Banning to Oblivion

Breaking news from the Ministry of Youth:

We’ve seen an unprecedented rise in drowning deaths among children.

The expert report by the Swimming Commission for a Better Life found that in 95% of drowning cases, the main cause is children’s inability to swim.

Such a finding is unexpected and alarming, posing an unprecedented threat to our country’s safety.

Therefore, the Ministry has decided to prohibit all children from accessing public pools, spas, and river bridges.

From now on, we will also require adult supervision when children fill glasses with tap water or jump over puddles, as well as regular and thorough reporting on minor safety during these activities.

Image source: Picryl

Disclaimer

There is a rising trend of European countries placing blanket bans on mobile phones and other electronic devices in schools¹, Czechia being one of them.

As the intro implies, I am strongly opposed to this decision. The reasons for this are the core of this article. At the same time, I want to clarify that I am not against the principle of regulating phone use in schools. Using phones is undeniably problematic and needs to be handled carefully.

For example, 36% of children in a Czech survey stated they had been photographed by a peer without consent. Firth et al. (2019) argue that heavy use of digital media leads to cognitive deterioration, especially for tasks that require sustained attention. Starting as young as age 8, children have access to explicit content and know how to easily bypass verification mechanisms.

However, none of this implies that a blanket state regulation is the answer. Below is my critique of the most problematic aspects of this approach.

#1. Children Have No Say

The UK has banned phones, and students view the decision as overly punitive. The same survey reveals a sharp divide between adults and children: while most parents and teachers supported a blanket ban, most students opposed it. Along with the externally imposed restriction, will children be also provided information about why it is actually being applied? Or should we invite children into the decision process instead, raising awareness about the core issue as a result?

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) has long shaped how psychologists understand intrinsic motivation, far beyond the realm of education. Time and again, SDT has proven to be a robust framework for creating policies that actually improve well-being. Autonomy is one of its three core pillars, alongside connectedness and mastery.

Stone et al. (2009) show that a sense of autonomy in the workplace leads to lower levels of anxiety and depression. By extension, the exact same principle applies to schools. When people are forced to follow arbitrary rules, they stop engaging with the core activity and start chasing external rewards, or avoiding punishment. Under a blanket ban, obedience and fear of consequences become the primary motivators, completely replacing any internal understanding of why excessive phone use is harmful in the first place.

Involving children in the rule-making process is one of the most reliable ways to get them to actually stick to those rules. Indeed, Cullen and Oppenheimer (2024) suggest that opt-in attendance models lead to higher school attendance. While that isn’t the same as resisting the urge to scroll a student’s For You page, it shows that students are willing to voluntarily accept restrictive rules—they just need to know what they are getting in return.

If students want to use phones during the school day, let them make the case for why that is a good idea. Defending their position forces them to become more aware of the technology’s inherent risks.²

On paper, the Czech educational framework promises that:

By the end of basic education, students will:

• Recognize a wide variety of problematic situations both at school and outside of it, identify and understand the problem, reflect on discrepancies and their causes, consider and plan ways to solve problems, and use their own judgment and experience to do so

• Think critically, make thoughtful decisions, defend those decisions, take responsibility for their choices, and evaluate the results of their actions.

Source: NPI

Yet in practice, we don’t trust them to manage their relationship with technologies whose everyday pitfalls they often understand better than the adults around them. Why should children care about self-regulation when the ban was passed by adults who are often just as addicted to their screens as the kids are?

Top-down state bans also cultivate learned helplessness, very often associated to depression. By stripping away agency, students are left with nothing to negotiate or resist. They have no way to influence the law, and neither do their teachers or principals. It creates an environment of compliance:

Authority and order are necessary evils, otherwise society would collapse.

Amid all this do-goodism and back-patting while approving blanket bans for children, aren’t we forgetting that we adults might need correction and education, too? Image source: Picryl

This leads directly to my next point: relying on sweeping legislation raises increasingly obedient, dependent citizens.

#2. Law defers responsibility and autonomy

As already mentioned, SDT-informed policies have been linked to improving student motivation. The proposed ban more or less violates all three core elements of SDT: autonomy, mastery, and connectedness.

Autonomy

Instead of letting students decide³ how they want to use phones, we tell them what’s best for them. Is legal paternalism how we build critical thinking, a term recently repeated ad nauseam?

There is also a very common argument that mobile apps hijack the reward systems of students, endangering their attention and ability to focus. But that should be an argument for improving awareness of such effects in schools instead of banning devices completely outside of classes. In many ways, hard drugs share similarities with social media; the “subtle” difference between a mobile phone and cocaine is that a phone can be a versatile device.⁴

Mastery

Instead of letting students grapple with challenges and drawbacks in a controlled environment, they are very often left consuming digital media and technology unchecked in their free time. By framing school as a “sanctuary for students”⁵ to get away from algorithmic traps, we frame any digital technology as inherently toxic.

Schools are actually the perfect environment for strengthening the “digital immune system” of children. We shouldn’t police technology usage by allowing only a prescribed set of applications and websites: no such whitelist will exist once children leave school.

