Hold the Phone!

“Instead [of allowing smart phones], the school gave everyone on campus – including staff – a Light Phone, that is, a ‘dumb’ phone with limited functionality. The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps. They are about the size of a deck of cards, with black and white screens. As one student put it: ‘It’s like the demon baby of an iPad and a Kindle.'” Our phones have turned all of us into demon babies. And replacing one kind of phone with another kind of phone is a sad indicator of how seemingly powerless we are to reverse or even slow the great device takeover. Here’s a story about phones and one school (and maybe one of our last stands). What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation.