cell phones soon to be banned in schools?

England calls on all schools to ban mobile phones. If one is seen or heard, it is automatically confiscated. “Even during recess, the phone distracts us, and prevents us from learning properly the rest of the day”, confides a student. The Prime Minister himself, Rishi Sunak, depicted, in a video, the intrusion of the telephone into education. “Almost a third of high school students say their classes are disrupted by their phones”he declares.

A teenage girl killed by classmates who consulted on the internet

Some would like to go even further. “With younger children, the telephone brings up problems outside of school, such as online harassment”explains Mike Baxter, director of the City of London Academics, in Southwark (United Kingdom).

A terrible news story recently pushed the British to question the place of screens among young people. A teenager, Brianna Ghey, was killed by classmates who had consulted on the internet. His mother, Esther, calls for radical change, and telephones “designed specifically for those under 16, which will not allow them to access social networks”. In the United Kingdom, 97% of 12-year-old children own a mobile phone, compared to 80% in France.