Are Phone-Free Schools Just A Ploy To Keep Kids From The "Truth"?

As all this happens, there are plenty of countercultural individuals and activists, campaigning against children and young teens from having access to social media, for families discouraging screen time in the early years, and delaying smartphones in their households.

Outside of legislative and activist circles, some of the most political decisions have been personal: a radical decision to opt out. Teens are going to their cellphone provider asking to downgrade their phone plan to a flip phone. Others take extended absences from social media or deactivate their accounts altogether. Trends continue to circulate online (perhaps ironically) about cultivating a 90s/early 2000s lifestyle by getting offline, going analog, reviving old aesthetics, and leading a more intentional, slower life. 

We’ve reached an odd cultural point where, as tech advances more rapidly and significantly, the greater the backlash and the more inspired the youth are to fight back by opting out. Anti-AI sentiment is reaching an all-time high. We’ve already developed slurs for robots, social criticism for people using ChatGPT is ramping up, and even AI-generated videos themselves seem to be calling out for a return to the past. An AI-generated video of people living in the 80s beckoning for the dwellers of our dystopian present of 2025 to “come back to the 80s” has spread online, giving off eerie vibes and sinister implications.

Concerns about smartphone addiction and its effect on kids’ developing brains have gained enough traction and supportive research to push schools from half-measures into outright bans. A viral video, purportedly taken from Hunters Lane High School, began circulating on social media last week, showing students using Yondr pouches (patented technology created to help enforce phone-free spaces) to retrieve their phones, which remain locked throughout the school day. Here’s how they work: phones are placed in the pouches, which contain a locking mechanism. Students remain in possession of their phone, but are unable to use it throughout the day until they step outside the phone-free zone and tap their pouch on an unlocking base.

While debates rage over how damaging social media and screen time are to not just children but all of our brains, there have been optimistic attempts to push back. Organizations like Wait Until 8th encourage parents to pledge to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 8th grade. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has gone further, proposing “Four New Norms” to free the anxious generation: give kids only basic phones without internet until age 14, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence and free play in the real world. 

According to The New York Times, 37 states have banned cell phones and other internet-connected devices during class as of this summer, with half of those states plus D.C. restricting phones all day, from “bell-to-bell.” To some, these movements are reactionary moral panics. To others, they’re a last-ditch effort to rescue children from the algorithm (and by all research accounts, that damage is very real). Internet journalist and author of Extremely Online, Taylor Lorenz, falls firmly in the former camp. Though she’s long been dismissing these concerns as little more than generational hysteria, she’s now taking it a step further. 

Rather than accusing people advocating for common-sense tech policy as concerned parents, she thinks phone-free schools are a sinister plot to “cut young people off from the internet and open information.” While she claims “it’s fine and great to have a no phone policy during class, that’s not what these school-wide bans are about.” What are they about, then? Mind control? According to Lorenz, yes, and not just for children, but for everyone. "First, they came for my six-year-old’s phone, and I did not speak out, because I was not a six-year-old. Then they came for my phone. And there was no one left to speak out for me.” That’s how I imagine Lorenz’s delusions of grandeur are playing out in her head. 

Lorenz went on a passionate tirade about how the government is angling to ban phones for everyone, everywhere, because schools are resorting to full bans around the country during school hours; a policy that has been the norm since the mass adoption of smartphones began. The only difference now is that, despite phone use during class being against school policy, students are unwilling to give it up or put it away, inventing new excuses or outright ignoring their teachers, and it’s showing in student performance, attention deficits, mental health problems, and even behavioral problems. 

Power struggles over phones have arisen due to inconsistent enforcement of half-measures in schools that don’t take a hard-line stance against phone use. This has led some teachers to quit, as they become increasingly frustrated with the futility of discouraging, confiscating, and arguing with students about phone use. Lorenz doesn’t believe any of that—insisting that phones are not just a right, but a moral good and net positive for children’s mental health, despite the evidence pointing to the contrary (that’s pseudoscience, according to Lorenz). 

She also characterizes phones as communication tools and word processors. She warns that these bans will “harm the most marginalized kids” because rich kids still have laptops and computers in schools. For underprivileged kids, their phones are their only word processor, she claims, as if schools don’t provide access to laptops or computers, or that a family who can afford an iPhone has no reasonable access to a computer.

Lorenz began firing off histrionic tweets and getting into amusing spats with anyone even slightly skeptical that phones are doing anything but distract students when they should be learning. In a particularly amusing exchange, she insisted students are using their phones to “check sources” and that we should be concerned about the potential for kids to slip into a dreaded pitfall of media illiteracy which will cause them to be swayed by PragerU videos and, after a decade of consuming that kind of content, they’ll go out and vote. Did I mention this was all over the innocuous locking of students’ phones during school hours to help improve student performance and wellbeing? The concept of Zoomers falling over themselves between lectures to check their sources from NPR articles... forgive me if I’m skeptical.

