The pressure to establish rules to regulate mobile phone use by teenagers is increasing. But who should regulate it? It begins to look at the authorities.
Parents are coming together to collectively agree on a legal ban preventing their children from having a mobile phone until the age of sixteen, and limiting their use in schools. Teachers also want regulation, fed up with the conflicts and dynamics that devices bring to schools. But they want the Administration to decide in a homogeneous way. Criteria for everyone equally and enough. The Department of Education does not want a ban, but that it be debated in each school, because that way parents and students will become more aware of it. Its intention is to give “guidelines”.
In Italy there is also the same debate. For the time being, telephone operators will have to install a parental control system from November 21 that limits access to online casinos, pornography, violence and discrimination to phone users under the age of eighteen.
On Thursday, the School Council of Catalonia will transfer to Education the impressions of the debate that the Government commissioned on the screens and will collect the contributions of each territorial council. The final report will be delivered in December. Yesterday there was a debate at the Maresme-Vallès Oriental Council and, in general terms, it agreed with the pronouncement of the Barcelona council last week: regulation, yes; but for everyone the same. That it does not depend on the center, but that the Administration regulates it with common criteria, by age groups and educational stages. And they refer to the matter as a public health problem, in which the Department of Health is already intervening. Pediatricians will also look after digital health.
The Department of Education plans to give an answer in January, after analyzing the final document from December. He will then order that all centers include the use of mobile phones in their operating rules. 53% already have it regulated.
The centers and parents ask that measures be taken urgently. “The mobile phone is a problem in the center due to the misuse of it”, explains Jordi Canalda, director of the Sunsi Móra high school in Canet de Mar. They are recordings of students and teachers made inside the schools that are then uploaded to the networks, reach parents and generate conflicts, confiscations called into question, excessive use… “But it is also outside the school, which is used by almost all young people, except when they are in extracurricular activities”, he adds.
For the Fapel family association, “educating with the first mobile phone, defining spaces, limits in time, in applications, is always more difficult than banning it altogether”, points out Josep Manuel Prats. Social pressure is born from impotence. For this reason, he advocates returning the authority to the teacher (“if he confiscates it, don’t go to protest”) and recover that of the parents. “A student is at school only 960 hours out of the 8,760 he lives during a year”.
At the same time, the movement of anti-mobile parents is spreading like an oil slick. In parallel with the groups born as a result of the initiative of a group of families in Poblenou, a Change.org campaign has been launched that calls for a legal ban for children under the age of sixteen. In one week it has obtained 40,000 signatures, 30,000 on the last day.
The promoter is Natàlia Jiménez León, 47 years old. His eldest son is in the sixth grade in a class where there are already mobile phones. He believes that he is not mature enough to have it and fears that the insistence on getting it will turn into a conflict. “The social pressure is worrying, it seems that at the beginning of ESO you have to have a mobile phone”, says Jiménez. With his campaign, which, at the moment, has no legal effect, he wants to invite reflection and achieve a “total ban”.
Despite the fact that her motivation is personal, Jiménez also contributes her vision as a biology teacher of twelve to eighteen-year-old students. “Technology is affecting performance”, he says, “there are students who find it more and more difficult to maintain their attention” which forces them to change the dynamic very often. And he relates it to the low reading compression.