Connectedness

Law-imposed bans put students in a safety cage, hoping that not exposing them to the bad, evil technology will somehow prepare them for dealing with it in adult life.⁶

Also, the research linked above uncovers an interesting phenomenon: children seem to suffer, whereas older adults seem to prosper from using digital technologies. I see two possible explanations for this, which are not mutually exclusive:

1. The research on digital media is biased and we want to hear and see that children are holding it wrong (literally), whereas elderly people using tech decrease their loneliness.
2. Children and young adults do not have proper control over their digital media consumption, and we should talk to them about how to use it safely and advantageously.

We have strong evidence that digital technologies can be used beneficially. Why can’t we use them for the benefit of children? Image source: Picryl

We’re also conditioning students for the adult panopticon that’s becoming more prevalent as more legislation is passed. By passing new restrictions and regulations, the degree of totalitarianism increases, despite the widespread belief in the “Almighty democracy” protecting us from totality. This way, we are forcefully put in a state of constant self-surveillance and environmental monitoring.

#3. Political Egocentrism

Similar to the 2025 amendment to the law banning the promotion of communism, the amendment to the Education Act feels to me like more of an attempt to appeal to voters than an effort to fundamentally change the country’s legal framework.

The amendment barely changes anything, as schools and teachers have the final word on where technology will be used in the vast majority of cases, apart from children younger than 10 where the ban seems to be absolute. The amendment, however, doesn’t even attempt to explain why that specific choice was made, apart from generalist safety declarations that can justify basically any political decision.

Furthermore, the amendment seems to be in contradiction with the previous trend. Both the Czech School Inspectorate and the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports consistently refused to impose a blanket ban. Therefore, the amendment feels rushed and cobbled together.

Contrary to what the amendment says, banning phones means teachers have another responsibility on top of what they’re already obliged to do, as the regulation applies explicitly to the school environment where it needs to be enforced by someone. This can have side effects and drawbacks that the authors of this amendment might have overlooked or handwaved.

Image source: Picryl

Furthermore, the blanket ban doesn’t have as much scientifically justifiable ground as it’s commonly presented. Research paints a much more nuanced picture:

1. Livingstone and Byrne (2018) suggest that globally, less digitally apt parents tend to enforce restrictive measures, whereas more educated parents prefer enabling mediation. This suggests the amendment stems more from the authors’ lack of knowledge rather than the availability thereof, and that adults do not have one generally conclusive and shared strategy for dealing with digital threats.
2. King et al. (2024) suggest that having or not having a phone ban in comparatively similar conditions in Australian schools did not differ significantly, or there were minimal differences, in terms of problematic use of mobile phones, academic engagement, school belonging, and bullying. Even though the Australian school system operates under different conditions, the amendment might not have as much weight as its authors think, as the quality of alternatives to pathological technology use is much more important.⁷
3. Orben and Przybylski (2019) suggest that empirical evidence of negative impact on well-being is statistically insignificant and that the relation between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is too small to warrant policy change. To me, this suggests the inherent complexity behind studying digital technologies and that we should be careful with assigning globally applicable causality to such a complicated matter.

Researchers studying social media usage among minors often call for more nuanced and targeted research that eliminates other confounding factors these demographics face. For example, Livingstone suggests that social disadvantage is linked both to greater screen use and to negative life outcomes.

My two cents

It’s easy and cheap to say we should make education so engaging that using phones for doomscrolling during classes is actually the less enticing and more boring alternative. I’m aware of how difficult an undertaking that is, especially in the presence of constantly disruptive technologies.

Children being hooked to their phones—irrespective of where that addiction is “cultivated”—is their scream for help and attention. They just don’t know any better because they feel disconnected from whatever they are taught at school, being constantly met with “arbitrary” rules made by adults that disregard their perspective, just to return home to their overburdened parents.⁸

By the same token, the dominance of the nuclear family in modern society is one of the main factors in children and young adults using digital technology pathologically. Apart from school, they have nobody to talk to in person on a daily basis. Banning phones, wherever we want, will not change that.

Digital media and technology in general aren’t inherently harmful; it’s just that the vast majority of their applications are. That’s because such infrastructure is mostly developed and run by companies that have penetrated everyone’s personal life, successfully disregarding and deprecating human agency, privacy, and respect.

That’s why it makes sense to offer uninvasive and agency-affirming alternatives. That’s also why I’m developing Heuri.

Happy learning!

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1. From now on, I will collectively refer to this whole group as “phones”. ↩︎

2. I’m not arguing for manipulating children into realizing how bad phones are. Quite the contrary: if the class were to decide that they will use phones, let them have them and bear all the consequences together with teachers. That’s a far stronger lesson than the Almighty telling us that using phones is bad. ↩︎

3. Notice the difference between letting schools decide and letting students decide. ↩︎

4. Some might argue that cocaine might have that effect, too, but the issue with hard drugs is that they are far more addictive than, for example, social media. That’s why I think it makes sense to self-regulate social media use, compared to self-regulating cocaine addiction where that’s close to impossible. ↩︎

5. To be fair, the Czech amendment banning phones isn’t written in this spiritual way, but it is a very common narrative and picture people paint. ↩︎

6. I am fully aware that the ban explicitly omits using technology for educational purposes. Are we so naive, however, to think that students obey such rules and that there are no ways of bypassing them? ↩︎

7. Paradoxically, this is the only positive I see behind the blanket ban: it might uncover how poorly children relate to the way education is presented to them. ↩︎

8. Even that is sometimes asking too much, as their parents are much more likely to separate than ever before. ↩︎