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Hold the Phones: What Students Deserve

Kids are in school. Their phones are not.

Effective January 1st, classrooms across dozens of states will enforce new phone regulations. H.B. 959 (N.C.), for instance, instructs each school district to establish a policy appropriate for its learners, one that will “prohibit students from using, displaying or having a wireless communication device turned on during instructional time.” Aside from explicit teacher authorization, students are given exceptions for emergencies, healthcare, and special education plans. In response, several schools welcomed students in August with a new policy already in place.

At first glance, the phone mandate seems like a debate over autonomy: the freedom to govern one’s own self. The pictured tug-of-war lies between students and school personnel, each vying for or against the student’s access to personal property. Kids like phones. Schools don’t. So it goes.

But what if the phone question is neither this simple nor simply about autonomy itself? Perhaps everyone, in one way or another, is on the side of student freedom and, instead, the underlying tension lies in what kind of freedom ought to take precedence. Which form of student autonomy needs preserving — and beyond freedom, is something else in jeopardy?

Let’s consider the stakeholders.

First, the kids. Students — and, well, people — are pretty big fans of personal autonomy. This indicates freedom over one’s most basic functions, such as a right to one’s own physical self. For example, a person who is free to dress herself in particular attire, tiptoe her feet across a floor, and ingest a liquid of choice could be said to possess personal autonomy. In a medical setting, this might look like making one’s own healthcare decisions without coercion. Whether high or low stakes, someone with personal autonomy does what she wants with her own self because the self is hers.

Here’s where phones come in. Invoking a right to one’s own property is an appeal to this sort of freedom. That is, perhaps freedom of access to personal belongings can be reasonably umbrellaed under personal autonomy. Unlike a contraband cigarette, a teenager might imagine her device as an extension of the self. Students might argue that a right to personal property is necessitated by a right to personal autonomy, that a school’s ban on phones is a threat to its students’ personal freedom. At first read, this sounds perturbing. But does something legitimate rest at its root, a justification for limiting agency?

Schools, perhaps, think so. ‘Schools’ implicates many personnel: district employees, site administrators, and teachers. Nominally, this conglomerate wants students to achieve academic success. District-level staff who do not routinely, if at all, interface with students may define their success as scoring proficient, if not remarkably above, on standardized tests in reading, math, and science. These results inform the school’s “report card,” a published letter-grade assessment of the school’s student achievement.

Teachers, by contrast, ground their work in student relationships, adapting instruction, assessment, and evaluation in light of the particulars of the young minds they teach. I, for one, might be a daily audience to a student’s burgeoning clarity of writing or speech, the sort of flourishing a scantron doesn’t capture. School principals perhaps fall between my imagined monoliths of district leaders and classroom instructors. Often former teachers themselves, school-based administrators have daily access to student goings-on but are tasked with managing their assessment data and long-term academic outcomes.

Broadly construed, then, schools seek students’ intellectual autonomy. Whatever the motive, they want kids to make well-reasoned judgments, whether demonstrated on a standardized bubble sheet or through analytical prose. If we rely on classroom instruction to deliver students the opportunity to stretch and grow their thinking capacities, then a kid glued to his feed instead of the whiteboard threatens his cerebral development. Well-developed brains, if not ends in themselves, hopefully grow up to power self-sufficient adults who positively engage in the world. If maximizing mental capacity is in students’ best interest, then phones must go, right?

The picture we’ve built, then, implies personal and intellectual autonomy to be at odds. To have freedom over personal choice, one neglects cultivating mental dexterity — and, perhaps, vice versa.

But maybe this is wrong.

For one, perhaps intellectual autonomy is already at risk. Learning often fails without the help of phones. When I lecture longer than my students can focus, my creative indulgence supersedes their likelihood of understanding. If a student is one of forty in a class, then their opportunity for personalized feedback, support, and rapport is lower than a learner tutored one-on-one. Swimming in educational apathy, whether at home or school, a child may grow unenthused in pushing the bounds of their intellectual capacities. In other words, removing phones is hardly a guarantee for saving intellectual freedom.

Kids have always managed to slip through the cracks, even though most classrooms in history were phone-free. Any student can find himself insufficiently rested, nourished, or comfortable, all of which preclude maximal learning in the school day. We will never be able to remove the human factor embedded in schooling, which means it’s not unreasonable to suggest that cultivating intellectual freedom was always a steep climb. Amid post-pandemic teacher burnout and drop in literacy, devices might be a dazzling scapegoat for deeper environmental issues.

