Should cell phones be allowed in class?

Currently, many jobs in the real world require the ones doing the work to use their phones. Whether this is for research, contact, or simply as a calculator, phones are very present in the daily lives of adults, and hiding phones gives kids a warped sense of what being a working adult is really like.

When kids are told to not bring their phones into class, they immediately have the temptation to bring it anyway, and that many times transforms into conflict with teachers. With bringing cell phones, kids learn the responsibility not to use cell phones in inappropriate times, which is an essential skill to being an adult.

Cell phones can be used for all sorts of things in class. This ranges from calculators to search engines to in-class games such as Kahoot!. All of these are things that kids can do with phones in class.

Sometimes, kids have emergencies that require them to get into contact with their parents or another figure in authority. This is only possible if they have a phone available to them. If a school gets shot up, which happened 97 times in 2018 [1], a kid without a phone is in much greater danger because he/she cannot contact anyone for help or to let them know that they are safe.

Many teenagers say, “When there’s an emergency, I need to call my parents.” But if there is an emergency, most likely, the school with have your parent and emergency contacts. And if there is something, like a school shooting, and you must evacuate, the school will most definitely contact every parent.

Also, if a teen brings their phone to school, they probably will not be using it for educational purposes. According to https://www.latimes.com/local/education/community/la-me-edu-teens-tweens-spend-hours-on-smartphones-20151103-story.html, “Whether on computers, tablets or smartphones, 39% of teens' digital screen time is devoted to watching, listening, or reading, 25% to playing games or browsing the Web, 26% to social media and video-chatting. Very little time, only 3%, was focused on content creation such as writing, coding or making digital art or music, according to the report.”

Because most teens are on social media so often, this causes a focused state of distraction, “And while that distraction seems like it should be temporary, its effects are actually chillingly long-term. "This type of frequent, focused distraction," she explains, "isn't just capable of creating long-lasting changes in our brains; it is particularly good at doing so." (https://www.health.com/anxiety/cell-phone-addiction)

Also, cell phones cause students to do poorly in school. According to https://www.mnn.com/family/family-activities/blogs/students-get-better-grades-when-phones-are-banned, “a 2015 study found kids do better in school when mobile devices are banned.” Also, according to the same source, student’s exam scores increased by about 6% when phones were banned. Also, if the student was struggling academically, their scores increased drastically by almost 14%. That can bring a “C” to an “A”. 

That's incorrect. They can't call parents if they're being held at gunpoint. That's exactly why the kids need cellphones in order to call for help. 

This is a study done on cellphone us in general. It doesn't say about in school. Guidelines for cellphone use will be put in place.

This is a non-unique argument. If there are no phones, the children will simply be distracted by each other!

In that study, the grades rose by no more than 0.5. That's hardly an increase and it's not a benefit.

I agree with your statement saying the adults use phones in the real world. But children do not use their phones for doing educational stuff. As I said in my first point in round 1, kids use their phones for surfing the web, social media, and watching videos online. The point is, phones could be useful, but they have gotten way to out of control for adults to handle.

Cell phones do not teach kids responsibility. If a child in class gets caught on their phone, that just proves they aren’t responsible in the first place. If they lose their phone, their parents will probably get called to get the phone back. And then, the kid will lose the phone. This doesn’t teach the kid responsibility, because he never gets the phone back. Also, if he does, he will probably use it again in class. Also, the kid has probably missed out on some valuable information, while he was 1v1ing someone in Roblox. The only way to stop this is to not have the kid on his phone in the first place.

What about the kids who don’t use cell phones? If a school provides games such as “Kahoot!”, and only limit them to kids who have phones, wouldn’t that be unfair? So, this leads me to think that if a school should provide electronic online educational games, they would have extra laptops or mobile devices that would allow other kids to play too. Also, why would you need to use your phone for a calculator, if the school already has them? Cell phones are useless in a school environment.

 97 times may seem like a lot, but there were 98,817 (https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-us-public-schools) public schools in the US 10 years ago. Imagine how many schools there are now. 97 is not even 0.1% of the schools that exist in the USA. Look at the forest, not the trees.