Ottawa Sun Column
March 13, 2007
My piece on Notre Dame High School banning the use of personal electronic devices on school property is on page 15 of today’s Ottawa Sun. If you don’t have a paper copy, you can read it online.
In summary, our schools need to do more educating and less banning. Pushing a social problem off school property by banning technology may be easier for the school, but it benefits neither society nor students.
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Interesting article, but I disagree with you on a number of points…
Notre Dame High School has “banned the use of cellulars and other personal electronic devices (PEDs) on school property — be it in class or out.”
The school has missed the point. Electronic devices are not the problem. The real problem is how they are used. Shame on our schools for not teaching this.
The school IS teaching it. It’s teaching it by saying “use of these devices in the academic setting is not appropriate and if you use them on the property you will face consequences.”
That is a CRUCIAL lesson. It teaches that you can’t always do what you want just because it feels good. It attempts to remove a MAJOR distraction from the academic environment. Indeed, your tax dollars are being wasted by having individual students, and indeed entire classrooms disrupted by device-users.
In a perfect world, there would not need to be a ban because properly raised youths would have been taught by their parents that using such devices at school is at best inappropriate, almost invariably rude, and possibly illegal. However, since parents have clearly abrogated that responsibility, it falls on the school to make a rule. Perhaps there’s a good lesson there too.
Technology is advancing so fast that much of society is struggling to keep up. Our legal system takes years to adapt to any significant technological advancements and so does etiquette.
Except that cellular and portable phones have been around longer than any student currently in high school has been alive… Handheld video games were available before I went to high school in 1979.
It has taken years, and the etiquette is well established. Again, since children are clearly not being taught the etiquette at home, the onus falls on the state to make the point.
It’s not a knee-jerk reaction as you state. Inappropriate use of electronic devices has been a problem in schools that I have heard going back at least a dozen years. Students have been told before, their parents have been told before. When flexible rules fail, rigid rules must be brought in.
One would expect high school principals and teachers to be in touch with society and students. Cellphones and MP3 players are part of everyday life and a knee-jerk ban isn’t going to change that.
Sex is a part of my life, but if I have it at the office I get fired. Everyone’s life is full of things that are “part of everyday life” and yet are still banned in certain places and conditions. Children might as well learn that early because it is much harder to drive the point home to an adult.
In this case, a student allegedly captured footage of a teacher and some students in a school hallway with a cellphone camera and posted it on YouTube without their consent.
The obvious solution here is to have YouTube restrict posting to adults only, so the adult can be held properly responsible for the content of the material they post.
The other lesson here is “don’t be a dumbass where you can get photographed because the photos might be posted on the internet.” That’s a REALLY important lesson that doesn’t get taught enough.
Banning the use of electronic devices on school grounds doesn’t solve the problem, it only pushes it elsewhere.
No, it doesn’t push it anywhere. It’s a good first step in teaching responsible use of electronic devices because it makes people think “am I allowed to use this here” – a binary decision with clearly defined sides. That kind of a decision is appropriate even for very young people, especially because, as you noted, even adults seem to have considerable difficulty with personal judgement when it comes to appropriate times and places to use their electronics.
Dang, it sucked the formatting out of my comment.