No, the phone-free school movement is not a moral panic

But a little panic is probably the right response to what Big Tech is doing to our kids

I don’t know of anyone else writing now who covers modern online youth culture from the inside with more regular insight and zeal than Taylor Lorenz (though The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka holds down a similar beat with better writing if less fanboyish enthusiasm). Writing, previously, for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and now as a free agent with her own shingle on Substack, Lorenz is a top-tier anthropologist of the extremely online, reporting straight from the trenches where TikTok trends arise and die like mayflies on speed, memes birthed in the web’s most repellent corners tip national elections, fact-free conspiracy theories rampage across the social media landscape, and baby-faced influencers battle like sumo wrestlers in Dior.

But for all her extremely online bona fides — and likely because of them — Lorenz appears to harbor a deep grudge against anyone who suggests kids are better off in school without the myriad distractions of a smartphone. Lorenz is a sharp-eyed cultural critic, but, bewilderingly, she misses what’s obvious to all but the most terminally online: it’s not healthy for kids to spend their school hours attempting to lurch back and forth between deep, focused learning, and an endless stream of texts, TikToks, DMs, and silent notifications, torn between attention-demanding classroom activities and dopamine-driven distractions that fracture their attention and assail them with reasons to pick up their phone just for a moment. Expecting teen-aged students, through sheer force of will, to resist the implacable social pressures and deliberate technological design of online tools that are carefully crafted to be addictive and unputdownable, while also applying themselves to focused, attentive learning is preposterous on its face. Yet Lorenz is insistent that phones are not only not problematic for kids during classtime but necessary.

Until recently, teachers and school administrators had to police the use of smartphones in classrooms themselves, a thankless and Sisyphean task

In a recent issue of her semi-weekly newsletter User Mag, Lorenz railed against school phone bans, savaging them as a pointless “crusade” and a “moral panic.” Her position goes back to first principles, dismissing the foundational assumptions these bans are predicated upon. “Reactionary hacks,” she writes, “have been pushing the false narrative that social media and smartphones are leading to declining literacy and mental health problems. It’s false.”

(Can we all agree that when you refer to anyone whose opinion you don’t share as a “reactionary hack,” it’s a red flag that you are perhaps a little too emotionally invested not in your reporting but in your position?)

The empirical evidence Lorenz’s provides for her argument against phone-free schools, and the social and pedagogical problems they are meant to mitigate, such as it is, rests on slight scaffolding. She self-references her own podcast, a Wired op-ed from a Portland schoolteacher, a parent opposed to such bans, and a Medium article from an educator. She also relies heavily on a single academic, Christopher J. Ferguson at Stetson University in Florida, much cited by those opposed to relieving students of these weapons of mass distraction while at school.

Ferguson is no crank or hack himself (though several years ago he resigned from the American Psychological Association for reasons relating to “political bias;” interpret that as you will). Still, he’s published extensive peer-reviewed research on the links between real-world violence and videogame violence (abstract: diddlysquat). More recently he has made something of an academic cottage industry out of refuting any causal links between smartphones or social media and mental illness in young adults. The skyrocketing rates of teen self-harm, suicide, depression and anxiety that began a hockey-stick-shaped climb in every developed country in the world around 2012, is, according to Ferguson’s research, purely coincidental with the fact that 2012 is exactly the moment when smartphones, social media apps, and front-facing cameras landed in the hands of teens in all these countries. They are more likely a result, he suggests, of “fatherlessness,” income inequality, and political partisanship. So says the data, in his view.

A new kids “play place” in a McDonalds: two chairs and two wall-mounted touchscreens.

Ferguson is dismissive of the countervailing scientific research behind the phone-free phone movement (“Cellphone bans were never based in good science,” he’s written), and he favors pithy sound bites like “opinions will change once the old people die.” One wonders what Ferguson would make of former old persons Neil Postman, George Orwell, Marshall McLuhan, and Aldus Huxley, whose decades-old ideas about the infantilizing and degrading impact of technology on politics, news, history, education and other aspects of the informational culture have proved remarkably prescient in the age of Trump and the new populism.

A favorite target of Lorenz is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of last year’s paradigm-shifting bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt is one of the most respected and recognized authorities in the world on the link between smartphones, social media, and the very real global teen mental health crisis. There’s nothing remotely reactionary or hackish about him. His book, and his regular writing on the subject, are grounded in carefully considered scientific research and experimental studies, all regularly updated at his superbly sourced Substack newsletter After Babel. There, he also brings in Gen Z contributors regularly to write from a firsthand perspective about the reality of living their entire life through a screen.

