Many people – especially parents – will agree, I suspect, with the Minister for Education as she launched her latest political crusade in the pages of The Journal yesterday. What’s interesting, as ever, is that the Minister somewhat undermines her own cause in the second paragraph of the article launching her campaign:
IT IS TIME now to introduce a ban on mobile phone use in schools due to the growing concerns about their impact during the school day.
The vast majority of schools already have policies in place regarding the use of mobile phones during school hours and are doing great work in this regard.
However, we need to take it a step further. The time has come to copperfasten a mobile phone-free culture in education.
Since, as the Minister notes, the vast majority of schools already have policies in place restricting the use of phones by students during school hours, one might wonder why the Minister for Education is devoting her time to the issue at all, given that the Department of Education has substantially larger problems to solve. For example, with Schools opening on Monday, there are presently 1,000 unfilled teaching positions across the state, with some schools reportedly being forced to drop some subjects from the curriculum for want of people to teach them. Many primary schools are suffering from overcrowding. In parts of Dublin, there is a flat shortage of school places, with parents in South Dublin being asked to make decisions earlier and earlier about which school to send their children to, in order to free up capacity.
Ministerial time and energy is a valuable resource: No human being can focus on dozens of issues at one time, and coercing a department with thousands of civil servants to focus on one task is not as easy as it sounds. There’s an opportunity cost to every investment of time and resources a Minister makes.
In this case, it might be noted that the “problem” that the Minister wishes to solve is already, in large part, being solved by schools and parents without her aid or interference. This should be the first question any Minister asks: Is my interference necessary here?
Of course, analysing something like this through the prism of high-minded theory about the role of Ministers and the limits of state interference is a mistake, because all of us instinctively understand that the Minister is not intervening to talk about phones in schools because this is a problem in need of a solution. She is doing it because the Minister herself is a solution in need of a problem.
With an election just months away, Norma Foley needs some good headlines. “Minister cracks down on phone use in schools” is, I’d confidently predict, one of those issues where 80-90% of the voting public will instinctively agree. First because we’re all aware of the stuff that lurks on phones these days, and second because if there’s one thing voters really approve of, it’s banning things.
The other point here is that banning things is easy: The Minister doesn’t have to do anything other than issue a decree. She will not be the teacher in the classroom tasked with enforcing the ban and confiscating a phone and facing down the angry parents who (stupidly) bought it for a child’s birthday. She will not be the Principal tasked with enforcing discipline on a child who refuses to comply, or who is guilty of using his phone for nefarious means. All she has to do is issue the order, and after that it’s up to local schools.
Popular and easy: That’s exactly how politicians like ‘em.
Unpopular and hard, by contrast? Those are the problems that are never solved in a democracy by a Government that needs to be re-elected. It’s one of the reasons that US Presidents, in their second term, tend to end up very unpopular – precisely because they never have to be re-elected, they tend to go on legacy-building initiatives to try and solve big problems. Bill Clinton tried it with Northern Ireland and the Middle East, George W. Bush tanked his presidency trying to reform Social Security, and Barack Obama wasted four years of his second term trying to do something on immigration – all because they believed not being up for re-election gave them a chance to do something big and hard.
Irish politicians rarely tend to have the luxury of trying, and besides as a collective don’t understand why you would try. The last one to give it a proper go, really, was Mary Harney, who tried big reforms of the Health Service and ended up with an approval rating that put her somewhere between Fred West and Osama Bin Laden on the popularity stakes. Phones in schools? Now that’s political gravy.
Ironically, in this case, phones in schools is actually a pretty good example of why Government shouldn’t interfere with the small stuff: Schools should be free to choose what works best, wherever possible. Those schools that are banning phones are, as far as I know, proving very popular with parents. Left to their own devices, the vast majority of schools would have followed suit anyway.
What schools cannot solve is the teacher shortage. Unfortunately, the Minister can’t solve it either. That’s why she’s talking about phones instead.