National Phone Bans in School Are a Bad Idea
They fail to get to the root of the problem and may cause more harm than good
Strict phone bans in schools are sweeping the world. And it’s not only at the school level. Most recently, South Korea outlawed the use of smartphones during class. That means they’ve now joined France, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and China.
This is a backsliding of student rights in South Korea and around the world. Prior to this change, South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission said that phone confiscation actually violates student rights. While it’s not the most extreme violation, it leaves me asking why — what’s the point of this? Is this for some noble purpose? Viewing school as mostly signaling and the median person’s preferred alternative to teenage work, it just seems needless and cruel.
Ethically, teens are not non-entities, their desires must be consulted as much as those of 20-60 year old workers in any setting. There are workplaces with phone restrictions, but no national laws banning phones in all workplaces, except maybe in North Korea. Students should have the right either to not go to school, and work instead, if that is what is best for them, or to attend a school that is most fitting to their own traits, insofar as such a school will naturally exist in a world without poorly thought out bans that try to force a one-size-fits-all status quo. In this case, schools without blanket phone bans are currently widespread, and therefore will be around as long as no national phone ban is in place.
Ethically, phone bans are dubious. Even if they “worked”, that would just mean they improve test scores. Test scores aren’t identical with the good, beautiful, and true. But empirically, they don’t fare much better. The evidence that phone bans do anything at all is mixed. While banning girls specifically from some apps like Instagram, particularly when they are being bullied or experiencing jealousy, might improve mental health slightly, on average the effects are close to nil and can actually be negative. For example, males and some girls might use phones for entertainment and to talk to their friends. Banning young men from phones leads to boredom and increased isolation from their preferred companions. Obviously this could have negative effects on young male happiness and mental health. People forget that there’s often variation in how individuals respond to interventions. Everyone is obsessed with the LATE, which looks more or less null, that they forget LATE means: local average treatment effect. There’s evidence in this case of significant effect heterogeneity, which should imply restricting phones on a case-by-case basis, instead of using a blanket ban.
When I was in high school, teachers had discretion and would generally make poorer students get off their phone. I never saw any issue with phone overuse, even though we had the same apps (I graduated 5 years ago). In fact I’ve learned it’s a trend among junior high students to shout the number “67” for some reason. When I was in junior high we had the exact same trend except it was “21”. So even the memes are very similar. Why is it a special issue now?
I’ve been reading about moral panics, as phones seem to be one. Any time something harms females under 20, there’s a moral panic over that thing. Moral panics are basically identical to middle aged women worrying about their daughters with feminist men giving them license, without paying attention to whether it’s all just hysteria or not. In moral panics, grifters called moral entrepreneurs play the key role of riling up the masses. In this case the leading moral entrepreneur might be Jonathan Haidt. A superficial theory might say that Jonathan Haidt and friends made phones a special issue now.
But it can’t be all reduced to the top-down acts of moral entrepreneurs. Grifters have to find fertile ground — in fact they are really doing the masses a service, which is why they are compensated with status and sometimes money. So is the ground more fertile now than 5 to 10 years ago?
Maybe. It does seem like teens are more addicted to phones today than 5 to 10 years ago. I still know a lot of people that age and they are on their phones all the time, specifically on TikTok which is where you find all of the junior high and high school fads. It may be reducable to just a TikTok issue, specifically an issue with a cutting edge, addictive algorithm. And there may be an age interaction, because I use TikTok occassionally but it is really not addictive to me. However it seems that there is also a sex effect where females are more addicted to it, consistent with the observation that girl issues cause more impactful moral panics. Sometimes boy’s issues generate discussion, for example violent video games and rock & roll panic, but they never result in policies and legal action, while girl’s issues often result in legal violence. It’s possible there is both an age effect and sex effect related to neoteny; teens are more neotenous than 20-somethings and older groups, while females are more neotenous than males within an age group. TikTok may be more appealing to more neotenous minds for some reason.
There is some evidence that TikTok’s 2020s algorithm is novel. One report says people spend twice the time on it as competitor Instagram, and that TikTok is the most used and most addictive app in the world right now. Personally if I had to restrict a teenager’s phone usage, I would probably just limit time spent on Tiktok and competitors instead of taking the whole phone. Why can’t schools do this?
It would be more consistent with mainstream democratic ideals. Students hate blanket phone bans. I ran a 319 person survey of 18-20 year olds and asked them, as recent high school students, if they thought the new heavy-handed phone bans were good. Here’s how they responded: