Blanket phone bans are a failure to do holistic, systems thinking and adopt structural ideology. Those require community conversation. Those require understanding and recognizing ecosystems. Those require thinking in terms of prevention (in social work terms) instead of tier 1 intervention (in RTI terms).
Phone bans are bikeshedding.
Phone bans are fundamental attribution error.
Phone bans are harm reduction theater.
Technology is at its best when serving toolbelt theory, workflow thinking, differentiated instruction, Universal Design for Learning, and niche construction and at its worst when serving behaviorism, “efficiency“, and techno-solutionism.
Education and society have no vocabulary for any of those positive things, yet are mired in those negative things. They have no vocabulary for healthy use of technology. Instead of developing that vocabulary, we as a society choose phone bans and blaming social media for everything. We focus on social media to the extent that we willfully overlook the real causes of student depression and suicide: schools and parents. Social media use is among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health.
Cop Shit and the Cult of Efficiency
Often times, especially in school districts and states controlled by far-right authoritarians who think children are owned by their parents, we ban phones and social media purposefully to cut students off from advocacy and community and social identity, actively and callously worsening their mental health. For many marginalized students, phones and social media are a lifeline.
…many of those who propagate hate are especially interested in blocking children from technology for fear that allowing their children to be exposed to difference might make them more tolerant. (No, gender is not contagious, but developing a recognition that gender is socially and politically constructed — and fighting for a more just world — sure is.) There’s a long history of religious communities trying to isolate youth from kids of other faiths to maintain control.
Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media – by danah boyd
Further, the education technology that is foisted on students is far removed from anything healthy and good. Ed-tech combines the dismal ethics of tech, Silicon Valley, and market fundamentalism with the dismal ethics of behaviorism and the deficit model and mainlines it all into public ed. Students are subjected to deficit model surveillance capitalism all day, every day. The deficit model is a business model that commoditizes students.
Students know better. Students are engaging in the holistic thinking, systems thinking, and structural ideology that the adults in their lives are refusing and failing to do. They are organizing and advocating.
Our reaction to them:
Ban TikTok!
Ban phones!
Ban laptops!
Ban communication outside district surveillance.
Ban, ban, ban.
This is cop shit.
Cop shit is seductive. It makes metrics transparent. It allows for the clear progress toward learning objectives. (“Badges” are cop shit, by the way.) It also subsumes education within a market logic. “Here,” cop shit says, “you will learn how to do this thing. We will know you learned it by the acquisition of this gold star. But in order for me to award you this gold star, I must parse you, sense you, track you, collect you, and—” here’s the key, “I will presume that you will attempt to flout me at every turn. We are both scamming each other, you and I, and I intend to win.” When a classroom becomes adversarial, of course, as cop shit presumes, then there must be a clear winner and loser. The student’s education then becomes not a victory for their own self-improvement or -enrichment, but rather that the teacher conquered the student’s presumed inherent laziness, shiftiness, etc. to instill some kernel of a lesson.
No wonder the traditional humanities classroom of “read things, come together and talk about them, and write papers about them” has disappeared in the age of cop shit. There’s no game to fix, no battle to win.
And I want to fend this one off at the pass: if a classroom is so large that it requires cop shit in order to effectively run, then the answer is not actually to use cop shit. The answer is hiring more instructors. There are enough to go around.
In conclusion: expel cop shit from your classrooms; expel cop shit from your hearts. We are educators. We are not cops. If you want to be a cop, I recommend you go be a cop. At least then you’ll wear a nice uniform that lets us know that you are not on our side.
This is the cult of “efficiency”.
Consider what effective classroom management looks like. Teachers police the bodies and brains of their students because it’s effective. Effective at what, you ask? Well, effective at making it look like students are well-behaved.
…
The most effective way to have your students be obedient is to run your class like a military regiment, or a factory. If that’s your goal, that’s your best way to reach it. If you measure student learning based on exam scores, what’s most effective is teaching to the test. If you measure a student’s attention based on what a student is looking at, then what’s most effective is using Proctorio’s eye-tracking technology to ensure students are facing their computer screen at all times.
