• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, March 28, 2025

In the recent New York Times piece “Who’s Against Banning Cellphones in Schools?” Ginia Bellafante wrote about the ban that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is currently promoting. 

If the proposal passes in September, New York will join a list of 18 states (including Florida and Louisiana) that have already put some sort of smartphone ban in schools.

The action comes from concern about the damaging effects that teenagers’ addiction to social media -- and their phones -- have had on their vulnerable brains.

Hochul was impressed by the successful 2022 experiment called “bell-to-bell” initiated by the superintendent of schools in Schoharie, N.Y., a small rural town in upstate New York.

From the first bell to the last, students could not use phones (or smart watches or earbuds) at any point during the school day -- including lunch, walking the hallways, and in study halls. 

The results were positive both inside and out of the classroom. Students started to focus and communicate face-to-face, newly engaged in the world, rather than shutting themselves off.

And the teachers had a much easier time, uh, teaching, rather than policing contraband devices.

Ironically, the most negative reactions tended to come from parents, who feared they wouldn’t be able to reach their children in a crisis. (Sadly, a school shooting comes to mind.)

But the parents’ concern proved misguided. As Bellafante writes, “In an emergency, phones distract children from remaining focused on whomever has been entrusted to keep them safe; calls and texts create added panic.”

In pondering the kids’ cellphone addictions, I couldn’t help but think of the brilliant and powerful British series “Adolescence,” which is now the number-one show on Netflix (see scene below).

Beautifully written and acted, it offers a, delicately layered, non-cliched mixture of psychological and social insight into the life of contemporary teens.

It’s painful to watch.

We are led into a raw, suffocating world that is lived mostly online, while most adults are unprepared and/or clueless about monitoring or understanding their kids’ experiences.

The story is set in West Yorkshire, England, and opens on a more violent than necessary early morning raid of an ordinary suburban home. The officers in riot gear are there to apprehend Jamie Miller, a terrified, baby-faced 13-year-old boy, who is arrested on suspicion of the murder of a female classmate, Katie Leonard, who had been stabbed to death the night before.

Crouching like a scared animal in the corner of his room, the boy wets his pants, cries, and then clings to his dad as police officers take him to the station.

Police have local CCTV footage of him committing the grotesque act.

Still, the kid adamantly claims he didn’t do it. (At one point he even uses the phrase “fake news.”) 

The show explores the difficult issues of misogyny, “the manosphere,” and online violence; it’s based on real-life news stories about young boys involved in knife crimes in 2022 in the U.K.

With Bascomb, the lead detective on the case, we also get a glimpse of Jamie’s chaotic school life, where fights break out in the yard and teachers scream at the kids to put their phones away.

We later learn that, along with two friends, Jamie was considered an outcast.

Throughout the propulsive forward motion of the four episodes (each of which, amazingly, is shot in one take), the story is told over the course of one year from the points of view of his parents (his father, mostly), the detectives, and a court-ordered psychologist. They’re all trying to figure out Jamie’s motivation for this incomprehensible act. 

The smug detective, whose reliance on sniffer dogs wasn’t cutting it, believed that the online communication he read on Insta between Katie and Jamie revealed that the victim had befriended, and even been kind, to her killer.

He had to get schooled by his also-bullied 15-year-old son, Adam, who told his father that it was “embarrassing watching you blunder about.”

Despite all his experience. Detective Bascomb had no sense of the wars flaring on these kids’ Instagram accounts, which included mortifying topless shots of some of the 13-year-old girls (including Katie) and coded emojis suggesting much larger cultural and gender explosions.

“Looks like she’s being nice, right?” the detective’s son asks him as he pulls up the Insta exchanges on his phone. Katie had commented on several of Jamie’s posts, primarily in emojis.  “The dynamite, exploding red pill, the 100,” the son points out.

Actually, she’s denigrating him, as the kid later explains. “The 100 [emoji] comes from the 80/20 war,” he says. (Something promoted online by extremists like Andrew Tate.) “Eighty percent of the women are attracted to 20 percent of the men. So you must trick them, ‘cause you’ll never get them in a normal way. “

 Finally, Adam gets to the crux: “She’s saying he’s an incel, Dad, a virgin forever.  And all of these people have hearted it. They’re all agreeing with her.” 

The series is too smart to blame it all on the Internet. Violence like this is a result of more than the toxic stew from some quarters of the web.

What the best episode, the third, shows is that everyone is overwhelmed. At bottom, Jamie was a kid on the cusp of puberty, filled with fear and tamped-down rage. (And yes, he was bullied.) He seemed to have caring parents and was bright. But in his case, his roiling insecurity and self-loathing turned into a tragic inability to understand or control his own actions.

That’s an issue way larger than cellphones. 

But yes, I’m with the governor: Banning smartphones in schools is one good start in tamping down the flames.