Should mobile phones be banned from classrooms?
While some European countries, namely France, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands, have totally banned the use of mobile phones in schools, there is still no clear consensus on this issue in Czechia. At the moment, each school decides for itself which position to take, without a coordinated approach from the government or the Czech School Inspectorate. Some schools allow them to be used in class, others only during breaks. But some have started to take a more radical approach.
The town of Vsetín in the Zlín Region is introducing a ban on using mobile phones in primary schools from September. Children will no longer be able to use their phones at any time during school hours, even during breaks, the local council decided at its last meeting.
For this purpose, the council is purchasing 99 secure storage boxes for all its primary school classrooms, where the children’s devices will be stored throughout the day, explains the town’s mayor, Jiří Čunek:
“The kids come to school and go to their first class, where the teacher will collect all the mobile phones and lock them in the safe. Their phones will be switched off. This will, of course, be sanctioned by a strict ban written in the school rules. Then after school, at the end of their last class of the day, the teacher will open the safe and distribute the phones out to the children again.”
The council consulted with neurologist Martin Jan Stránský in May on the issue and cites a number of reasons for the introduction of the ban, mostly to do with the negative effects that overuse of mobile devices can have on the development of children’s brains. These include lower IQ, decreased ability to concentrate, and diminished powers of verbal expression, which leads to an overall reduction in their ability to learn and the effectiveness of teaching.
Moreover, the councillors say, school should be an environment where kids experience a variety of things other than just staring into a screen, and there is an increased risk of cyberbullying when they are allowed to use their phones all day. According to the councillors, kids spend too much time on their phones even during breaks between lessons, with some spending their entire break playing games or watching videos on their device rather than interacting with each other.
Czech and civic education teacher Lucie Tetivová teaches at a primary school that has already banned mobile phones at break time. During class, it is up to the individual teachers whether they allow the children to use their phones. However, this school in Prague’s Vinohrady district took a different approach to Vsetín – rather than taking the children’s phones away and locking them in a safe, they are simply not allowed to take their phones out of their bags during breaks. But the reasons for the ban are much the same.
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“We saw all kinds of secondary problems associated with mobile phone use. Most often, it was things like kids filming or taking photos of each other without permission and posting them somewhere online, which caused a lot of arguments and disharmony among them. On top of that, we noticed that the kids weren’t interacting with each other – they were on their phones instead of talking to each other. We really wanted them to try co-existing together more.”
The Vsetín town council are confident that the ban will lead to pupils being able to concentrate better and to them communicating with each other more in the real world during breaks. They expect that parents and the school management will welcome the decision. How the pupils themselves will feel about it when they come back to school in September is another matter, however.