…
If you measure student discipline based on their outward behavior, what’s most effective is to have strict rules about sitting still and facing forward and swift corporal punishments for anyone who dares step outside the bounds. Maybe it’s high time we asked ourselves – sure, what we’re doing is effective. But is it good?
In Defense of Inefficiency – YouTube
We’re so in love with “efficiency” and cop shit, that we ban phones despite there being an inverse relationship between bans and PISA scores.
However, our examination of student outcomes and phone bans has revealed an inverse relationship: the more a country bans phones, the lower their PISA score. When controlling for gender, school behaviour and socio-economic status, phone bans are still negatively associated with PISA results in OECD countries.
Everyone needs a properly equipped toolbelt to get through life.
Enough.
It’s not students who are “coddled”. We’re coddling parents and administrators and a broken society with these misguided bans.
Instead, let’s rally our ed-tech philosophy around this statement: Everyone needs a properly equipped toolbelt to get through life.
Phones and tablets and especially laptops are essential tools for navigating modernity. They should be baked into the learning experience using toolbelt theory, workflow thinking, differentiated instruction, and Universal Design for Learning.
How do we support scholarly agency and autonomy when devices are banned?
And how do we avoid throwing neurodivergent and disabled people under the bus when devices are banned?
This is our chance to build real Universal Design for Learning around the greatest information, communication, and collaboration tools humans have ever developed.
Instead, we blanket ban phones.
Don’t Swallow the Bunting of the Very Big Stupid
I am reminded of Frank Zappa.
Here it comes, folks! Watch it grow! One day, the BIG STUPID goes to a PTA meeting, winds through the PTL Club, wends its way to the White House, spreads out from the Oval Office like a cow flop into the judiciary system, dribbles over onto the desks of BIG BUSINESS, and the next thing you know we’ve got THE VERY BIG STUPID.
THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.
Frank Zappa, Full text of “FRANK ZAPPA”
And it sometimes look like bans on potentially liberatory technology that helps students organize against their oppression. With bans on phones and social media, we are disarming students who refuse to swallow the bunting.
Our school systems train kids to be ignorant, with style — functional ignoramuses. They do not equip students to deal with things like logic; they don’t give them the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any product or situation. They are groomed and launched to function as mindless buying machines for the products and concepts of a multinational military-industrial complex that needs a World Of Dumbells to survive.
As long as you’re just smart enough to do some kind of job, and just dumb enough to swallow the bunting, you’re going to be ‘all right’ — but, if you venture beyond that, you run the risk of mysterious stomach problems and migraine headaches.
I believe that U.S. schools have a Search and Destroy program, aimed at any hint of creative thinking exhibited by students. Somebody plans this curriculum. Somebody writes those textbooks. Somebody sets those standards. Somebody watches to make sure it all goes well. Somebody pays big bucks for this shit.
Frank Zappa, Full text of “FRANK ZAPPA”
Name the Systems of Power
Failure to do structural thinking is a major obstacle to inclusion. “Don’t swallow the bunting” (derived from the Frank Zappa quote above) is my new rallying call to refuse deficit ideology and harm reduction theater and engage in systems thinking and structural ideology.
Instead of banning, do some systems thinking, and name the systems of power. Don’t swallow the bunting.
- Neoliberalism
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Moral Panic
- Lowering the Bar
- Minority Stress
- Racial Weathering
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Eugenics
- Administrative Burden
- R-Word
- Empire of Normality
- Autism Grievance Parent
- Power
- Privilege
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Systems Generated Trauma
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- Tech Ethics
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Empire of Normality
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Eugenics
- Deficit Ideology
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Resilience
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 14 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Disability Double-bind
- Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
- Pathology Lite
- Empire of Normality
- Harm Reduction Theater
Related Reading
- Everyone Needs a Properly Equipped Toolbelt to Get Through Life – Stimpunks Foundation
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination: Thorndike won, Dewey lost. Skinner won, Papert lost. – Stimpunks Foundation
- Luddite Sensibilities – Stimpunks Foundation
- The Cult of Compliance and the Policing of the Norm – Stimpunks Foundation
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