The fact that the U.K. Government has had to say it will prohibit children from using mobile phones in schools is just a glimpse of what is wrong with the education system. The problem does not lie with the students but with a cross-section of adults who are charged with looking after and educating them. Strong teachers, headteachers and school principals do not need to be told from on-high which path to take in a given situation. They think critically about a topic, intellectually assessing a situation against values such as morality and high standards, and then act accordingly.
Over the last three decades, the sector has been steadily diluted by a diminishing pedigree of teacher. Adults who are more interested in what happened on X Factor the night before than in educational philosophy and ethos. This is why some of them think that a man can give birth to a baby and that there are 100 different genders. Many of them are dangerously unintelligent, and when it comes to safeguarding children against harm, this is very worrying indeed.
My favourite teacher, when I was a teenager at secondary school in the 1980s, was Mr. Winter. He taught English literature and was a master within his subject. The school had within it a number of rough and challenging pupils who were not automatically obedient and compliant with authority. Nonetheless, the adults at the school won the respect of the children by being experts within their respective fields. Many of my teachers were relentlessly inspiring and all of them possessed a zero tolerance of poor behaviour. However, Mr. Winter, with his combination of maverickism and intellectual genius, set the bar for the entire staff. He could get the most disruptive child to become passionate about reading novels and produce engaging creative writing. It was he who inspired me to become a teacher myself and eventually a headteacher. I realised that I too could inspire kids with challenging behaviour and educate in an innovative and creative style. But it was Mr. Winter’s very high expectations of pupil behaviour which underpinned both his and my own practice. The notion of a child playing about with his or her mobile phone in a classroom would have been unthinkable to Mr. Winter. Great teachers do not need to tell children what they expect of them in terms of classroom behaviour. They resonate a gravitas and presence which speaks for itself and the students just follow suit.
I believe that many teachers within the school system today simply do not know what is right and wrong for children. Those who do know often lack the backbone or moral courage to act on it, preferring instead to fall in line with the herd and go along with the profession’s latest groupthink for fear of reprisals. Regarding children using mobile phones in schools, of course they create disruption and negative behaviour. In terms of the content viewed by many children, this is often wildly inappropriate and has no place within an education setting. Teachers and headteachers should have banned them from the start, as I did very easily when I ran my own school. But the profession is saturated with the sort of adults who think that drag queens should be reading stories to little children and that teaching teenagers about choking and fisting is appropriate. The mobile phone debacle is quite mild compared to what is also going on.
When I trained to become a teacher in 1995, there was an intellectual interrogation at interview. It was an attempt to assess our critical thinking capacity. Successful applicants also had to be genuinely enthusiastic about academia and learning. We studied Vygotsky and Piaget while training and I remember staffrooms in my early years being full of conversations about educational pedagogy. This was a period when the likes of Mr. Winter were still working within the system and inspiring the younger generation of teachers entering the profession: masters within their field of expertise whom we could look up to and learn from; teachers and school leaders who were not distracted by popular culture and navigated by the latest trend. That is what children do. Instead, they were highly respected professionals who took the job of educating children seriously and with a very clear idea of what constituted right from wrong.
Over the years, I have cultivated a philosophical belief in the importance of critical thinking, freedom of speech and safeguarding children. Put very simply, I challenge orthodoxies and then express my views about my observations. If I think that something is potentially or directly harmful to a child, I will say so publicly. Of course, critical thinking goes way back to the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Socrates. Many excellent educators, past and present, use the Socratic technique. But it must be combined with freedom of speech. There is no point in noticing something, particularly if it is harmful, and then staying silent about it. All that ends up happening is the matter becoming worse in the long-run. This is what has taken place with the mobile phone fiasco. Effective teachers would have concluded early on that mobile phones in schools would cause disruption and then taken the decision to ban them immediately. Not wait for years until the situation is out of control, to the point that the Government has to step in to sort it out.
Furthermore, all adults working within education have a legal duty to safeguard children against harm. Every year, there is compulsory safeguarding training which educators must undertake. Within it, there is always the scenario of institutionalised abuse: situations in which entire organisations and schools are involved in sexual, emotional and physical abuse. We are told that even if we are the only person within an organisation to notice harms taking place, we must fulfil our legal as well as our moral obligation and raise the alarm. This is where critical thinking, freedom of speech and safeguarding children go hand in hand. They feed into one another and form a very strong protective shield around children and education as a whole. However, teachers often choose to stay silent out of fear of reprisals from others. They worry about their career prospects, their finances and reputations if they report abuse and wrongdoing. When I have attended safeguarding courses and case studies have been presented where this has happened, the delegates will always tut disapprovingly, imagining themselves to have acted completely differently if they had been in that situation: the principled individual who would have gone against the groupthink and spoken out about the abuse, putting self-sacrifice ahead of self-preservation. Virtue signalling in this way, which teachers are very good at, is very easy. It requires a lot more than that in practice. Not least of which is to acknowledge that the path of speaking out will be challenging and incur various losses, but to do the right thing anyway.
