Banning Cellphones in Schools: Unveiling the Drawbacks and Controversies - Report Sample

Teenagers in the United States are coming of age when technology is growing at a tremendous rate. Each of them has a lot of knowledge of how they should use many electronic devices currently on the market. Smartphones are one of the most used electronic devices in the country, and they have grown to become a significant menace in many parts of the world. Cases of teenagers getting depressed, leading to suicide, have increased over the years, and gaming addiction and social media use get intense every day. However, more cell phones are showing up in schools each year, with reports from Tech Crunch in the United States showing that many children receive their first phone at 10. Despite the increased child phone ownership in the United States, cell phones should be banned in schools because they have more disadvantages than advantages.

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Cellphones create channels for students to cheat when carried to class. Since students were allowed to bring their phones to class, cases of exam irregularities have increased, with most of them using their cell phones to get answers to tests and exams against school regulations (Cain 738). Unlike in the past, where students wrote answers on their arms or a piece of paper, the availability of cellphones that have access to the internet has made it easier to cheat and get answers to exams provided. Students can also text each other the answers during a test making cheating easier.

Cellphones also disconnect teenagers, especially those in college, from the real outside world. With the increasing number of people with cellphones in school, modern students prefer making online friends to physically interacting with other students in school. This has led them to be disconnected from the real world, creating development challenges where they cannot interact with other students because they are used to chatting and calling strangers from the internet (Cain 739). Girls are the most vulnerable to this vice because most of them who meet new friends online end up meeting them, which poses a threat to their security. Many teens spend time with the friends they meet online outside of school, which threatens stranger danger when the cellphones are allowed into class.

Cellphones and easy access to the internet also increase the chances of students getting cyberbullied. Some strangers online use their time to bully other people by harassing and threatening them, body shaming, and spreading certain false rumors about some individuals. Students in possession of a phone in class are affected the most when they are targeted by bullies online because they have access to the internet and see every negative thing being said about them (Fjortoft et al. 215). Most of the students become depressed due to this societal vice, and it affects their performance in class and the way they pay attention in school.

Suicide cases have also increased among young students due to depression and bullying in school and from the internet. Ownership of cellphones in school also causes some students to bully other students they do not like by making them the topic of discussion in school forums like Facebook and WhatsApp. The victims experience stressful periods. Most of them end up transferring to another school or failing in their exams, with a small percentage of them committing suicide because of their image getting tainted by fellow schoolmates.

Possessing cellphones in school also makes students addicted to gaming and chatting, which interferes with their school concentration levels. Most students spend a lot of their time playing games and talking to their online friends, which affects how they concentrate in class (Twenge 4). They are forced to divide their attention between listening to the teacher and using their devices, and most of the time, all their attention switches to the cellphones because they are unable to multitask. Only a small percentage of people worldwide can multitask, meaning that a lot of information loss occurs when students are allowed to have cellphones in schools.

Another reason why cellphones should be banned in schools is that these electronic devices offer access to mature content for students. Such content affects their brains as they are exposed to images and videos that damage their thinking and push them to try what they see. This leads to early pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, and even dropping out of school after becoming parents at a young age or getting infected with some untreatable diseases such as AIDS. Cases of sexual assault have also increased in schools due to students watching graphic materials on their cellphones and trying what they see, especially when they watch violent videos.

Using cellphones in class distracts both the owners of the devices, other students, and the teachers. Students around other students using a smartphone are distracted a lot by the extra activities in class. They cannot concentrate in class, which causes them not to understand anything; hence, they fail because multitasking is impossible for them (Twenge 5). Cellphones also create a safety concern for many students in school, as many of them receive sexual solicitation from strangers through their online activities. Many students do not talk to people they trust in such conversations and end up meeting people they have only known online. This poses a danger to their lives as they can easily get abducted, sexually abused, or even killed.

