In Ontario, there is now a ban on cell phones in the classroom. To be clear, I am not against actual teachers banning phones from their classroom. At this point, school is definitely a place where you can teach where it is, and isn’t, appropriate to use your phone. Luckily, schools are full of professionals whose actual job involves teaching young people all sorts of things in a wide variety of subjects, and they’re the ones who need to make that call.
The problem I have with the ban is not the idea of excluding cell phones from a classroom. Instead, the problem I have with it is an entirely different one, and something that extends far beyond this specific rule – a lack of respect for the teachers themselves.
That’s the problem that Ontario specifically has had with a lot of education rulings, whether it’s a good idea or not, they’re founded in a basic mistrust and lack of respect for teachers.
Now, in a lot of cases, having a phone out in class will also indicate a lack of respect for teachers, from the other directions. If kids are not paying attention in class, that’s a lack of respect for the teacher in charge, and that is sometimes compounded by the existence of a perpetual distraction that a phone can bring.
That said, there are a lot of situations where breaking out the phone, or some other technology, is going to be relevant for the class being taught. A phone could be handy in a social studies course, perhaps in an art course for looking up a reference image. There are situations where a common technology can be relevant for the class you’re teaching. There are also situations where kids need to know that having a phone out is extremely inappropriate, and maybe if they’re chastised by a person with the respect of the class they’ll keep it off in a theatre, for example.
I also trust the people actually teaching the class to make the call on whether or not a cell phone is welcome in their classroom. Teachers know how to do their jobs. They work hard to teach the kids that material. What a blanket rule like this does is tell them that their government doesn’t trust them to do their job properly.
The worrying thing for students is that at a certain point, there are going to be knock on effects. Good teachers might leave for a province where they have some respect. It might be more difficult to handle contract negotiations when they inevitably come up – the poor relationship could make a teacher’s strike more likely, for example. It could be more difficult to recruit people to join the education system.
Which is why I’m writing about the blanket ban in another province. I don’t want Saskatchewan to go down the same road, not because I think everyone needs a phone in class, but because I think the only way to properly teach a child is to listen to the people who do it, and let them set the rules around their classrooms. Whether those rules involve phones or not, I’ll leave it to the professionals doing the job.