The mobile phone situation in schools provides a window through which to see the erosion of the education sector. Much of the blame for this is unfairly placed on children, their families and societal challenges. However, I would argue, having worked within schools and seen how they have changed over the last 30 years, that education professionals are the problem. Many of them do not think critically at all. Those who do so often remain silent, allowing things to happen around them which they know are harmful to children but are too weak to do anything about it. Banning mobile phones tackles one of the many symptoms of the failing education system, but we must also be transparent about the root cause of the problem. Perhaps, eventually, we will succeed in restoring the education sector to an example Mr. Winter would have recognised, where children flourish and which we can be proud of.
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My kids’ secondary school never allowed them – and this was 15 years ago, and not an especially impressive school – bog standard comp. I assumed all schools had banned them long since.
If the little blighters cannot use mobile phones how will thjey get the texts about voting Labour at te GE after next and how will they know the latest line to take on wokery and Palestine.
When I was in school there already was a ban, even though most kids didn’t have a phone.
Are children being taught what to think rather than how to think?
The BBC tells us that children shouldn’t be thought of as being ‘mindlessly glued to screens’.
As a student at a university studying an evening course some years ago I witnessed how young students in their late teens sitting around tables in groups would regularly look at their phones and even take calls. The young woman lecturer ineffectually and repeatedly asked them to stop. They ignored her and only put the phones away when they had finished.
I compared this performance to the school regimen of the 1960s in which I was educated. The orderly conduct of those classes where each pupil sat at a separate desk facing forward started to be undermined when in 1969 the pupils were encouraged to address their teachers by their first names. All very matey.
Looking at this young woman lecturer at the university I could easily imagine she would have wished for a class of pupils of the 1960s sort. But of course that would be going back to the bad old days where teachers were just a brick in the wall.
Is it time to think outside the classroom? If the kids are not mindlessly glued to their screens, the teachers will have to appear on them in some tik-tok-style video.
It is the Liberal Progressive disease that has spread all over the western world where discipline is a dirty word.
Great, now if only they can have phone-free workplaces (while on the clock) as well. On both sides of the Atlantic. The resulting productivity improvement would likely enable us to cut the workweek to 30 hours right off the bat. And it would also provide real teeth to the right to disconnect as well, and of course allowing actual work-life balance by un-blurring the “always on” lines between the two. Plus, employees and supervisors would both be acting a lot less like zoned-out zombies and high-strung chihuahuas, at least after the initial brief detox and withdrawal period is over.
I get the impression that in my daughter’s school (secondary grammar) it’s hard to do without a phone – teachers put homework on Teams (instant messaging software – a bit like a superior WhatsApp), give updates etc. Almost all the homework is done on electronic platforms. I don’t really approve of this. Also it makes it very hard as a parent to follow what’s going on and help with homework.
All her friends have WhatsApp too, even though the recommended minimum age for that software is 17.
Agree about the great teachers setting the bar but the school management and, I assume the councils as check and balance, don’t have much back bone when a teacher makes a stand. My daughter has recently quit teaching due to poor leadership and being reported to the Westminster council for being racist when she wouldn’t back down, the school and Governors didn’t back her and she kept excluding one child. One of many black kids in the class but that fact didn’t matter. Reep what you sow
The other day during the half term holiday I was in a Coffee Shop (for some hours) with friends/ Two boys aged 14 & 16 sat there the whole time surrounded by school books.
They told us they were having to do this as they had a Maths exam and they had not been taught what they were going to be examined on. The teacher just hadn’t done it. Their worried faces were something I will never forget.
Teachers are leaving in droves and I would say that the extra pressure of making sure they don’t have mobile phones will only make things worse….
But Education Policy comes from Government. ——It is government who insist on all the equality diversity race and gender stuff in schools and it is government that stuff climate change dogma down the throats of pupils. Individual schools do not decide pupils need to save the planet, that all comes top down from government.—– If government wanted to ban phones and micro mini skirts in schools they could do it. But as usual with our systems of government nothing gets done, and one lot fight against the other lot mostly politicising every issue.
Schools and teachers who are either enthusiastically, or reluctantly (but for a quiet life) are going along with Stonewall’s trans/gender indoctrination, have lost all moral authority to teach.
End of.
Schools no longer appear to be centres of education; they have become centres of indoctrination where critical thinking is actively discouraged and only opinions which are approved by “woke” Education Professionals in the D of E/Quangocracy/Charity-Quangos are permitted.
Unless you’re a Muslim, of course. Then religious extremism and blasphemy takes priority.
Schools have been encouraged/bribed by governments and IT corporations to adopt ever-increasing IT since I started teaching in the 1980’s. It has its place but mostly a blackboard and books with hand-written exercises are better for the youngsters in my view.,and I taught computing.