An editorial in the Los Angeles Times endorses the growing trend to ban cell phones in public schools. The editorial points out that school districts all across the country are enacting such bans. The Times writes:
The 2024-25 school year may be the tipping point when adults act to curb kids’ phone addiction and regain their attention. It’s about time…. Nearly three-fourths of high school teachers surveyed last fall said that students being distracted by their cellphones in the classroom was a major problem, according to the Pew Research Center…. In addition, excessive social media heightens the risk of anxiety, depression and cyberbullying, and students use their phones during the day to coordinate drug purchases and fights. It’s clear that the presence of cellphones on campus is more harmful than helpful. Kids need an intervention, and schools are right to rein in this technology now before another generation suffers.
I’ve got a better idea. Instead of banning cell phones in public schools, let’s ban state involvement in education. After all, there is a good reason why students resort to their cell phones: public-school classes are boring. Statists simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that.
The much bigger issue that statists cannot bring themselves to acknowledge — in addition to the fact that public-school classes are boring — is that public schooling, not cell-phone usage, destroys children’s natural love of learning and turns them into good little automatons of the state.
After all, from the time a child is born, he loves to learn. With his eyes always wide open, a child eagerly absorbs everything he sees around him. By the time he spends 12 long years in the government school system, that love of learning has been extinguished. That’s not a coincidence. That’s causation.
The ultimate aim of the state is to turn every child into a good little citizen of the state. That’s what public schooling is all about. It’s really just army-lite, with its emphasis on inculcating a mindset of deference to authority, obedience to orders, and regimentation. And it’s why public-school classes, just like classes in the military, are so darned boring. Resorting to cell phones to relieve the boredom of public schooling is the most natural thing in the world for a student to do. It’s also a smart thing to do because it keeps students from falling asleep from the boredom they are experiencing.
Unfortunately, all too many statists, who themselves are public-school “success” stories, simply cannot see this. They see all these kids trying to relieve the boredom of public-school classes with their cell phones and conclude that something is wrong with the students rather than with their beloved public-school system. So, they take away their cell phones or, even worse, inject them with drugs, like Ritalin or Adderall. The aim is to cause students to “get their heads straight” by inducing them to see the public-schooling experience as something exciting and beneficial, even if it take drugs or just a cell-phone ban to accomplish this.
There is only one solution to this massive state-induced dysfunction. That solution is not to ban cell phones from public schools or to drug children into becoming “good little citizens of the state.” The solution is instead to throw the state entirely out of education, just as our ancestors had the wisdom to throw the state out of religion. In that way, families would have the freedom to take charge of their children’s education, entrepreneurs would have the freedom to offer families the best educational vehicle for their children, and, most important, children would have the freedom to nurture and expand their natural love of learning continuously all the way through adulthood.