Growing up in the Wild West of rapid technological development and expansion, most of my technological skills are self-taught. As I taught my first university course this past summer, I was faced with a room full of students who also seemed to have suffered this challenge. For teachers of all ages, the instinctual reaction is to simply avoid dealing with students and technology. It is endlessly frustrating to police students, and research consistently shows how much more beneficial the learning environment is when technology is not present. It increases comprehension, reduces anxiety, and increases engagement. Simple solutions I’ve experienced are outright bans or doing nothing.

Doing nothing ensures that the learning experience will be interrupted, and bans aren’t a productive long-term solution. The trends I’ve observed in higher education, especially with the increasing capabilities of tools like ChatGPT, are moving away from technological tools that became more prominent during and after the pandemic, and regressing towards analog tools, emphasizing a return to pen and paper. Blue books are making a comeback! Yet students find ways around bans: VPNs, decoy phones, texting via Apple Watch. Bans are antagonistic at their core, and antagonism is no way to set up successful habits.

This approach to controlling student usage of technology deals with technology in the same way we might think of dealing with a drug—it leads to addiction and loss of self-control, the solution being to forbid usage and get rid of the problem altogether. Except that strategy hasn’t actually worked for drugs either. The United States had a fifty year “war on drugs,” which was incredibly unsuccessful. Drug usage is on the rise. Students laugh at DARE programs and wear the t-shirts ironically. So, despite the indication that we’re headed to a war on phones, it likely won’t be the solution we need.

Perhaps we can look to drug programs that work to provide a guide to how we might think about dealing with technology issues. Experts are in agreement that bans or “wars” on drugs are problematic and don’t reduce drug usage, just push drug usage underground and make it much more dangerous, meaning addicts are less able to seek help. Rather, experts suggest harm reduction, which includes access to safe injection sites, support groups, investing in research, and accessibility of resources.

How would this translate to phone usage? We probably aren’t going to restrict phone usage to certain locations. But the overall principles of harm reduction are applicable, including public health interventions, access to resources, recognition of the problems, and not treating misuse as a moral failing on the part of the individuals who struggle with it.

Students are adept at using their phones in class not because they dislike school or don’t care about learning or the content, but because they can’t help it. Some definitely do care about the content. It can be challenging even as a graduate student to have healthy boundaries with my phone, and I know my experience is not unique amongst graduate students and even professors (students are not the only ones guilty of online shopping during presentations). Technology is designed to stimulate our brains. Social media is curated to keep you mindlessly engaged. Notifications appear on phones, tablets, laptops, wrists. Targeting the individual may help on a small scale, of course—addiction requires treatment—but the real change comes from regulating and holding responsible the drug manufacturers and designers.

And I won’t be able to resolve these issues in one semester-long class. We might discuss the topics of technology, but assisting students in developing longstanding habits takes much more effort than I alone can achieve. Ideally, this would be supported by systemic, policy-backed implementation across sectors of society from education to consumer protection. Treating phone addiction and our unhealthy relationship with technology as a public health problem enables concrete solutions.

In my classroom, I can’t implement such wide sweeping concrete solutions. But I can set clear boundaries and hold students to them. Not because I believe that they’ve failed morally somehow, but because I hope that positive or negative incentives can cause them to reflect on their behavior. I explain the boundaries I set, talking to the students about why it’s important to be fully present. And I enforce the boundaries I set by holding students accountable. I don’t want the students to feel policed, but I want them to know that I do pay attention and that phone usage does have impacts on others around them, beyond the negative impact it has on their own learning experience.

Phones may not be conducive to an classroom environment, and bans do see success when it comes to getting students to focus. But what happens when those students enter the workforce and have to self-manage? This is often a concern brought up when discussing the banning of cell phones in schools. The reasoning for inclusion of devices is engagement, interactivity, etc. (Think, Kahoot!). But are these just tools that happen to use phones, or are they tools that productively engage with technology? This is a crucial difference! Sort of like the difference between giving someone who struggles with addiction pain medication with opiates and giving someone with an opiate addiction methadone.

Furthermore, it is important to not run away from confronting the role that phones, social media, and technology have more broadly in the subjects that we work in. How do we engage socially online? How do we think critically about the content we engage with online? How do we have healthy habits and relationships with the technology that permeates every corner of society? These are questions I ask myself as a current student who grew up with the internet, questions I hope to encourage my students to think about as an instructor, and questions I hope you, too, will engage with.

Junia Paulus

Junia Paulus is a current MA student in philosophy at Georgia State University, originally from Seattle. In addition to her philosophical interests in social and political philosophy and technology, she is interested in education (especially higher education) and the intersections of academia and government.