Phone-free Preppies

Lacrosse sticks, yes; smartphones during class time, no

As my longtime readers know, I have been concerned about smartphone usage among children (and adults) for some time now. I’d like to write more about this issue, but while I work on other things (my biography of Judy Blume, my one-sided quarrel with David Brooks, my hunt for the perfect five-pocket brown cords, this li’l magazine), I am gratified that authors like Jonathan Haidt are on the tech-danger beat, pretty much all the time. But you know one thing I have that Haidt doesn’t? An email in my inbox from the headmaster of a New England prep school that has taken steps to reduce phone usage among its students.

Below, I will reprint that letter, with my annotations, my various thoughts on it scattered throughout. But first, let me say why we should care what boarding schools do about the phone issue. In a way, they are special laboratories, because they are totalizing environments. That is, the boarding high school is one of the very few institutions in American society that can really create a culture, by fiat, and enforce it. Some colleges and universities try, particularly religious ones, but they will always have limited success at best (having reported from a “dry” Christian campus, let me tell you, the students find ways to drink; having reported from a campus where students pledged not to have premarital sex, let me tell you—sex, they have some, premaritally). High school students break rules, too, of course, but less so, and with less success. They are simply monitored more, and, broadly speaking, more afraid of getting caught.

What’s more, boarding schools, being private, can expel students who don’t get with the program. And because their faculty members are not unionized, they can pretty easily fire teachers who don’t get with the program. And because students live on campus, they have fewer outside influences—the culture of their school is their culture, to a degree not seen in most corners of American society.

All of which is to say: if a private, boarding high school decides to ban smartphones during school hours, they have a good shot at succeeding. And if the rule contains exceptions (like, “phones will, however, be allowed in the game room”), it will be because they consciously chose to make those exceptions, rather than because they despaired of being able to enforce the rule. Boarding schools are a true laboratory, where we can see what it looks like to rewind the clock to a time before smartphones, or before their ubiquity.

Phone-free preppies running through a boarding-school meadow. (I have recently gotten grief for using AI images; in my day job at Arc magazine, I pay illustrators. I believe in illustrators. But I find the AI images funny and perfect for certain occasions. I hope those of you seeing this one will see what I mean. —MO)

All of which brings us to the letter I received this morning from the “dean of community life” at my high school alma mater, a private boarding school (well, mostly boarding; it’s 30 percent day students, and I was a day student in the Class of ’92). It’s a nifty document, smart and reasoned and redolent of open meadows through which happy children roam; it also, in its way, shows the limitations of a prep-school administration’s ambitions ca. 2025. The letter begins:

Dear ______ Families,

Happy New Year and welcome back to school. We are so grateful to have everyone back on campus and already feel the energy and vibrance our student community brings to the Island.

Now you may be asking, “What is ‘the Island’?” Funny you should ask.