Counterargument

On the contrary, despite cellphones having many adverse effects on students, they can be used for positive school gains, mainly when used to study and access learning materials. Instructors can create various applications that can only be accessed using cellphones, providing learning materials, and giving them access (Wissman and Hogan 131). The students can use video learning to read ahead of where the instructor left off and look up any information about something that they did not understand when it was being taught. Online resources provide the students with a full curriculum on the specific subjects they are supposed to review, increasing their knowledge away from the usual learning materials in class. Students can also use their cellphones to access various learning tools such as playing games as long as they can identify authentic resources for information.

Another counterargument for banning cellphones in schools is that they provide students with opportunities for multimedia learning. Instructors can easily tell students to search for particular videos and watch them. The instructors then talk about the information presented in the videos, making the learning process more interesting and insightful (Johnson and Kritsonis 4). Such visual learning makes it easy for students to retain vast amounts of information in a short period. They can also experience learning from a completely different perspective from their own or that of their instructors. Some people argue that learning in school involves more than writing and reading; hence, students should have cellphones in school. Cellphones allow for online interactions, which are just as crucial as having face-to-face interactions in the learning process. Cellphones offer the chance to engage with each other through social media, texts, and other online forums. They only need to be taught how to avoid the toxic side of cellphones, and they will benefit from the phones.

Rebuttal for Counterargument

Despite cellphones having several benefits to the students when they carry them to school, the disadvantages surpass them. It is challenging for students to concentrate in class when they have their cellphones; hence they experience lower grades and have their studies affected (Johnson and Kritsonis 3). A few of them use the internet to access reading materials and other online courses placed by their instructors. Many of them use their cellphones for gaming and accessing social media sites, which affects their critical thinking level and makes it hard to understand many concepts in class.

Cellphones compromise the students' security because they trust strangers they meet online more than the people they meet in real life. Most of them meet these strangers, increasing their chances of getting sexually assaulted, abducted, or killed, and the school is blamed for such acts (Johnson and Kritsonis 5). Cellphones also create unhealthy competition between the students because instead of competing to see who gets better grades, they compete to ensure that they have the best cellphones in school. This demoralizes those who cannot afford expensive cellphones, leading to lower grades and lower self-esteem. Cases of theft may increase when students are allowed to carry phones as some people steal other students’ gadgets and sell them for their gains.

Conclusion

Cellphones have many benefits when allowed in school, but the disadvantages are very extreme in that they sometimes make it impossible for students to concentrate and pass in their studies. Schools in the United States should ban cellphones on their premises due to teenagers getting depressed, leading to suicide. Over the years, cellphone adoption has also led students to addiction to gaming and social media use, which has caused many of them to live abnormal lives where they interact with online friends and ignore those they see physically, including their schoolmates and instructors. Students who use phones in school experience many physical and emotional problems and if not taken care of, can lead to depression and suicide.

Works Cited

Cain, Jeff. "It’s time to confront student mental health issues associated with smartphones and social media." American journal of Pharmaceutical Education 82.7 (2018). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6181159/pdf/ajpe6862.pdf

Fjortoft, Nancy, Jacob Gettig, and Melinda Verdone. "Smartphones, memory, and pharmacy education." American journal of Pharmaceutical Education 82.3 (2018). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5909880/pdf/ajpe7054.pdf

Johnson, Clarence, and William Allan Kritsonis. "National School Debate: Banning Cell Phones in Public Schools: Analyzing a National School and Community Relations Problem." Online Submission 25.4 (2007). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497423.pdf

Twenge, Jean M. "Have smartphones destroyed a generation." The Atlantic 9 (2017): 2017. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6b8626297114f0da87eec7/t/5c50b2554d7a9c41a9ebf73f/1548792408542/Twenge_Has+the+smartphone+destroyed+a+genertation_2017.pdf

Wissman, Kevin, and Linda Hogan. "We need to be smarter than our smartphones." American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 83.1 (2019): 131-132. https://www.ajpe.org/content/ajpe/83/1/7350.full.pdf