Haidt and Ferguson both have credible and reasonable arguments for and against phone-free schools, though I (and by all accounts most of the rest of the book-reading world) find Haidt’s position a good deal more persuasive. More on why that is in a moment.

I won’t get into a deep examination of the science behind both positions here, as there are resources that do that far better and with more interest than me. Suffice to say that much of the disagreement comes down to often highly esoteric details of scientific methodology: sample sizes, selection criteria, statistical significance, confidence intervals, meta analyses, the difficulty of separating causation from correlation, and the natural disinclination by scientists to embrace one-factor explanations for complex social phenomena. Intelligent and well-meaning scientists can and do debate the relevance of these factors to what we’ve all been seeing for the past 15 or so years.

Lorenz is right to state that history is filled with moral panics that massively overstated the actual threat to people. But here’s the thing: nearly every moral panic we’ve ever seen has been a case of parents, do-gooders, and politicians freaking out about something — reefer, Dungeons & Dragons, trans people— with which they themselves have little or no firsthand experience.

But as it happens, a little personal experience with a thing goes a long way. In the design world in which I work, we call this Walk-A-Mile Immersion. Abstract quantitative data can tell us a lot about what is happening and what people do, but it’s terrible at telling us why. For that, we need to understand at close range the lived experiences of the people affected. This is a big part of why the design field of User Experience UX has exploded over the last decade. There is no substitute for understanding, and designing for, people’s actual behavior and latent goals and frustrations and DIY workarounds — things statistics and data analysis will never reveal, no matter how impressive the confidence interval or sample size. I could, for example, parse the national data regarding pedestrian deaths on U.S. highways all day long. But if I want to really understand what’s going on, I also need to stand there in the bright midday sun and watch pedestrians struggle to get from one side of a six-lane highway at rush hour to the other while holding a shopping bag in one hand and a toddler in the other as screen-distracted drivers in two-meter-high Ford F150s try to beat the red light. And this is exactly the kind of thing good designers — and good anthropologists — do.

“There is no substitute for understanding, and designing for, people’s actual behavior — things statistics and data analysis will never reveal.”

The problem with calling concerns over smartphones in schools a substanceless and temporary moral panic is that you and I and most parents in the developed world — indeed, virtually every living person — knows exactly what it feels like to be captured by these devices and apps. As fully grown adults, we struggle hour to hour and day to day with many of the very same debilitating effects that Haidt and so many millions of others (including schoolchildren) are calling out. We are intimately familiar with the frustration of trying to focus on reading or writing something, anything, for more than a few minutes without finding our attention pulled elsewhere. We’ve all struggled not to look at our phones while someone else is speaking to us; to recall a simple fact when we can so easily Google it; to resist the ineluctable conforming pressures of social media; to critically assess what we read online for signs of utter bullshit (though many of us seem not to care anymore). We are all unconscious experts in switching from tab to tab on our computers an average of every 19 seconds; every one us of can practically taste the rush of dopamine that accompanies a notifying ping or a crimson dot (you think it’s an accident they’re always red?) telling us that something on my phone needs my attention right now. You and I and most internet-using adults we know are intimately familiar with the feeling of being inundated by images and messages that make us feel not attractive enough, funny enough, smart enough, successful enough, curvy enough, thin enough, ripped enough, productive enough, hardworking enough, rich enough. We’ve watched in despair as our social media posts languish without likes or comments too many times to count; we’ve all emerged from a “quick peek” into the feed an hour later wondering what the hell just happened to our brains, 60 minutes we will never get back, knowing we will do it again and again and again.

Prohibiting the use of smartphones during classtime is overwhelmingly popular in the U.S. across all ages and groups — in no small part because adults live this problem themselves every day

And yet we’re expected to believe that kids in primary and secondary school are immune to all this? That ignoring this tsunami of turmoil is somehow easy for a 13-year-old whose brain is quite literally still developing, who’s under unimaginable pressure to be liked and popular and to make the right friends, who’s going through the nightmare of puberty, who knows almost nothing about the world or adulthood, who’s constantly hearing they won’t be able to buy a home or afford a college degree or land the algorithmically perfect partner, a hopeful future professional for whom “influencer” now strikes millions as the only job that’s accessible to them?

The anecdotal data that’s coming in from the classrooms and schools where smartphones have been banished is so far overwhelmingly positive. And not just in the dozen or so U.S. states experimenting with it (several of which are impressed enough with the results so far to double down) but globally. In the past year, the number of such initiatives has boomed — in Canada, Brazil, several European countries, and elsewhere. South Australia is seeing “remarkable results” after a year of removing smartphones from classrooms — and this according to the students themselves. Teachers, too, are over the moon for the change.

