Why are schools being urged to ban smartphones?
Shares in Apple hit an all-time high early this week, a fraction above the previous peak of December 2024 – valuing the firm at not far off $4 trillion. The reason for the jump was better-than-expected sales for the latest iPhone: the 17 series has outsold the 16 in China and the US over its first 10 days of availability. The lure of the smartphone remains as strong as ever, it seems. Why wouldn’t you love a handy computer in your pocket that acts as a phone, camera, sat nav, mini television and everything else in between? But public disquiet over the effects of smartphones on users’ mental health – especially children and adolescents – has become louder than ever, with calls for politicians to make school smartphone bans mandatory, for example, rather than left up to individual headteachers.
Are worries about smartphones well founded?
There’s certainly a long and ignoble history of one generation worrying about the harmful effects of emerging technologies on the next. Plato, for example, famously believed that writing facts down on scrolls would erode pupils’ ability to remember them, since the only true way of imparting knowledge was by face-to-face dialogues. More recently, pedagogues have worried about the emergence of everything from calculators to video games and artificial intelligence. But the case against smartphones is of a different order – incontrovertible and epoch-defining, reckon critics. The advent of the smartphone, widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s, will be remembered as a “watershed in human history”, argues James Marriott in his Substack newsletter.
How so?
Whereas previous entertainment technologies such as cinema or television “were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life”, says Marriott.
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Phones are designed to be “hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait”. Addiction is a design feature, not a bug – and is linked to a dramatic and disturbing collapse in the numbers of adolescents and adults reading books for pleasure. On average, adults spend seven hours a day staring at a screen; for Generation Z, the figure is nine. The advent of smartphones coincided with the start of a decline in global PISA scores (the most authoritative international measure of student ability), while university professors are reporting a “collapse in literacy” that has disturbing implications for the future – for manifold social and economic reasons. We are seeing “not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience”.
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Are smartphones really that bad?
Scrolling social media is certainly addictive, says Rhys Blakely in The Times. The brain’s amygdala-striatal system reinforces behaviour that we find pleasurable, creating the urge for more. Social-media sites resemble an addictive slot machine, says Professor Wouter van den Bos of the University of Amsterdam. “It is the variability in rewards that is so addictive. And as with slot machines, the swiping gives a feeling of agency – it’s as if you’re in control of the feed, even though you are completely manipulated by an algorithm.”
Why are teenagers so susceptible?
Partly, because their brains are not yet fully mature. The prefrontal cortex – a source of self-control that lets adults override the urge for another dopamine hit – develops far more slowly than the impulsive amygdala-striatal circuits. This sequencing of brain development is part of the reason why adolescents take more risks. Adolescents are also far more concerned about social status and what their peers think of them. Social-media platforms gamify and quantify that impulse, via features such as “likes” and Snapchat “streaks” that have a greater effect on teenagers’ mood than on that of adults. “You have to have seen the latest memes, and also be seen responding to all group apps and so on. That means you just have to be online all the time,” says Van den Bos. Teenagers would previously “go home and have a break from these dynamics.
Now it never ends. And their social brain is overheating” – with consequent damaging impacts on educational attainment and mental health.
Is there hard evidence of smartphones' impact on mental health?
One of the largest studies of teenage mental health is being run by researchers at Oxford University, led by John Gallacher, professor of cognitive health. They found that about 60% of 16 to 18-year-olds in the UK spent between two and four hours a day on social-media sites, and that time spent is highly correlated with poor mental health. In the most extreme cases, young people reported they were spending up to eight hours a day using such sites. Girls report more mental-health issues than boys, and the top five most frequently used platforms were Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube.
Are there any other studies on smartphone use?
A widely-cited Norwegian study by Sara Abrahamsson found that a ban on smartphone use in secondary school has a clear positive effect on students’ grades, especially for girls – and also contributed to less bullying. Another, recently concluded study in India – a randomised controlled trial – followed 17,000 higher-education students for three years. It concluded that removing phones from classrooms led to a small but measurable improvement in grades, and that the weakest students benefited most. To date, the evidence is “not overwhelming”, says The Economist. But, on balance, schools that haven’t already introduced bans should certainly consider them. After all, most educational interventions have only a small effect on attainment levels. Scientists can afford to wait for the evidence to improve before issuing a final verdict. Teachers cannot.
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