Children start their day at the Bogaerts International School near Brussels by putting their smartphones in a locker.
“If we catch them with a phone, we confiscate it and we give it back at the end of the day,” said the school’s director, David Bogaerts.
Hundreds of schools across Brussels and Belgium’s southern region of Wallonia are set to follow the institution’s example. Over the summer, the Francophone community’s new government announced plans for a smartphone ban in primary schools and the first three years of secondary schools.
Many schools, however, aren’t waiting for the plan to be finalized before moving ahead with bans of their own.
The trend isn’t catching on only in Belgium: The Netherlands has a ban on the devices, and education ministers in France and Ireland said last week that they were also considering it.
Banning smartphones in the classroom seems like an easy fix amid growing concerns that the devices are a source of distraction and a hotspot for cyberbullying.
The effect of excessive screen time on kids’ mental health has shot up the political agenda — it even was name-checked by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her program for her next mandate.
“The early and teenage years are critical for brain and personality development — and are also times of vulnerability to harms from social media and excessive screen time,” she wrote.
Schools are now the primary place where this clash is on display, with teachers and administrators seeing many apps with the potential to distract pupils from learning. Some, such as TikTok, are well-known.
According to Bogaerts, Snapchat, which has a messaging function, is also still very popular among teens.
A relatively new kid on the block is TenTen, an app that turns into a live walkie-talkie, which helps students chat with friends in another classroom.
Shrinking attention spans
Apps like these force schools to think about “how to avoid abuses that could interfere with the smooth running of classes,” Géraldine Kamps, spokesperson for the Francophone school federation Wallonie-Bruxelles Enseignement (WBE), said in a statement.
The school federation has now drummed up a clear response: a total smartphone ban.
Some experts argue that bans are imposed only because earlier, less draconian attempts to regulate smartphone use inside classrooms had already failed.
“A common theme in schools was: a smartphone, we need to teach kids how to deal with that. It’s part of their life, it may have a place in school,” said Lieven De Marez, a professor in media, technology and innovation at Ghent University who also works with Belgian research center Imec.
However, teachers struggled to enforce their own rules simply because students’ urge to use smartphones was too high.
A total ban now has the benefit of clarity: “It will bring peace in schools. There won’t be any [cyber] bullying, teachers won’t be filmed, the attention span will be trained,” de Marez said.
But a ban also has a downside, he argued, by not teaching kids how to work or engage with smartphones between the crucial ages of 12 and 18, when the part of the brain that manages focus and attention is being formed.
Some suggest that smartphone apps could even help teach children how to have healthy relationships with their devices.
“There are specific applications inside the smartphone to check which apps are being used intensively, [or] how long you’re online, ” said Michel Walrave, a professor in communication studies at the University of Antwerp.
He argued that it could lead to in-class debates about how social media’s techniques can keep people glued to their phones.
In many schools, pupils also already use laptops during class, which could help kids navigate the digital world without long-running exposure to smartphones.
“Do they need a phone if they have a computer? Well, not at all,” Bogaerts said.