Much to the dismay of its students, the Toronto District School Board recently blocked access to Snapchat, Instagram and Netflix on its networks. The stated reason for the ban was that these apps were not being used by students for educational purposes and were clogging up the TDSB’s aging network, which made administrative tasks difficult to complete.

The board has said this is only a temporary measure, and it will restore access once it upgrades its network over the summer. But this would be a huge a mistake. If the TDSB cares about what’s in the best long-term interests of its students, it should make the ban permanent.

While phones in the classroom can have legitimate educational uses, the reality is that in practice they are used by students in ways that impede their ability to learn. For example, a 2016 National Science Foundation-funded study found that when given the opportunity, even the most intelligent and motivated students access the Internet in class primarily for non-educational purposes like browsing social media, they spend more time browsing than paying attention to their class, and their academic performance suffers as a result.

Research by Microsoft has found that between 2000 and 2013, the average Canadian’s attention span decreased by 33 per cent, and is now shorter than the average attention span of a goldfish.

Furthermore, Microsoft has found that the main culprit behind our dwindling attention span is the addictive nature of our phones, and the problem is most acute among younger people. Indeed, 77 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they instinctively reach for their phones as soon as there is a lull in their attention.

What people seem to forget is that this is all by design. As is now being revealed by Tristan Harris, an engineer who has worked at Apple and Google, the whole business model of tech companies centres on making their phones and apps as addicting as possible. Harris states that unbeknownst to much of the public, “There is this war going on [between tech companies] to get as much attention as possible … It’s a race to the bottom of the brain stem to get people’s attention at all costs.”

An example of this comes from the CEO of Netflix, who recently stated that it sees its biggest competitor as not YouTube or Facebook, but sleep. We should be especially concerned about Snapchat, which is considered by many experts to be the most addicting app, as research from Harvard has shown that Snapchat use can produce alarmingly high levels of anxiety among teens.

And while technology use is often cast as an issue of personal responsibility, Harris reminds us there are thousands of the smartest people in the world working at these tech companies, employing principles of behavioural psychology precisely to overcome your willpower. Can any high school student or teacher really be expected to compete with that?

What is especially galling is that while tech executives make billions of dollars pushing tech onto the masses, when it comes to their own children, they try to raise them in explicitly low-tech environments. Many Silicon Valley execs send their children to technology-free Waldorf schools, which emphasize human interaction and hands-on learning.

When asked about how his own kids had responded to the iPad, Steve Jobs told the New York Times: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” The Times later found this to be a common theme among many high-powered tech executives, including those associated with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The reason? According to Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine, it’s because “we have seen the dangers of technology first-hand. I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

Recently in schools, there has been an admirable push toward developing mindfulness, which helps students to focus more of their attention on the present moment. But developing deep mindfulness will be near impossible if schools also encourage students to be on devices explicitly designed to hijack their attention.

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As MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle has found in her research, our complete capitulation to technology has led to the degradation of many human capacities. At the very least, school boards should not be complicit in inflicting this damage on their students.

Sachin Maharaj is a PhD candidate and Canada Graduate Scholar in educational policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

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