There is a school in Washington DC called Benjamin Banneker Academic High School that has the honour of being in the top 2% in the Washington Post list of America’s most challenging schools. It has another distinction – it will not allow personal smartphones, tablets etc in school and has cellphone lockers in the foyer where the gadgets have to be stored during school hours. (My grandson has the same arrangement in his British school).
Many teachers, to quote Jay Mathews, who writes about this sort of thing for the Washington Post, says “Many teachers think that electronic devices have turned classes into uninspired rehashes of Google, with fewer student exchanges about important issues, and little retention of facts, concepts or procedures”. Another teacher commented, “The biggest change I have seen since the advent of smartphones is an apparent inability, not aversion, to concentrate for an extended period of time” . At Banneker, apparently, kids actually talk to one another; elsewhere there is probably an eerie silence as each child gazes at a screen. On the other hand I bet the chatting kids at lunch are complaining about the cellphone ban in class!
I actually heard someone claim that remembering facts was now, with Google, an old- fashioned concept and that rote memory, like times tables or mental arithmetic, is now superfluous. Perhaps our younger readers could agree or disagree? My personal view is that those who believe this are due for an unwelcome surprise when they engage with adult life.
I used my phone a fair bit during school, and especially during sixth form, and I think it helped immensely. If you didn’t quite understand something, you could very quickly look it up instead of having to waste everyone’s time asking the teacher what it was. It meant you were never embarrassed about not knowing something. Once I looked things up, I tended to remember them from then on, so I don’t agree with the argument that phones are bad for memory retention. I also used my phone to note down interesting things that my friends had told me, or important things I had to do and events I had to go to.
Sometimes in class, you needed to do research projects. But there weren’t always enough computers available, and the library was too small for everyone in the college to go there all at once. So having smartphones allowed people to do research projects without using any of the college’s resources- freeing up their money to be spent on other things.
There’s no evidence to suggest that our generation are any more stupid than the generations before. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise. (http://41.media.tumblr.com/f520e7839af552fce83168464d7eba35/tumblr_nc4zrdEbnf1qa0uujo1_1280.png) I’m not going to claim that technology is responsible for all of this, but in my opinion, it has certainly played a part.
I do think there’s a problem with allowing younger children access to technology in school; because their brains are not as developed, they can’t handle the temptations of it as well. You’re right that they are more easily distracted. But once you reach 15-16, technology becomes a non issue.