School’s Cell Phone Use Policies Must Change

In the world of high school and beyond, teachers seem to think that confiscation or punishment for frivolous activities will lead to an actual lessening of action. Yet, from policy study after policy study, we see that more laws only makes more outlaws; more rules are only followed by more rules broken. Especially in the foreign language department, the use of computers or phones is frowned upon, and teachers (likely for personal reasons) think that the cause of inattentiveness is the symptom.

Yet, in the real institutes of higher education, the Anglophone colleges we aspire entrance to, there is no penalty, no disturbance, no action against the use of mobile devices. For professors at university, including my father, the use of mobiles is more of an annoyance rather than a major issue. There is a loss of the student who is distracted, a loss of grade and a loss of knowledge. In these places, people recognize that it is impossible for someone unwilling to pay attention in class to become so without the threat or use of physical coercion.

If a class is boring, it is the responsibility of the teacher to make it not so rather than the responsibility of the student to drudge his/her way though it. People without motivation or without academic ethic cannot be reasonably expected to suddenly change their ways without such petty action. Examining the causes of inattentiveness, there are effectively two—the first a calculated move to ignore material already known or easily learnt and the second as a disdain for the course material altogether. Foreign language as a subject is mostly the rout memorization of grammar rules and vocabularies. English is mostly the creative thought of new theories, which also happen to be unable to be proven or tested, but it is still a sense of creativity. Science, in a non-graduate setting, is also the learning of theories, but that theoretical basis is of use in the future. Most science experiments are ‘canned experiments,’ in which the result of such is already known, not a great point towards the discovery of new knowledge. These are not the classes of dreams.

Teachers in some classes have a more liberal policy than others. My freshmen biology teacher allowed us to use our phones, though only a few, as she was confident that the phones were used to investigate (usually on Wikipedia) material relevant to class. Many other teachers make no such distinction. My sophomore Spanish teacher made that distinction, as she allowed me to use my phone to memorize vocabulary on Quizlet.

In fact, for foreign language, I have noticed that the online language tutor, Duolingo, is a more effective curriculum than the school’s McDougall and Holt textbooks. Duolingo focuses more on the conjugation of verbs, written translation, and oral recognition. This curriculum is more focused and, for me, more efficient than the wide-ranging, generally useless vocabulary topics taught in school textbooks. School though, active ignores and repudiates external help, such as Duolingo.

However it is, we must respect the freedom of people to speak just as much as we respect the freedom to not-speak, to not pay attention. As there is no real way of convincing a person to join in other than outright force or improving the classroom environment, band-aid solutions like taking their mobile phones will do nothing but foster a sense of resentment. It is as if there was a force of nature which leads people towards the most interesting, the most stimulating, to satisfy the curiosity of the mind. As Sir Ken Robinson says, we live in the most stimulating era in all of human history, where knowledge is transient, something which is rewritten and transmitted at speeds faster than humanity can comprehend. And now exists an “Information Age” which compiles all of human knowledge into a new accessible and dynamic form.

Yet, while schools have their place in this new era of information, we must also recognize that the expansion of knowledge by way of a lecture is generally uninteresting and moderately boring. But if people are not willing to participate, such is their right and such is their detriment. Yet, an examination of how people have viewed the Internet shows a level of hypocrisy and tells me that we have not yet come to terms on its far-reaching influence. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Internet was viewed as a new invention, which would revolutionize humanity. People dreamed of a new society, one untouched by the physical world, where all people could speak freely without the straightjacket of degrees, money, or power. The rise of information networking also posed a new opportunity to educators, an opportunity for new horizons in teaching and in transmitting the knowledge we have today. Yet, as we pass into the second decade of information technology, everyone seems to want it both ways. We want to be able to express opinions and learn the previously unknowable, yet also want the Internet to be a censored and filtered place where the truth stands alone, opinions are given by those with degrees, and societal interactions are looked down upon as cheating.

People allege that the right of teachers is to maintain a safe and effective learning environment, but if we are to call an allusion to the common practice of doodling or even daydreaming, nobody has an objection or negative association at all. It is a virtue of the mobile computer’s new status and widespread use that people blame it for all of society’s flaws. In an earlier time, I am willing to bet that the invention of writing would have been an impetus for similar resentment among the educating class—distracting away from the Socratic seminars of Ancient Greece. In fact, that sentiment is echoed in the schools of Ancient Egypt, where it was alleged that writing would lead to nobody ever remembering anything. However it is, people’s right to not pay attention, no matter how self-defeating it may be, should be respected, as sadly, those which refuse to learn will never learn anyway.