Across North Carolina, students are gathering their school supplies for the coming school year. Teachers are organizing their classrooms, and families are trying to squeeze out a last long weekend at the beach or the mountains. Excitement rules and both students and teachers look forward to seeing each other after a summer break, and—like it or not—socializing is a big part of being in school.
Decades later, I still remember the embarrassment of being reprimanded by a teacher for passing a note to a friend. I have not heard of that happening in years. Today’s students text each other, even if they sit across from each other in class. They are fully digitized and likely cannot imagine passing a contraband note.
School systems have noticed all the chirping and pinging, eyes glued to cell phones in laps and online bullying, and many are beginning to regulate various digital tools in classrooms. The New York Times reports that at least 8 states now limit cell phones in school. In North Carolina, Winston Salem and Forsyth County schools recently banned cell phone use during the school day, allowing use by high school students only during their lunch break.
Such policies sound both practical and reasonable so why not implement them in all school systems, including Cumberland County?
Like everything else in the digital era, it is complicated.
First, technology moves faster than school boards or legislators can make policy, and sometimes even understand what the new technologies are and what they do. Students are on to the next technology, such as artificial intelligence or AI, before many adults even know it exists, much less how it works and how to deal with it.
Secondly, we as a nation have mixed feelings about all digital communications, including cell phones. We love the convenience of them, so much so that most of us, including this writer, no longer have a landline, only a cell phone. Parents and students want, and sometimes actually need, to communicate with each other during the school day, and cell phones make that easy and private. In addition, some students do not have access to tools such as tablets and laptops and use their cell phones for schoolwork. And, in this era in which Americans have apparently decided that it is OK for even teenagers to possess military-style assault weapons, some argue that student use of cell phones can be a safety measure.
At the same time, digital communications of all sorts can have serious negative effects on mental health, especially for young people who are digitally bullied or those who have been abused by others through AI technology. Such digital behavior has resulted in youth suicides, and no one wants that.
So, what to do about this very 21st-century problem?
Increasingly, there are calls for developers of these complex digital devices and social media and AI platforms to build in “stoppers” of some sort to prevent misuse of technologies that did not exist on a commercial scale even a few years ago. Calls are also coming for both educators and students to learn not only about the capabilities of powerful technologies but about their very real dangers and how to use them responsibly.
The best description of all this I have read comes from the New York Times Education Reporter Natasha Singer, who described this complex school situation this way.
“Essentially, some say, we should follow the model of another program that has for many decades taught young people how to handle powerful machines without harming themselves or others: It’s called drivers’ ed.”