How Colleges Are Forcing Students To Give Up Their Phones

This Monday, September 2, the first day back at school, nearly 200 colleges are beginning to experiment with the “digital break,” which is a ban on students keeping their phones on the premises.

This Monday, September 2, 12 million students are going back to school. Among them, many will be faced with a major change with the experiment of banning mobile phones to implement a “digital break”, as Nicole Belloubet, the resigning Minister of National Education, indicated during her press conference for the start of the school year on August 27.

In concrete terms, the middle school students concerned are required to place their phones in pouches or lockers. This is the case in the Annot middle school, Castellane, Saint-André-les-Alpes, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

“When they return to the school, students will have to put their switched-off phones in their lockers (…) They will be able to put them there with their things, lock the locker and forget about them to devote themselves completely to this wonderful start to the school year,” Alexis Cornille, the school’s principal, told BFMTV.

Anti-wave locker or pouch

This college has decided to experiment with a “digital break” in response to children’s “addiction” to mobile phones. It intends to “avoid any form of temptation” so that students can focus on their learning and communicate with their neighbors without using their phones.

If lockers were already present in this establishment, new ones have been added so that each student can place their phone there. The Ministry of National Education wants “equipment already present” in the establishments to be used when possible. Otherwise, the departmental councils have been asked to help the colleges buy the necessary equipment, he told Tech&Co.

In addition to the lockers dedicated to each student, the colleges participating in this experiment can decide to use “anti-wave pockets”, in which students place their phone when they arrive and collect it at the end of class, again according to the Ministry of National Education.