Dear Sirs and Madams,
I am writing to express my sincere disapproval of your choice to prohibit the usage of smartphones in schools. As a representative member of the school system, being a student myself, I believe it’s important to fully acknowledge the root of the problem and why this rule was instated.
As of today, the world has made incredible achievements in a multitude of areas, such as technology, which made it tough to stay out of social media and overall, the internet. Although this may come with a swarm of detrimental outcomes, such as bullying, being exposed to forged news and all sorts of harmful media, it is important to apprehend the tremendous good it has done.
Firstly, the restrain of smartphones does nothing but stop a problem temporarily, while the issue that needed to be dealt with, the addiction of instant dopamine, normalized behavior that would otherwise be considered a risk and much more stays pending. You cannot stop a substance abuser from using narcotics by just taking them away. You need to make the person aware of the bad consequences of their actions and help them find new meaning and healthy ways to cope with stress.
Through this analogy, we understand that just taking away smartphones for a small period will not stop the problem, which in this case is the small attention span. It will only offer the short satisfaction of a good outcome, but, in the distant future, we will be faced again with the same problem. If we can’t engender healthy habits and relationships with smartphones during school, then what hope do we have afterwards, when us, the students today, will be faced with the requirement to teach our own children how to deal with the internet.
Secondly, we have taken a poor view of the problem. The school system sees smartphones as a tool that restricts the act of receiving education, when, actually, it leaves an empty room that should be filled with the ability of our teachers to manage our attention and teach us how to use this tool to better ourselves as future adults, and not become controlled by it. We can’t prohibit a lousy repeated action by just restraining ourselves from it. This will cause unnecessary shame, and only show the fact that we lack the willpower to start working from where the problem started. In this fashion, prohibiting smartphones will only make us more blind to why we are spending so much time on it. We, as a generation, need to understand that our future stays at stake, and distracting ourselves from it by using our phones creates nothing but a barrier. Regardless, this will not happen by getting rid of the tool, but by embracing it, and using it in a smart, and efficient way.
Thirdly, due to the rapid change in how jobs are managed, a lot of today’s jobs will be replaced by technology. This means that we must adapt to the new way of the world and learn how to work with machinery. Although growing up with technology might seem like a bad idea, and in abundance it is, we, the digital natives, have learned how to be comfortable and fluent in IT. This will ensure us an untroubled sail through the path of choosing a career and being efficient at it. We have also been exposed to a double life: one with and without the impact of technology. Therefore, we have learned how important it is to balance our online time with being connected with the world outside our screens. And the most important lesson that we have acknowledged is that learning motivation comes from us, whether we are influenced or not by our smartphones.
I would be very grateful if you could consider my established arguments that have proven that prohibiting smartphones isn’t the best solution for this problem. You could examine new solutions, such as implementing a course for professors that teaches how to work with the rapid rate of technology, and to be able to teach the pupils ways to cooperate with smartphones, and not to be controlled by them.
By doing this, the new adults will be able to develop future generations that are not educated and raised by the internet, but by involved parents that can, themselves, understand how to maneuver technology and how to do it in a controlled and measured manner. By making this effort we might not see changes in a year, nor in five. We will see them by the time the new generation gets the chance to prove themselves with their abilities.
Sincerely,
LOGO paper 