In case anyone would like to know how banning cell phones during school hours is actually going, it’s been a resounding success. After implementing a phone-free school policy at North Adams school district in Massachusetts, they saw a 75% drop in referrals in the last quarter of the 2024 school year compared to the same quarter the previous year, which the school’s superintendent, Tim Callahan, says is “almost completely attributable to the cellphone ban and pouches.” Callahan reports huge reductions in students skipping class, roughhousing, fighting, and being out of class without permission. Teachers say that now that they don’t have a phone vying for their constant attention, they’re more focused, so they can get through material quicker and assign more long-term assignments.

The results aren't isolated, either. According to Education Week, 19 states have laws or policies that ban or restrict the use of cellphones by students in schools at the state or local district level. Administrators are reporting reduced cellphone infractions and disciplinary issues all over. Even the students and parents are getting on board. The Bentonville district in Arkansas tested a cellphone ban in one of its high schools in 2023, and 86% of teachers surveyed perceived an improvement in student engagement, 75% saw increased socialization within the classroom, 57% reduction in verbal and physical aggression, and even a 51% decrease in drug-related offenses. The resounding success led to a districtwide policy ban. 

At Indian River County School District in Florida, Superintendent David Moore recalls the nightmare that was the environment pre-cellphone ban. "Students would cyberbully each other, take teachers' pictures without permission, and manipulate those images by putting their heads on a different body." It’s hardly the picture of “harmless source searching and word processing” that Lorenz insisted were what students needed their phones for. 

By all accounts, smartphones and social media are causing demonstrable harm to our children’s brains, socialization, and learning abilities. But even so, we’re not even talking about national policy, age restrictions for social media, or anything like that. This is supposed to be a softball, easy-to-agree-upon, unanimous decision: phones don’t belong in classrooms, especially given the declining literacy rates and math skills among American students. If we weren’t currently in a war with cognition, if American kids weren’t slipping behind in standardized tests, if teachers could actually get a handle on them, kids might be more entitled to freedom, to the benefit of the doubt. But their brain chemistry is literally on the line.

If these kids were to see a performance in the theater, they’d have to turn their cellphones off. Think of the school day as being akin to going to the theater, only much more important. And in terms of the rebuttal that kids need to “just focus,” how well is that going for adults? This caused people to wonder what stake Lorenz had in defending kids’ right to cellphone use so passionately. 

Amongst all the memes, an actual conflict of interest allegation arose. Lorenz had done promo content for Bark, a digital safety company offering monitoring software and child-friendly phones for kids aged six to fifteen that limit apps, screen time, and exposure to harmful content. This prompted shill accusations, to which Lorenz rebutted that she wasn’t even paid for the promotion, though she did suddenly delete a number of her tweets and evidence of her Bark promotion from social media after the TikTok was labeled as a “paid promotion.”

In Lorenz's defense, she's been throwing her whole back into defending kids’ right to phones in schools for a while now. It’s kind of her thing. She recently put out a podcast with Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, president of education media company Mrs. Wordsmith, where the two argued not only that phones should stay in schools, but that they should be more integrated into the classroom so kids don’t “fall behind” in tech skills or lose access to assistive tools that might make them more “productive” later in life.

Lorenz paints parents who support bans as selfish upper-middle-class white families who “can’t conceptualize” that people use their phones in different ways. For instance, waking up at 5 a.m. to work a shift and then needing their device at school to juggle homework or stay connected. 

Brandon chimes in with what he seems to believe is a devastating blow to the anti-phone lobby: that for many students, their phone is their calculator. When I was in school, I recall my math teacher constantly refusing to let us use calculators because “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” She turned out to be wrong about the latter part, but the principle remains the same: understanding how to do the math yourself mattered more than convenience.

From there, Brandon doubles down: phones are also word processors, synonym finders, citation tools, and even creative platforms for music or video editing. Some kids, he argues, are isolated and need their phones to find community with peers elsewhere. If anything, he argues, “We should be figuring out more ways to get access to kids, not figuring out ways to take it away.”

Maybe your kid plays “educational games” for dyslexia, maybe they’re using a calendar app to juggle after-school activities, maybe a translation tool helps them make friends. These are the anecdotes he trots out as proof that banning phones would somehow rob the “most vulnerable kids” of vital tools. Meanwhile, the actual issue is staring us in the face: social media addiction, constant distraction, and parents undermining teachers by texting kids throughout the school day, sometimes even pulling them out of class the moment they text, “I’m bored,” to go grab food or go shopping. 

Kids are free to use their phones outside of school. If a student genuinely needs one for a special circumstance, accommodations can be made, just as they already are for special needs, medical conditions, or language services. But otherwise, they’ll have to relearn some basics: how to do math without a calculator, how to turn in homework on time, how to actually socialize with the people around them, and how to be present in the room they’re in. 

I understand the teenage instinct to view these bans as oppressive (though many are surprisingly responding positively to them). In reality, though, they’re restoring what’s become the most endangered resource for young people: attention, presence, focus. If only they knew that most of us adults fantasize about an institution with some authority over our lives ripping our phones from our hands, so we could start being tied to the here and now.

This policy is intuitive and unobjectionable. No lesson, no matter how engaging, can compete with the infinite-scroll slot machine in your kid’s pocket. The compulsion to check the next notification is so tempting that people can’t resist checking it while they’re driving with other people in the car, let alone stuck in learning prison for eight hours a day.