It is time for India to ban smartphones in schools and colleges like Finland has

India Today

05-05-2025

First, it was all anecdotal. Over the years, as I have interacted with more and more people, I have come to believe — and I am using the word believe because this can also be construed as old-man-yells-at-moon — that young people seem to lack certain skills. And when I say skills, I am talking about work-related skills.I have noticed that, generally, young people are poor readers, not just of books but also anything that has printed text. They have difficulty with abstract ideas. They rarely notice subtext. They are mostly low on irony and sarcasm — likely because of their issues with subtext — and they struggle with problem-solving. Now, I am not throwing shade on Gen-Z and Millennials. They also have positive qualities in them, the kind of qualities that in certain cases, cover them in glory. But this piece is not about what Gen-Z and Millennials lack or what they have. Instead, it is about smartphones.advertisementWhat was anecdotal a few years ago is now increasingly turning empirical in 2025. Study after study reveals that people in the world, young and old alike, but the young in particular, are no longer that good with text, numbers, ideas and attention span. Some of these findings were recently covered by The Financial Times in an article titled 'Have humans passed peak brain power?' The article brings facts and figures to a feeling and notes that, since 2010, the cognitive decline among humans is real and not imagined. In general, we can no longer process numbers or read and comprehend in the same way as we used to do 30 to 40 years ago.
Oddly, and encouragingly, The Financial Times article did not reach a conclusion that humans have biologically lost their mental faculties. Instead, it blamed the decline on the world we live in. 'The good news is that underlying human intellectual capacity is surely undimmed,' John Burn-Murdoch wrote in his piece. 'But outcomes are a function of both potential and execution. For too many of us, the digital environment is hampering the latter.'advertisementIn other words, our cognitive decline is the result of screen-time. Since 2010 — that is when smartphones arrived in the scene — it seems that screen-time has gone up and our ability to read text and numbers has come down.This is probably the reason why countries have started taking note of smartphones and the havoc they seem to have been wrecking on people's minds. Given their ubiquity — and I must add a degree of usefulness — it is not possible for them to disappear from our lives. But countries have started limiting their usage wherever they can. Finland is the latest to do so. Its parliament passed a new law a few days ago, banning smartphone use in classrooms. The Netherlands is another country where similar rules exist. Italy, too, has done so and ditto for Brazil. At the same time, a number of countries have partial or conditional restrictions on smartphones in schools.It is high time India too comes out with a proper regulatory mechanism and guidelines to ban smartphones in schools. Ban — that word again which I dread. This necessitates that I must explain myself a bit.I do not want a ban on smartphones in schools and colleges because youngsters might use them to scroll through reels, or watch pornography, or share lascivious clips, or might use them to cheat in exams, or may end up playing violent video games, or might end up impacting their privacy because of the cameras and microphones in their phones. My reasons are not the reasons that one calls puritanical. I do not care about the prudishness or culture or 'corruption' of young minds. A ban is not even needed to keep children 'safe'. There are other ways to keep them safe. These are bad reasons to ban something.advertisementMy reason for suggesting a ban on smartphones is purely and plainly about what these devices are doing to our mental faculties. The world created by smartphones is a terrifying place for our brains. There is an information overload for which evolution hasn't wired us. It is this information — mostly junk and low-quality information — that led American writer John Naisbitt to quip decades ago, 'We are drowning in information, but are starved of knowledge.'Smartphones are increasingly leading to a world that Thomas Bernhard — the great hater as he was — presciently called 'stulted' at a time when smartphones did not even exist. Writing decades ago, Bernhard issued a warning against the primacy of images over text. 'The worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic images and attained its present deadly momentum when the images began to move,' Bernhard wrote in Extinction. 'Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralysed. Come the millennium, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking.'advertisementThe millennium has come, and while Bernhard is no longer alive to see the world he predicted, we increasingly get a sense that we are no longer thinking that sharply.A reversal is needed. Brought up feeding and feasting their eyes on screen, children and teens nowadays seem to be losing their sense of the world. And, of the word. Again, I am reminded of a few lines from a writer, although he wrote them in a different context. In Red Birds, Mohammed Hanif writes: 'Without their mobile phones and access to the internet, it was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their ears, and hence their ability to find things as they flew in the dark.'advertisementThis, I believe, is what has happened to all of us — and even more so to the generations that have grown up with small screens always attached to their hands. They are like bats that have lost the use of their ears and radar; now, each time they go out into the world, the noise, the light, and the chaos of it all render them immobile and dazed. They seem lost. We owe it to future generations that we give them the same skills that were given to us decades ago. Or else, we will be losing a little bit of that which made us dream big, create wonders and reshape our destinies.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch