Thirty years ago I was teaching in a high school when a student brought in a very early mobile phone. He used it to create havoc by phoning the school switchboard; having friends at home call him while in a class, and generally being annoying.
I recall as a head of department this was brought up at a weekly meeting. No one really knew what to do, but feelings were generally negative. If someone had forecast that 30 years later every student would have one of these devices in their pocket we would have been aghast. We would have been even more appalled if we had been told these new devices could access extreme pornography, find all sorts of dangerous information – an incident a few years later saw a student build a pipe bomb and bring it to school – and be linked to a system of ‘social media’ that seems designed to harass other students.
Today a vice-principal I know says that around 75 per cent of the student discipline cases he is involved in concern a mobile phone. Students plot extreme methods of basically verbally and visually assaulting their schoolmates. This often leads to actual literal assault, sometimes carried out on the school grounds. But of course students are only at school for six or so hours a day. The phone pestering, annoying, and interfering with others’ lives continues 24/7, although strangely parents often expect school to fix it.
In many cases the use of mobiles on the school grounds has other detrimental effects. The other day I had to do a car errand at around 7:45 am. The school buses were everywhere in my suburb. For amusement I did a rough calculation of how many of the students waiting at bus stops, or walking to them, had their heads down, immersed in a mobile phone screen. Around 50 per cent was the answer. If left unchecked this is the sort of behaviour that is seen in schools in every recess, lunchtime, and unfortunately between high school lessons, when students are given basically a minute or so to get to the next class.
The effects of even innocent behaviour at such times are negative. Students are often reported as not engaging in play with ball games and the like. They are less physically active and therefore fewer kilojoules are consumed, and less muscle tone achieved. And a flow-on effect is there is much lateness to lessons – another in the list of discipline offences to burden teachers’ lives.
Who is to blame for this and what is to be done? Perhaps surprisingly, I lay the blame at successive federal governments’ doors. But don’t the states control education? So they do, but the money and the central curriculum come from the feds, who even employ thousands of public servants in the federal arena, although not one teaches a class. The federal government, like everyone involved in education, has lived through the growing disaster of phones in schools and has done nothing about it for decades.
What they should have done was to lay down the law. This could have been done with a national consultative process, and indeed it would have been likely the states and territories would have been glad to get such leadership.
At present, the states control the rules that govern schools. For example, almost every school now has a uniform policy, although for some years, especially in the years following the ‘hippy movement’, it was sometimes seen that students should be ‘free to assert their creativity’ and so on by having a no-uniform policy. Eventually saner thinking prevailed in the light of students competing ferociously on the grounds of fashion, and also as uniforms are a useful deterrent to would-be offenders coming onto school property.
Mobile phone policy has been left to the states, and there the rot set in, particularly and especially as the state education authorities were notoriously lax on it. ‘Leave it to the individual schools!’ was the cry, largely due to wanting to avoid the problem of having multiple arguments with parents, students, and even teachers, who in some misguided instances argue that having a phone and using it responsibly is something that must be taught. (Along with the other things not being taught, such as literacy and numeracy in many cases.)
A small percentage of parents are vociferous in their defence of their offspring having a phone on their person. ‘I demand the right to contact my child at any time, and especially in an emergency!’ they will say. This ignores decades of the ability of a school office to take a message, and in an emergency multiple messages from scores of students hardly help a situation.
Phones in schools should have been banned years ago, and the policy should have been one dictated by the federal government, who could have allied it to finance. A national policy should have been set down. Students should not have the phone on their person, nor in their bag, or in their locker, in every school, every day.
If phones are going to be tied to transport and making purchases, and that is necessary for students before and after school, then schools should have a locker system. And yes, I have read of those valiant institutions that are doing this, and students then buy a toy mobile to be locked up for the day or try similar dodges. But if the overwhelming majority of students obey, and they usually will, then make the penalty for offending a massive one. week’s suspension for the first offence, and two for the second, and so on.
The result would be better learning, discipline, and friendship. There would be less harassment, misbehaviour, and time-wasting. What a win for all that would be. Get onto this now state and federal governments!
Dr Tom Lewis OAM taught in the high school and adult areas for over 20 years. Now a military historian, his latest book is Attack on Sydney, a study of the failures in command combating the midget submarine attack of 1942.
