact has been positive. The overall impact was called “broadly successful”. However, I believe that phones in school should be allowed as long as what students do on their phone is under control.

Phones are a very recent invention and, so the issue kids having them especially at school is a relatively new one. There have been several other phone bans in recent history. In a similar situation, Australia banned social media for kids under 16.

Phones can help students with nearly anything, but that includes activities that students shouldn’t be doing or participating in. But, if I were in a situation where I had to choose whether or not they were allowed at school, I would say yes – but under special and particular circumstances. Only specific apps and websites would be unblocked, and you would only be allowed to have them out during specific periods of time, for research only.

However, no solution is perfect. Phones have access to a huge amount of information, much of which is not to be accessed during school. Students having phones would give a school two choices: giving each individual parent a list of the hundreds of thousands of websites to be blocked and forcing parents to block all of them. Another choice is buying phones for every student, and have them connected to the district rather than parents, which would mean getting enough funding for phones for every student.

Many would see this as reasoning to not allow students to have access for phones, but if this policy were blocked, it would just replace the conflict with another: students might just bring phones in secret, and most things wouldn’t be blocked because parents and people in the district would be under the assumption that there would not be phones at school, so students could cheat, and then some parents might sue schools for giving their kids inaccurate grades, which would result in the same problems, except there would now be both problems: headache and cost, and it would be on both sides. Overall, I believe that phones should be allowed at school under the right circumstances.

If you are a school administrator, I ask that you allow phones for students at school under the circumstances that particular apps and websites are blocked.