After focusing over the past year on tackling distracting mobile phone-use among primary school-aged children, the Irish government has now declared its intention to ban devices in secondary schools.
Education minister Norma Foley suggested this week that current attempts by second-level schools—attended by 12-18-year-olds—to restrict the use of mobile phones do not go far enough, and said it was time to establish a wider “culture of non-acceptance” of phone usage.
Foley said:
I am now in a space where I’m looking to introduce a ban on mobile phones at post-primary.
All studies, including a United Nations study last year, are telling us that mobile phones interrupt learning in a school environment. Obviously, they are also a cause of cyberbullying and we know, too, that the community of conversation is very much interrupted by the fact that students take out their mobile phone at different times.
The government hopes an outright ban will remove the “continual hum” of distraction from mobile phones, which is ongoing despite attempts to remove their influence from the classroom.
Similar measures have been adopted in Italy and, more recently, in Hungary, where officials said that as a result, “academic performance will improve, and there will be less online bullying.”
Some Irish educational commentators have raised questions over the enforceability of the proposed ban, and on whether measures will also be taken against similarly distracting tablet devices. But on the whole, there appears to be the recognition that the intention is right, and a hope that the plan will produce positive educational outcomes.
Businessman Bobby Healy noted that while “there will be naysayers … the argument for must be overwhelming.” American social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt added that the blanket ban is preferable to “fake phone-free” measures, “where phones are ‘banned’ during class time only, which does not work.”
Foley said it was her “absolute ambition” to include these plans in the upcoming October Budget.
