How some municipalities have solved the smartphone problem in schools

To prevent children from becoming addicted to smartphones too early, some Japanese cities are distributing devices with very limited functions to schoolchildren. “Real” smartphones are banned.

In France, the use of smartphones will be banned in schools and colleges from January 2025, and 200 colleges will experiment with this law from the start of the school year. Some cities in Japan are implementing a different and radical strategy: no smartphones for schoolchildren.

The main reason children ask for a smartphone is the need to be able to call their parents and be reached. In Japan, some municipalities have found a solution to meet this need, without a smartphone: they distribute mini-smartphones with very limited functions to primary school students. These small devices allow them to send an SOS with an alarm that triggers a call to a rescue center, which can immediately locate them and even see, thanks to the camera, what environment and circumstances they are in.

Furthermore, the device can only be called, or call, pre-recorded numbers. Those of parents, siblings, grandparents and possibly a few friends, and it is the parents who manage this directory. It is possible to exchange short written messages with these same numbers, but no more. No apps or social networks.

Unlike schoolchildren, middle and high school students can use a real smartphone. Because it is true that the need to reach and be reached exists, and that municipalities consider that they are too old to be satisfied with the same devices as their younger schoolchildren.

In Japanese schools, smartphone ownership by middle and high school students is not a major problem. Teachers do not have to fight to enforce discipline and prevent students from constantly playing with their smartphones. On the other hand, smartphones are a problem outside of schools: the Japanese are addicted to them to an unimaginable extent, and social networks are now the new space for bullying, a scourge for decades in Japan that has never been solved.