Conversely, as Ted Gioia observed last week, in schools where students still have free and unimpeded access to smartphones at all times, teachers are struggling, and they’re increasingly speaking up about how difficult it is to teach the “apathetic,” “vacant” “zombie students” in their classrooms who seem not to care about anything but getting to the next dopamine fix.

In the meantime, Lorenz isn’t even pretending to hope that things improve in phone-free schools. For someone who is essentially an anthropologist, Lorenz seems to have no problem setting aside observational evidence from the field and embracing the number crunchers and quants who see only data and statistics instead of the nuances of real human behavior.

Nearly a century ago the author Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In the very same newsletter in which Lorenz rails against what she calls the “false narrative” that online technologies are leading to youth mental health problems, she links to a new fashion trend among Gen Z they’re calling “Y3K.” In short, kids are dressing like the world is ending. What, one imagines, could possibly have inspired such a thing?

“Banning cell phones in school isn’t the answer,” Lorenz writes in her essay. Fine — and here she and I agree that banning smartphones in schools is certainly downstream of the real problem — but if she’s right, to what supposedly nonexistent problem is it not the answer?

The Zeitgeist Watch

• The appeal of smartphones continues to slip, as “dumbphones” mount a lowkey and notification-free comeback. It’s become clear, for example, that screen time reports won’t help you put your phone down; but making your phone boring very well might. August Lamm, writing at The New York Times, gets it: he gave up his smartphone for a dumbphone, and finds it a lot less inconvenient than the alternative.

• Zalpha dumbphone creator AJ Rice (who I happen to know) has been living for nine months without a smartphone, using instead an early version of the featureless phone he developed himself. So far, the pros are outweiging the cons: “I rarely look at my phone, and the decreased distraction instantly made me a better listener. I frequently talk to people in elevators and while waiting in line. I go for more walks, I sleep more, and I read more books. I look up at the world around me, and I am increasingly hyper-aware of how often everyone else is on their phone.”

• Many women who spend hours each day staring at their own faces online find it has made them unrecognizable to themselves, a Lynchian symptom of “body dysmorphia” that destroys their confidence and self-esteem, no matter how objectively attractive they may be. Meanwhile, many of those ditching their smartphones are reporting their perception of beauty and body image is improving as a result.

• What we lose when our memories exist entirely in our phones. (Maybe this is part of why travelers across the globe are putting away their smartphones and taking up urban sketching instead?)

• It Is As If You Were on Your Phone is an “almost speculative” game about an incredibly near future in which we’re all simultaneously under significant pressure to be on our phones all the time, but also to not be on our phones all the time. Meta and thought-provoking.

• Gen Z is getting awfully tired of chasing TikTok trends whose half-lives are getting shorter and shorter. “The prevalence and pure amount of microtrends has made it impossible to understand or participate,” says one.

• They’re also giving up on romance as brokered by dating apps, often finding themselves settling, unhappily, for “situationships” lacking in real intimacy instead.

• A startling essay in the Financial Times on the international decline in the ability to read, reason, focus, and learn new things that began trending upward for both teens and adults in the early 2010s. No doubt due to “fatherlessness” (see above).

• A quiet movement of soon-to-be parents are concealing their pregnancies from the internet, and sharing strategies for delaying the announcement.

• Writing at Dazed, Thom Waite says what we’re all kinda feeling right now: social media is in a death spiral. So what comes next? Maybe a project called Free Our Feeds will save us? The new initiative, backed by technology advocates and celebrities (um…), hopes to create a new social media ecosystem that’s “resistant to billionaire influence.”

• I’m a fan of the superb work Harvard historian and Analog Social founder

  Shae O.
  is doing to revive the lost tradition of the salon by creating intentionally tech-free spaces for people. She breaks down her thinking around the need to reclaim in-person connection in a digital world in a new podcast interview at Misguided.

• CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson talks about the importance of reading in a tech-obsessed world where the majority of Americans now admit to not reading a single book in a year.

• Big welcome energy to Trumplessness, a newsletter designed to deliver a weekly set of Trump-free news links. Reading the ‘About’ page here was like meeting a mind reader.

• Finally, members of the Norwegian ski jumping team were caught secretly altering their ski suits in small ways against FIS rules. When confronted with the evidence, the head coach responded: “We regret it like dogs, and I’m terribly sorry that this happened. I don’t really have anything else to say other than that we got carried away in our bubble.” I want to hug this man and his lightly altered ski suit for reminding us what actual leadership, masculinity, and personal responsibility look like.