The basic delusion is that man may be governed and yet be free, famously claimed H.L. Mencken. In other words, to obtain freedom, one must forfeit structure — and what better structure is there to forfeit than this new 12.2’’ x 11.81’’ slanted wooden jail? After all, imprisonment contradicts freedom.
Or does it?
In theory, the phone jail is a cure for our waning time — an antidote to our anti-production — gifted to us in a clean wooden box with numbered cells to house our addictions. In practice, however, it is a threat of further action.
Does it save lesson time, or spend it? Cause anxiety, or cure it? Minimize distraction? Maximize attention? Is it the final solution, or only the first step? Who is to say that the school will not implement a harsher policy next year? And the year after that? What does it seek to remedy? Whose fault is its implementation?
Many students do not know. And that uncertainty can be frightening.
When those of generations before us hear our worries, their minds often go to the past. They think of their payphones and front offices, blame our frustrations on a generational overdependence on and obsession with convenience. They do not remember that Stevenson alone has over 4,500 students, that the attendance office lines are long as they are now, and that, were we to “go back to how things used to be”, the needed staff members would still be littered in inconvenient offices across two buildings.
In other words, they underestimate the obvious: our world has forsaken its physical conveniences for digital ones. Were phone jails to only be the first step in a series of increasingly harsher policy updates, we would not have the infrastructure to accommodate.
To their credit, however, landlines do not follow us everywhere, nor do they bombard us with colorful alerts at all hours.
Cell phones do not share that limitation. A 2023 study from Common Sense Media found that teenagers now receive about 237 notifications on average per day. We may be too dependent on our instant dopamine shots after all.
Without them, however, we forfeit timely communication with our loved ones. We worry that, were there to be a threat on campus, our final goodbyes may not reach them. That, in the worst case scenario — wherein policies tighten, administration hardens, or Illinois as a whole passes a cell phone ban — we would be at the mercy of our circumstances: unpredictable, even in supposedly safe schools like ours.
But is that the whole truth?
“If it bleeds, it leads” is not a saying for nothing. News channels are known to repeat the same horrid stories even when their respective timelinesses fade, for blood is indispensable to income, and frequency in news coverage does not equate to frequency in reality.
The reality is that school gun violence is rare, especially for Stevenson. When a student brought a “real” gun to school for the first (and only) time in 2015, it was handled in less than 20 minutes by school staff and local law enforcement without so much as a lockdown. The airsoft gun from last year was even less of a threat.
Furthermore, in these already rare cases, a spokesperson from the National School Safety and Security Services warns that phones can, in fact, lead to more distraction than benefits, for phone-occupied students “[are not] paying full attention to the directions of adults.” They thus impede their situational awarenesses, sacrificing precious seconds that could be the difference between life and death.
This raises another question: If our phones are more akin to digital security blankets than indispensable means of communication, can we forsake them after all?
Unfortunately, to say “yes” would be to ignore a crucial fact: most students rely on their phones for entertainment and games, not just messaging and calls. (In fact, the class of 2025 may have spent more time on GamePigeon than Google Docs.)
Yet regardless of our intended use, I would like to raise another point. These jails are the physical manifestation of an anti-technology fervor that has grown beyond student cell phones. It has grown so much, in fact, that the school’s yearly iPad expense of nearly 200,000 dollars is becoming more sunk than fruitful; our tablets may as well be paperweights, weighed down themselves by the papers we continuously receive.
Still, as students, we have not done ourselves any favors.
A rule is only as good as its enforcer, and most teachers only jail the cell phones of underclassmen, if at all. Without having tasted the forbidden fruit of the App Store, and under the all-seeing eye of Apple Classroom, is this new wave of students more attentive? Apparently not.
While the class of 2025 was shoved into an “unprecedented” online middle school experience, that of 2028 had an even earlier virtual education. Their rise in screen time likely took place during their more formative years, making these habits even harder to shake.
Regardless of year, however, it is important to remember that we all exist in the context of a digital world. We learnt math through Zoom, met friends through Discord, and kept in touch through FaceTime. In other words, when COVID came, we adjusted easily; however, we failed to do the same when it left — our screen time rose, and it has not come back down.
In fact, according to research published in the journal Pediatrics, the average screen time for adolescents rose 1.75 hours per day during the early lockdown stages and remained 1.11 hours per day above its height during the pre-pandemic period, even as restrictions lessened. Most of these additional minutes were spent on leisure, not schoolwork.
In the end, we are the first generation to grow up with phones in our hands. We learnt that scrolling is the solution to boredom, that coping means consumption. As combatants against our vices, phone jails are certainly better than outright confiscations — which the school is unlikely to enforce anyway — so maybe, if we can demonstrate control, we can mitigate the need for them altogether.