Some even argue phones help. Maybe students feel personal autonomy ought to manifest in a phone-friendly way to feel a sense of safety at school. Accessing instant messaging when the outside world lobs our kids bigger-than-math-test updates — family emergencies, travel, death, or celebrations — allows them to acknowledge their whole personhood. The possibility of contacting emergency services or a parent in dire straits, even if unlikely or unrealistic, can feel like freedom. In the wake of media coverage on school shootings, many parents openly feel this way. Life threats aside, we don’t ask working adults to ignore their messages all day. So long as she completes her work too, why must a studious fourteen-year-old?

But maybe we don’t want our kids to have cellular security blankets. More so, we don’t want them to have to want them — to feel like they won’t be able to go without. A lesser acknowledged metric for education is how well-prepared kids are to interact with others in the real world. You might support the phone ban in the name of intellectual efficacy. You might support the phone ban as an appeal to instructors’ authority or improving staff working conditions. But perhaps the best reason to ban phones is in the name of a lesser acknowledged function of education: socialization.

Two school years ago, a high school student told me that social anxiety directly feeds an impulse to turn to a phone; unsure how to talk to new friends, it’s more comfortable, in the short term, to reach into a backpack and feign focus on fleeting notifications. We know persistence amid discomfort is what empowers us in the long term, but it’s hard to relish the long-term when you’re a nervous fourteen-year-old who just wants to hide in the bathroom.

Phones capitalize on this avoidance. This means avoiding not only instruction but also assignments, peers, and oneself. From nervousness or boredom, if every student checks a text every few minutes, even briefly, likely staggered on different timelines, there is feasibly one person is on a phone at all times. With short-lived individual soothing comes disjointed classroom — or lunch table — culture. The whole point of being together in person feels moot. Ironically, most children more than likely aspire to be informed and prepared for the adult world, to find and be who they are, and surround themselves with others who support them in doing so. Even the phone time reflects this inclination. What are any of us ever doing on our devices besides engaging in or idealizing human connection anyway?

This is the point where we might look for something hopeful about the inclusive use of technology. You’ve likely heard the refrain: “We’re not getting rid of it. Technology is a tool. It’s just about using it properly.” There are plenty of tools we’ve made that we’re probably not getting rid of. However, I’m not convinced that any of us are reliable advocates for proper use if we’re all entrenched in algorithmic soup ourselves. I’m not sure that there always is an in-between, even if we want one, and I’m not sure that there’s much nobility in seeking to include tools that both profit from and shape our impulses.

Students have these thoughts, too. They’re aware of their attention degradation, and they don’t like it. Perhaps, then, the most compelling support for banning phones lies beyond intellectual efficacy or teachers feeling respected and, instead, in how kids interact with other kids.

Heaps of my students freely admit technology to be disruptive — one joked her friend is a “screenager.” The only further memory I hold from that moment is its aftermath, how the quip prompted two other seventh graders to peek up from their computers and melt into a conversation full of hand motions, emphatic head-nodding, and giggling through braces.

I think this is where we all want them to end up: looking up, laughing with each other.

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A Right To Attentional Freedom?

collage of various people on their phones

The White House recently posted a proposal for an AI Bill of Rights. In California, there is a bill that aims to hold social media companies accountable for getting young children addicted to their platforms. Several of these companies also face a federal lawsuit for emotionally and physically harming their users.

For those who use technology on a day-to-day basis, these developments are likely unsurprising. There is an intuition, backed by countless examples, that our technology harms us and that those who have created the technology are somehow responsible. Many of us find ourselves doomscrolling or stuck on YouTube for hours because of infinite scrolling.

Less settled is precisely how these technologies are bad for us and how exactly these companies wrong us.

The California bill and the lawsuit both argue that one notable form of harm can be understood through the lens of addiction. They argue that social media companies are harming a particularly vulnerable group, namely young adults and children, by producing an addicting product.

While this way of understanding the problem certainly has plausibility, one might favor other ways of explaining the problem. The way that we frame the moral relationship users have with technology will shape legal argumentation and future regulation. If our aim is to forge a morally sound relationship between users, technology, and producers, it is important to get the moral story right.

What makes social media addicting is the fact that it has become especially adept at producing content that users want to engage with. Complex algorithms learn about its user’s predilections and can accurately predict the kinds of things people want to see. The ability for AI to manipulate us so effectively highlights our failure to recognize the importance of attention – a valuable good that has gone underappreciated for far too long.

First, our attention is limited. We cannot attend to everything before us and so each moment of attention is accompanied with non-attention. If I am paying attention to a film, then I am not paying attention to the cars outside, or the rain falling, or the phone in my pocket.

Second, attention is susceptible to outside influence. If someone is talking loudly while a film plays, I may become distracted. I may want to watch the film closely, but the noise pulls my attention away.

Third, attention is related to many foundational moral rights. Take for instance freedom of thought. We might think that in a society where there are no laws about what you are allowed to think, read, or say guarantees the freedom of thought. However, unless your attention is respected, freedom of thought cannot be secured.

