The circular of Minister Valditara who from the next school year requires the prohibition of use of the smartphone in school hours also to the students of the second grade secondary school is a measure that will generate a lot of debate. But according to what I know, as a specialist of the mind and the evolutionary age, It is the best measure that can be made available to teenage students of the third millennium. Many think that limiting the use of the smartphone involves preventing teenagers from acquiring digital skills. But that’s not the case. If a teacher wants to integrate his lesson with tools and activities that require digital, he can do it without problems. What will no longer be possible, however, will be to allow the smartphone object to interfere with everything a student lives during the school day. It is not the “digital” itself that is a problem, but it is “the smartphone object” that represents the real risk factor. And both the kids and the adult world must take full awareness. Having a smartphone in hand, in fact, allows every boy/girl of keep two lives at the same time: the real and the digital one. The teacher explains and in the meantime the student navigates. The smartphone is in the pocket and during the lesson it begins to vibrate, reporting the arrival of notifications from the many social and video game communities to which the very young people are registered. The damage associated with the portability of the object falls on two fundamental aspects. The first is the effect of “mass distraction” that the smartphone object – as such – produces. At any time, its presence involves a continuous interference with what is happening in the principle of reality. This thing is very evident in everyone’s life, not only of the very young. You are talking to someone and that person, while listening to you, shakes on your small screen and types messages in your chats. You are guiding and you should devote your attention to an action on which individual safety and community depends. Yet he can’t resist checking what the message that has just arrived in chat is. The system of notifications and messaging, as well as the Like and reactions system that are produced after we have posted something in a social media, It is designed to hoc to keep the dopaminergic center of our mind constantly hiredthat is, that neuronal network that is activated when we experience phenomena associated with instant gratification and which, in this situation, produce a biochemical neuromody, called dopamine that in addition to making us feel immediately happy or excited or amused, however pushes us not to interrupt the experience, generating a vicious circle that trap us in a process called “addiction”. Whenever I hear: “Prohibiting is wrong, why just educate to make a good use of it” I ask myself: but there is the concept of “good use” for something that is – by its own nature – depended? Do we recommend, in evolutionary age, the good use of tobacco, pornography, alcohol, psychotropic substances, gambling? No, we forbid it. And the prohibition is a protection tool necessary for the brain in evolutionary age, because it still does not have cognitive maturity for a totally responsible use of what it is – by definition – additive. Whenever I hear that the prohibition in education is wrong, I am struck, because our society has already in force many prohibitions to protect minors, which have not been introduced to limit, compress or repress the choices of the very young. But they are introduced to guarantee to those who grow, a full and conscious access, to the many opportunities that life and the community of belonging, in particular the educational agencies, make available to them. In the online, the action of the educational agencies is practically non -existent, while enormous and unstoppable is the work of the market agencies which, just like the cat and the fox told by Collodi, look at the very young with predatory eyes and sensing their fragility and emotional and cognitive vulnerabilities, exploit them (precisely inviting them in a world based on the dopaminergic stress) to get huge profits.
Second aspect that makes the prohibition of smartphones at school necessary, It is the partner relational effort that today connotes the evolutionary age. Our children live in a time of enormous social deprivation. They reduced the attendance of real people in their real community, to socialize in a virtual way in the communities where they sail during the day and night. Many of them, almost without realizing it, find themselves interacting more with followers and influencers, who with their companions in the flesh and blood, who live by their side. Sometimes, it is desolating to find that as soon as the interval bell rings, the first drive of many teenagers is to take the smartphone in hand to see what is happening inside your social communities. To restore new direction to all this, the Free Smartphone School could represent that opportunity for the change of which the teenagers of the Zeta and Alfa generations could have a tremendous need, although not having any awareness of it. For this, I think the minister’s decision is more than appropriate right now. And among other things coincides with one of the four indications that J. Haidt has proposed as fundamental to restore good mental health indicators (today, unfortunately, very fragile) in its volume – of epochal scope – “anxious generation”. The thing I consider important today is that the same circular gives clear indications on which environmental pre-registers are and what the procedural protocols can be able to make a “smartphone-free” school and these indications must also include a behavioral protocol that concerns not only what is happening to students, but also what is required of the teachers themselves.
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