the prohibition of The private use of mobile phones by students of colleges and institutes has obtained a wide support (80%) among the hundred teachers and parents who have participated in the debate raised about it in the Education Forum of THE COUNTRY. The Community of Madrid recently announced the measure, which already governed in Castile-La Mancha and Galicia and France began to apply in 2018. In Catalonia, a group of teachers began in the summer to collect the 50.00 signatures necessary to bring to the Parliament a legislative initiative similar popular. And the minister of Education, Isabel Celaa said in September 2018 the Government studied to follow the same path, but time has not advanced.
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The arguments of the various regulations to end the use of mobile phones in the classrooms and the schoolyards —that are exceptions, such as the express request of a teacher to use them as an educational tool in class or the students who suffer a serious health problem— they are very similar: the phones make it difficult to concentration in class, reduced the direct relationships in the recesses, and are susceptible of aggravating the bullying, when you add the risk of that is spread by social networks photos and videos captured in the center. Academic studies on the consequences of the presence of mobile phones in the school environment are scarce in Spain, but made in the United Kingdom and the united States, for example in the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, suggest that the concerns that are promoting the restrictions are well-founded. 22% of the Spanish children has a cell phone at the age of 10 and 14, the 93%, according to the National Institute of Statistics.
Miguel Andrés Castaño, head of studies of the institute for public Secondary Florencio Painted Peñarroya (Córdoba), summarizes the main reason given, in the debate raised by this newspaper, by those who are opposed to the exclusion of mobile phones in the educational environment: “If we want students to learn how to use the mobile, its potential and its risks what is best to do so being guided by the teacher, not by trial and error. The question is not whether to ban it, but how to use them”. An opinion similar to the one that keeps the spaniard Daniel Sierra, member of the board of the Confederation of State Associations of Students: “The problem is not the technology, but the values that they transmit to us at home and in school. You should not prevent them, but to teach to do so.”
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the director of The institute Mont Perdut de Terrassa (Barcelona), Josep Maria Argemí, promoter of the popular legislative initiative to restrict their use in Catalonia, is of the opinion that such training might be addressed in the centers, in workshops or tutorials on specific. But he believes that it makes no sense to turn it into a mission of the teachers of all subjects. A lot of work they have, adds Gorka Elola, a teacher in Bilbao, trying to “25 or more adolescents are attentive to the explanation” as to have to watch that the students use within the classroom only as a “educational tool”, and which are not dedicated to check WhatsApp or Instagram.
Charo Fernández, professor of Computer science in FP-Basic in the institute Josefina Aldecoa de Alcorcón (Madrid), ensures that the decision to prevent the entry of phones in its center, adopted last year by the school board, has been very beneficial to the climate inside and outside of the classroom. “Discipline issues have improved, there are heads lifted in the courtyard, balls on the tennis and football fields, and many more conversations in the corridors than before,” he says.
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Argemí also observed a rapid improvement of the living” when your school banned the use of mobile phones (except in cases in which a teacher asks to use it as a pedagogical resource). The director ensures that many institutes have adopted similar measures because the evidence on the ground are clear. And believes that education Authorities are reluctant to introduce a change in the regulatory perspective that considers logic, that is, that the general rule is the exclusion of mobile phones in school hours allowing the centers to introduce exceptions based on pedagogical criteria, because it is more comfortable than are the management teams who take on the wear and tear of applying the restriction. A role that is sometimes difficult. In the institute of Argemí, the sanctioning procedure normal, consistent in that if a student is caught using the mobile it will be removed and returned to the parents, had to add the course to expulsion from the centre during a day in those cases in which the student surprised you resisted physically to deliver it. The director ensures that the problems at the centre are now very rare, but believes that with the support of a general rule to the institutes would be much more easy to deal with students —and families— more recalcitrant.
The parents who have participated in the forum also caters for the restriction. “Teens need concentration and the mobile prevent them from having it for more than 10 minutes at a time,” says Josetxo Azurza, of Getxo (Bizkaia). Viviana Llorach, a mother of two children, is keen that the kids can take them “if they go or come back alone” to the college, but do not use them within. The regional rules adopted in Spain, as well as the French, provide this possibility: allow the student to enter the cell at the center, provided that not to take it out of the backpack. Elisa Aviles, retired teacher, of Tarragona, adds: “Not to carry the mobile does not mean that the student is isolated, since in a situation timely to the centers always warn the parents of the manner in which it has always done. We have to ask why change what works”.
