Smartphones at school: between kidnapping or Far West, a middle ground is needed

When to a confrontation between parents and principal must intervene 118 and the police, it means that those parents are obviously a big part of the problem. On this, there is no appeal. And the story that happened to scientific high school Ettore Majorana of Latinawhere some family members of a female student would verbally assaulted the head teacher guilty of having imposed the ban on smartphones in his institution (the precise contours of the story are to be clarified, but we are interested up to a certain point), certifies it. The young woman is unfortunate to have grown up with those who think of relating through violence.

In the background, however, the problem remains in all its inscrutability and has persecuted managers, teachers and most of the families for years, since the times of the “feature phones”, Nokia and company at the turn of the millennium: there is a third way between Morning “kidnapping” of the smartphone and compulsive delirium that devastates attention and teaching when this is left in the hands of the students? In other words, how do you deprive adolescents of a tool that is the lock pick of their daily life, the object – precious and at the same time taken for granted – that mediates, overlaps and stitches together the different levels of existence, sending them in immediate withdrawal crisis? And at the same time, how can you manage to protect the dignity of a morning of teaching that deserves the right concentration, a decent threshold of attention and the little respect that still owes to a classroom, the first and perhaps only investment in our future?

Difficult to answer because the question, both in pedagogical and publicistic terms, has always been one of the favorite battlegrounds by the apocalyptic and integrated, including pedagogues of various schools and popularizers, teachers and philosophers, parents and students, writers and popularizers. Each convinced of his reasons for always keeping in his hand or, more rarely, eliminating the telephone from the counter and even from his pockets. It is no coincidence that the shelves of the childcare, sociology and adolescence sections of the bookstores are full of manuals that no one has ever read after all. Yet there may be concrete proposals that go from absolute ban to Far West, humble and minimal but perhaps able to lend a hand: for example, a pact that requires maximum attention for most of the lesson time in exchange for 5 final minutes. of informal confrontation and, en passant, smartphone control? I know it, to some it will seem like a surrender. But the important thing is to bring home the result. And if it saves us a few brawls between principals and parents, even better.

The opinion

“It takes a middle ground. In my dream world, the box would not be needed – explains a Wired Italy Valentina Farinaccio, writer, head of events at the Moby Dick cultural hub in Rome, engaged in numerous training initiatives also in schools -. The kids know, because they were taught this when they grew up, that in some situations telephones should not be used. Simply because that rule must be respected. Other than the world of dreams: in the world in which I actually believe, made up of trust towards the boys, it is enough that they are told to keep their cell phones off, closed in a backpack. Obviously this requires a little more control on the part of the teachers, a little more attention, a little more dialogue, elements that are always desirable regardless of the cellular theme.“.