Italian education minister Giuseppe Valditara does not believe “good teaching can be done with a cell phone,” prohibiting them from classrooms across the country.
Valditara announced the measure at an education conference in Rome, highlighting that it “prohibits the use of cell phones for any purpose, including educational purposes.”
The ban will come into effect in September—the start of the next school year—but will not apply to ‘middle schools,’ attended by pupils ages 11-14.
The minister explained that alongside the educational benefits of the ban, it will also help restore authority to teachers and combat bullying. The emergence of artificial intelligence has seen pupils in England—and likely elsewhere across Europe—using their phones to create indecent images of their classmates.
Pupils at pre-middle school institutions will continue to be allowed to use computers and tablets, but only for educational purposes and “under the guidance of a teacher.”
Il Giornale described the ban as “an invitation … to rediscover books and to resort to them.” Valditara has also ordered that “the old [school] diary will return, where the child writes down in pen what he has to do and his homework,” citing the need to “re-accustom our children to writing, to the relationship with the pen and with paper.”
The ban on smartphones expands on an existing ban—introduced in 2007—on the non-academic use of phones in the classroom. It is a recognition of the fact that, so long as a technological device is at hand, tech-savvy children will always find ways to skirt around such limited bans and distract themselves from their work.
