Banning phones is the wrong fight
What the phone panic gets wrong about attention, trust and teenagers.
I’m not against phone bans. Plenty of schools have good reasons for them and see real benefits. What I’m against is treating the ban as the strategy rather than a tactic — as if the device were the problem and not the thing the problem is pointing at.
The phone is where the attention economy meets a fourteen-year-old. Confiscate it and you’ve won the room back for the day; you haven’t taught anyone how to manage their own attention, or why they’d want to. That’s the harder, more durable work, and it doesn’t fit on a poster.
A ban can buy you the conditions to do that work. It can also become a substitute for it. The schools getting the most out of bans are the ones treating the quiet they create as the start of the conversation, not the end.
Let's turn the argument into the honest next step.