Why Mobile Phone Pouches are all Soundbite and an Alternative Plan
If you were to tell me the story from this year’s budget that would carry the most legs would be one from the education budget, I wouldn’t have believed you, and yet here we are. Minister Norma Foley has managed to bring The Department of Education to the forefront of the media headlines but for all the wrong reasons. Her decision to allocate €9m of the education budget to funding mobile phone pouches for secondary school students has been met with a wave of criticism and ridicule from almost everybody.
For my efforts, I decided to list some of the things that €9m could be spent on for some context.
The post on X was quoted on RTE News, The Tonight Show on Virgin Media TV and the web channel, Joe.ie. I don’t think anything I’ve ever put on X has ever made the news! However, I want to use this article to expand my thoughts on this obviously opportunistic but misguided idea from Minister Norma Foley and her advisory team.
Not that the Department of Education was ever deeply interested in education, or pedagogy at least, since the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve noticed a shift in policy from decisions loosely based on children’s educational needs to one that is focused on parents’ pockets. If you think of the big Department of Education headlines over the last few years, they have all been about issues that you’d expect to see in a parent WhatsApp group.
Perhaps it began when the Department of Education realised that the only thing parents seemed to care about during the pandemic was when the schools were going to reopen and that parents didn’t seem to care what kind of conditions the children (or the staff) would face as long as they all were in the building.
The big hitting decisions from the Department of Education have been to supply free bus transport to as many children as possible; to partially pay for school books for all students all the way to Leaving Cert; to waive examination fees; to create an overly complicated school meals’ programme so everyone gets free lunches; and now, buying mobile phone pouches for students.
I think the biggest error of judgment by the Minister for what her advisors have now called “pouch plan” was trying to sell it as a mental health and wellbeing initiative. In light of the crisis in mental health services for young people, it came across as vulgar and offensive, as if a locked-away mobile phone was going to make a single dent in the long waiting lists for services for children.
One might have forgiven the Minister if she had offered these phone pouches along with an expansion for therapeutic services for young people but the increase to mental health services was only €2.5m. Standing beside the €9m bill for expensive magnetic plastic pockets didn’t sit well.
However, what’s made things worse is something that I’ve witnessed with politicians over the last number of years — a strange need for party colleagues to jump to the defence of a bad decision. The worst of these was Jack Chambers, the Minister for Finance, who chastised a Sinn Féin politician, without the slightest bit of irony, for “playing politics” with young people’s mental health. The official Fianna Fáil social media account obviously didn’t see the irony either.
Over the next couple of days, the Minister seemed to try and double-down on trying to justify this ludicrous budgetary measure, firstly in The Journal and then in a rather odd attempt in the Irish Independent, where some advisor thought that a joke about bluetooth being a result of eating a Mr. Freeze, might endear her to the audience — parents who were likely to be ice-pop munching children back in the day just like her. (I wonder would she even know what flavour the blue Mr. Freeze’s were.)
However, all the politicking aside, and let’s forget about the cost of the pouches, (because people are also trying to defend the decision as a small drop in the ocean of the budget), why are these pouches not the answer? In fact, what is the answer?
I’ve been advising teachers in the use of technology in education for over 20 years. I created one of Ireland’s first ever cross-curricular education games, Who Took The Book back in 2001 with one of the pioneers of educational technology, Robbie O’Leary, and I’ve been around for every effort the government have made around educational technology since.
While a lot has changed over the twenty years, one thing has not. I have argued that when technology is used well, it can be one of the most powerful tools for learning you can have. I have also long argued that as well as being an important resource, it is also something that creates the most innovative methodologies, most of which are vital in the 21st century.
Can anyone working in the IT sector imagine not using collaborative tools such as GitHub? Could anyone working in social media do so without the creativity that technology gives? What research and development position doesn’t use technology to aid them in their critical thinking of complex problems?
Schools are incredible places for learning and harnessing the overwhelming good that technology can offer to a student. For example, could you ever imagine how you might have learned about the Space Station when you were in school? With technology, children can talk to a real life astronaut from their classroom!
Of course, like any powerful tool, technology can be all of the things that parents like me fear. When you have a tool that allows one to communicate with an astronaut or a scientist or a famous conservationist, it also allows a child to communicate with anyone. Unfortunately, there is a real risk this could be a predator in a chat forum, but it could also be another child and it can become a platform for cyber-bullying and inappropriate behaviours.
Likewise, technology can offer young people the opportunity to look at anything from the coral reefs off Australia to the Burren in Co. Clare from the comfort of their classroom seat. On the flip side, they can be at home watching all sorts of dreadful content, some of it dangerous.
And it’s the flip side that has become more and more dangerous over the last number of years as we have become much bigger consumers of technology than creators of it. Unfortunately, over the last number of years many adults have passed on the devices to children for that purpose — consumption. Whether that’s popping on a film on a long drive or propping up a phone when in a restaurant, whether it’s shoving a little screen in front of a crying baby to letting your teenager bring their device to bed, these are the kinds of things that turn people off technology. It’s where you would have heard the argument before COVID-19 about children getting too much screen time. I argued at the time that we shouldn’t be looking at technology so simply. Consumption is very different to creativity.
However, when one adds the social element to technology consumption, as well as algorithms designed to ensure the user stays hooked on the device, I had to concede that my attitude to technology and young people changed. I would not advocate for a child to own a smartphone anymore. The trouble is that almost every young person over the age of eleven has one and we have to make some choices.
