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The Bottom Line Banning Smartphones Helps. Now Bring Back the Books.

Originally published at Real Clear Education

This summer, several states have proposed banning smartphones in public schools or introducing programs that will limit kids’ phone use during school hours. So far New York, Indiana, Ohio, California, and Oklahoma have proposed bans or restrictions, showing rare bipartisan concern over the issue.

The impetus for this movement came in May when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter to every fellow governor in the United States with a complimentary copy of The Anxious Generation, a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt shows how starting in the early 2010s kids’ mental health steeply declined. The main culprit? The smartphone, which soon became an ensnaring substitute for “real life.”

Gen Z, those born after 1995, were the first to grow up in what Haidt terms a “phone-based world.” This generation spent more time indoors on their phones instead of going outside to play. Now, they’re graduating college and entering the workforce with loads of anxiety to show for it. Phone bans in schools, Haidt writes, are shown to increase test scores, cognitive ability, and deeper interest and engagement in schoolwork. Unless we want the next generation to fare even worse than Gen Z, we need to get the phones out of the schools.

Haidt’s message has clearly resonated with state governors across the nation. But if states start banning the use of these addictive devices in the classrooms, what should replace them? Smartphones have stolen a lot from kids, including genuine learning, but they also replaced a time-tested vehicle for entertainment, learning, and imaginative fun: books!

Reading instills curiosity, openness, and interest in the world like nothing else. When kids actually enjoy reading, they’ll be more interested in learning.

Peter Biles

Although I’m a member of Gen Z, I was fortunate to attend a phone-free school that championed reading. My family also encouraged me to read, so from a young age I found myself immersed in great literature. My friends and I used to race each other to the elementary library to snag the next Harry Potter book. I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the fifth grade, and devoured classics like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before entering junior high. I may have been more bookish than the average kid, but my community encouraged a love of reading that was contagious. Almost everyone got into it when they found a book they liked.

While many people advocate for the educational benefits of reading, I think we also need to view it as a form of imaginative play. Immersion in a fictional world is among life’s most precious joys, and studies have shown that reading for pleasure reduces stress, calms the nervous system, and builds the reader’s ability to sit still and focus for longer periods of time. The antidote to our society’s anxiety crisis is gathering dust on our library shelves! Data also indicates that reading for pleasure gives children better cognitive performance and is correlated with less screen time and deeper, longer sleep patterns.

I got a smartphone when I was around 16. Again, unusual for a Zoomer. But even at that age, my ability to sit and read a book for long periods of time atrophied. I got sucked into the internet vortex and lost some of my former love of reading. It’s taken the better half of a decade to try and recover that childlike delight in reading novels. How much more difficult will it be for a child today who is given a smartphone at age nine and isn’t given a good book to read? At this rate, kids’ attention spans will be so short that they won’t even be able to enjoy watching a full-length movie, let alone read the Hardy Boys or Old Yeller.

As governments step in to limit screen time in schools, parents and teachers should consider this a prompt to fill that void with the written word. Teachers can do this by implementing entire class periods to silent reading, reserving a few minutes a day to read from a book out loud, and working with school libraries to host book fairs, author readings, and literature-themed parties. This would ignite children’s imaginations far more than staring into a screen, or simply doing worksheets, and would stoke a lifelong love of good stories.

In short, this is an opportunity for teachers to really teach. Reading instills curiosity, openness, and interest in the world like nothing else. When kids actually enjoy reading, they’ll be more interested in learning.

Phone-free schools are a good idea. Even better are phone-free schools that are reading-centered. Ideally, more individual schools would take the initiative, avoiding any need for government intervention, but these blanket bans create an opportunity for educators to instill in students a true love of life through reading great literature. If teachers in these phone-free schools can reintroduce the pleasures of reading for its own sake, kids will be more readily open to loving truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they encounter it.

Are you concerned about educating the next generation?
The American Center for Transforming Education is a program of Discovery Institute, a non-profit organization fueled by its supporters. Will you help us advance the timely and vital work of transforming our K-12 education system so that it better serves students and their families?