We need only think of Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron” to show what this claim misses. In it, Harrison Bergeron lives in a society that goes to great lengths to ensure equality. In order to make sure everyone remains equal, those who are born with natural talents are given artificial burdens. For Harrison, who is exceptional both physically and mentally, one particularly clever tactic is used to ensure he does not think too much. Periodically, a loud, harsh sound is played through an earpiece. This makes it impossible for Harrison to focus.

The relevant point here is that even if no law exists that prohibits you from thinking whatever you please, reading what you want, or discussing what you wish, your freedom of thought can be indirectly overridden.

By utilizing the fact that your attention is limited and not fully voluntary, another party can prevent you from thinking freely. Thus, although our rights may be respected on paper, assaults on our attention may inhibit us from utilizing the capacities these rights are supposed to protect in practice.

When we interact with technology, we must give our attention over to it. Furthermore, much of the technology we interact with on a day-to-day basis is designed specifically to maintain and increase user engagement. As a result of these design choices, we have developed technology that is highly effective at capturing our attention.

As predictive technology improves, machines will also improve their ability to distract us. The result of this will mean that more people will spend more time using the technology (e.g., watching videos, reading news pieces, viewing content produced by other users). The more time people spend using this technology, the less they can spend attending to other things.

If our attention is limited, can be controlled from the outside, and is vital for utilizing other morally important capacities, it seems clear that it is something that should be treated with respect.

Consider how we tend to think that it is rude to distract someone while they are trying to concentrate. It rarely feels satisfying if the person causing the distraction simply replies “Just ignore me.” This response denies a crucial reality of the nature of attention, viz., it is often non-voluntary.

Furthermore, it would be even worse if the distracting person tried to mask their presence and distract someone secretly, and yet this is precisely what a great deal of our technology does. It exploits the non-voluntary nature of our attention, overrides attentional freedom, and does so in the most discrete way possible. Technology could be designed in a way that respected our attentional freedom, instead of covertly trying to undermine it. For example, periodically prompting the user to consider doing something else, instead of endlessly presenting more content to engage with.

Rather than focusing on technology’s tendency to encourage addictive behavior in young people, I would like us to think about the effects technology has on all users’ attentional freedom.

Technology that is designed to distract you is harmful because it overrides your attentional freedom. When you use this technology, you are less free. This analysis must overcome at least two challenges, both centered around consent.

The first is that we consent to use these products. To argue that my phone wrongfully harms me because it is distracting seems like arguing that a book wrongfully harms me if it is so gripping that I cannot put it down.

However, while a book may be enticing and may even be created with the hopes that it captures attention, the book does not learn about what captures attention. There is a difference between something capturing your attention because it is interesting and something that learns your preferences and sets about satisfying them. What makes AI driven technology unique is that it has the capacity to fine tune the kinds of things it offers you in real time. It knows what you click on, what you watch, and how long you engage. It also relies on the involuntary part of attention to keep you engaged.

The second argument is about general human interaction. If it is wrong to affect someone’s attention, then daily interactions must be wrong. For instance, if someone walks down the street and asks me to take a flier for a show, do they wrong me by distracting me? Do all interactions require explicit consent lest they be moral violations? If our moral analysis of attention forces us to conclude that even something as trivial as a stranger saying hello to you constitutes a moral wrong because it momentarily distracts you, we will have either gone wrong somewhere along the way, or else produced a moral demand that is impossible to respect.

To answer this second objection, one thing we can say is this. When someone distracts you, they do not necessarily wrong you. Someone who tries to hand you a flier in the street effectively asks for your attention, and you have the opportunity to deny this request with fairly little effort. Notably, if the person who asks for your attention continues to pester you, and follows you down the road as you walk, their behavior no longer seems blameless and quickly turns into a form of harassment. When someone intentionally tries to override your attentional freedom, the moral problem emerges. Because attentional freedom is connected to a set of important freedoms (e.g., freedom of thought, freedom of choice, etc.), if one can override another’s attentional freedom, they can override other important freedoms indirectly.

If technology harms us because we become addicted to it, then we have reason to protect children from it. We may even have reason to provide more warnings for adults, like we do with addictive substances. However, if we stop our analysis at addiction, we miss something important about how this technology operates and how it harms us. When we see that technology harms us because it overrides our attentional freedom, we will need to do more than simply protect children and warn adults. Several new questions emerge: Can we design technology to preserve attentional freedom, and if so, what changes should we make to existing technology? How can we ensure that technology does not exploit the non-voluntary part of our attention? Are some technologies too effective at capturing our attention, such that they should not be on the market? Is there a right to attentional freedom?