On one hand, we have to teach young people how to use devices responsibly and meaningfully, and on the other hand we have to be aware of the dangers that lurk with them. We need to look at proper solutions because putting the phones into pouches during the school day doesn’t get to the root of any of the problems.
For example, most problems with mobile phones happen outside of the school and usually out of sight. In some ways, it would nearly be better to give the phone pouches and tell parents to put their credit cards in it during the hours mobile phone shops are open!
Ultimately, no child is born glued to their smartphone. When a parent decides to buy a smartphone for their child, they are making that choice and with that choice they should be taking on that responsibility. This is not a helpless act. As I get closer to the point where I may feel the need to buy my child a phone, I get more and more angry about it. It seems there is a collective resignation from parents and it’s really frustrating.
In some ways there’s a correlation with the sacraments in schools. Nobody seems to believe in the religion, or even like it, but the parents all go along with it anyway. While my child isn’t going down that road, the sacraments are something that excludes a child for one day. Not having a smartphone ensures exclusion until one caves in. Part of me wishes that parents would simply not buy the bloody things but it’s clear that isn’t happening even though I have yet to meet a parent that is delighted to have bought a smartphone for their child.
One simplistic answer is to make it illegal to buy a smartphone for a child or for a child to own a smartphone. The problem with this solution is that it’s unlikely to fully work. While it would be easy to ensure that a child could not buy a smartphone in the same way a child cannot buy cigarettes or alcohol, it is very difficult to persuade parents not to buy a smartphone for their child. It isn’t that long ago that nobody thought anything of sending their child to the local shop to by cigarettes for their parents with a note. I don’t think anyone thinks that’s normal either. I think people would say it is vulgar. Perhaps that is where we need to start looking — how do we make it as vulgar for a child to be scrolling on a smartphone as it would be to watch a child taking a drag of a cigarette?
Maybe a better analogy (and solution) would be how most people look at toy guns versus real guns. While I’m not in favour of toy guns, I don’t mind a water pistol. Wherever you are on the spectrum of gun-shaped things, there is probably some point where you deem it to be ok. I wouldn’t have as much hesitation about buying my child a mobile phone that was designed for children if it contained only the things it needed, no more no less. To me a Smartphone is only as dangerous as the applications that are on it. A gun without bullets is scary enough but you won’t kill anyone with it. A water pistol is not scary at all and you also won’t kill anyone!
Similarly a Smartphone without social media, communication apps, social gaming, full internet and so on could be a very useful tool indeed and not dangerous. The amazing thing is that this already exists. It is entirely possible to lock a phone down from any distractions, dangers and bad actors easily enough. We could do it on our own phones but we choose not to do so. I am as guilty of this. In fact, in writing this article, I have checked my phone dozens of times. If we don’t want our kids to suffer the same affliction, we need to remove notifications from phones. Better yet, we need to remove any apps that rely on notifications.
Obviously this isn’t enough because it doesn’t take a notification for me to distract myself from my phone. Every few minutes, I might check my email or check my Twitter/X feed and so on. The solution for young people here is to remove access to most communication tools and only allow access to people that parents have physically approved, and, can take responsibility for should anything go wrong. With this in mind, I would think a highly restrictive messaging app with the capabilities of a Nokia 3210. In fact, what I’m essentially arguing for is that children should not have access to a device that is any more powerful than the phones that were readily available before 1999.
In a way, we need to make these kinds of phones the water pistols of the mobile phone world. Children do not need the adult versions of the devices because they are not appropriate. A good rule of thumb with mobile phones should be — if you are able to access pornography on it, a child should not have access to it. That basically wipes out every smartphone.
One of the biggest reasons that people will offer to counter this argument is that sometimes a smartphone is the only device in a family home, and if children need to do homework or research, this is all that is available to them.
And this leads me to where we would be better investing the €9m. €9m would buy 30,000 very decent laptop devices. That’s enough for approximately 1 in 16 second level students in the country. I don’t think anyone would object to doubling or trebling that €9m to ensure there are enough safe devices so that young people could complete their schoolwork, where necessary. These devices can be as locked down as any other device, allowing only what the school requires.
Perhaps you may think I am living in some sort of fantasy land. Wouldn’t young people instantly find ways around this? Like every other forbidden fruit in history, it is our job to keep up with young people. However, you may not agree, so I’ve come up with another solution, which would force Internet providers to require age identification before logging into any browser.
When I want to access my bank account, I have to prove I am who I am. The technology already exists for face recognition or fingerprint recognition and so on. We need to utilise whatever technology is out there to restrict what young people see, in the same way as we restrict young people from buying alcohol or voting in elections or watching films aimed at grown ups and so on.
We also need the various social platforms to desist from pumping out content to young people that is not age-appropriate. This would be another solution to the issue that would help somewhat.
As you can see, I don’t think the pocket pouches are the answer to the problem. They aren’t even close to the root or the solution to the problem. We desperately need to treat smartphones as adult-only devices and create versions for children and younger people because we need to build them up for responsible usage.
I realise my ideas need a lot more fleshing out. They are rudimentary at best but I’d argue they are less rudimentary than wasting €9m on lockable phone pouches, which young people already know how to navigate if they really want.
We need to get to the root of the problem not a plastic pocket solution. And while we’re at it, the Minister might look at mental health for young people and ensure there’s a proper plan in place.
