The news this week that Toronto's public school board is considering banning cellphones from classrooms and hallways has a ring of inevitability to it.
On the one hand, they are must-have accessories for teenagers, who use them to chat, text, take pictures and even listen to their favourite tunes. Parents rely on them to keep track of their teens as they become increasingly mobile.
On the other hand, cellphones are disruptive in class and can even be used to cheat on tests. Kids have experimented with ring tones that can't be heard by aging ears, and they have also been known to deliberately vex teachers and then record their angry reactions and post them on the Internet.
This was a clash that has long been coming. [...]
A cellphone ban would probably score the trustee some popularity points among teachers and principals, but not all parents and teens are fans of the idea.
"I think individual schools have policies about them and teachers have policies about them, and we really don't need to bring down an edict from on high," says Annie Kidder, a spokeswoman for parent group People for Education.
Toronto parent Mollie O'Neill doesn't believe that her 13-year-old daughter should have to store her cellphone in her locker, as her public school currently requires (she didn't want her daughter's school named for fear of repercussion).
"I want my daughter to be able to carry her cellphone on her person at all times, because I want to be able to reach her and I want her to be able to reach out," Ms. O'Neill says.
Perhaps the favourite theme of unimaginative commencement addresses is how the graduating class is going out into a world wracked by pain, conflict and problems of incredible knottiness which have completely flummoxed the speaker’s generation, but which he just knows that they, the graduating class, will solve by doing something splendid to make everything right. The key to this will be their selfless energy, higher moral sensibilities and clever use of myriad technological wonders to come. The climax is his brow-furrowed warning that they can “choose” to use these marvels for good or bad, and that those choices hold the key to whether they will live in peaceful, prosperous harmony or blow the whole show at once like his generation almost did. He expresses his complete confidence they will get everything right, although by this time he is often so gloomy one wonders if he isn’t more than a little relieved he won’t be around to find out.
It’s a heartening tale for the occasion, but as every social conservative knows, it’s rot. Technological progress is an imperative that imposes itself on us inexorably. While we can regulate to try and control some of the more alarming potentials, there is no time in modern history that we have successfully made a collective decision not to invent or produce something on ethical or lifestyle grounds.
The reason we don’t is that there is always a beneficent use that we convince ourselves trumps the downside and which we quickly convert into a necessity we can no longer even conceive of doing without. In many cases, such as stem-cell research, the potential is linked to curing frightening diseases. Who can hope to win a battle for the lives of future cell clumps against that of a dying child? For gadgets like cellphones, we suffer billions of dollars worth of distraction, unwanted unnecessary and unhealthy supervision, compulsive and frantic contact, and various levels of anxiety if we are out of touch for minutes, all because somebody has planted the notion in our heads that someday we may be marooned in a car stuck in a snowdrift. That kind of fear eventually becomes such a preoccupation that we couldn’t care less whether cellphones keep the drug trade humming and are a terrorist’s best friend.
If we are really desperate to defend our new toys to ourselves and can’t think of an obvious justification, we’ll make a new, completely incoherent one up, like the mother in this article who has convinced herself “reaching out” of a classroom is an important part of her child’s education. And if all else fails, we just throw up our arms and ask the naysayers trying to take the fun out of our lives whether they would also be in favour of sending children back to work in the mines.
So ok, cellphones are here and they aren’t going away. There is an arguable (but far from self-evident) case they have specific advantages in healthcare, business, government, etc. It is smart to have one in the glove compartment or purse for emergencies. But apart from that, is anyone prepared to defend the gawdawful contraption as other than a useless squandering of endless time and money that is driving us further down the road to collective neurotic madness?
3 comments:
My work used to take me to schools in rural areas, so I was glad to carry a cellphone in case the car broke down (which it never did), or I needed to let a school know I was running late (which happened frequently). I was in constant conflict with my manager, though, for refusing to keep the cellphone switched on at all times. He wanted my secretary to be able to contact me at any time and I found ths intrusive. As I was employed to give advice, not life-saving aid, I could not see why my meetings should be interrupted. Before we had cellphones, email amd Calendar we submitted a hand-written (sic) weekly programme and the world still turned.
Cellphones in schools - most of our schools try to keep them out of the classroom, with varying levels of success. It used to be a problem confined to secondary schools but now even some five year olds carry them. Who knows what the long-term effect of telling children they need to carry a cellphone for 'emergencies' will be? Will they all be distrusting and fearful and unable to solve problems for themselves?
Speaking as a mother, now grandmother, I think what the mother meant by reaching out, was that if there were an emergency like a shooting spree, her daughter could call 911 and get help.
Britain is at the forefront (ok, along with Japan and Sweden) in mobile phone ubiquity and technology fads. (Britain has always loved a fad - domestic crazes for Indian clothes, tea, tobacco, sugar etc were the foundation of the Empire, but that's another story.)
I used to know a few people who didn't have a cellphone, now I don't think I know anyone who hasn't.
Ways in which mobile phones have made life worse: teenagers with stupid ring-tones on the bus; loud businessmen on the train making unnecessary calls to show how important they are; the nagging urge to keep checking your phone in case someone has called you.
Ways in which they have made life better: you never have to wait for hours for people at pre-alloted meeting points any more - if someone is going to be late, they can call you and you go off and do something else; if you're in the supermarket or video shop, you need never get the wrong thing - you can call home and check; you don't have to hover around near a land phone if you're waiting for an important call; you can get the latest football score when you're nowhere near a TV...etc etc.
I'd be tempted to say that if the costs outweighed the benefits, the market would simply decide and mobiles would go the way of the Sinclair C5 and other unwanted technological innovations. That's a little glib, since mobile companies saturate us with marketing.
But we are at the point where it is impossible to imagine going back to the old days without them. Humans are social animals and they like security, being with the people they know, and they dislike isolation intensely. Mobiles provide that comforting feeling of being in contact.
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