Say No to Screens. Say Yes To Learning.

On the first day of class, my professor laid down the law: no screens allowed.

There was a collective sigh as we all shut our laptops. Papers were passed around, phones were tucked away. Unless an immediate family member was in grave and urgent danger, we were expected to keep our attention where it belonged: on the material, on each other, and on the work at hand.

I almost rolled my eyes. At best, the policy was mildly annoying. At worst, wildly inefficient. I couldn’t write nearly as fast as I could type — how could I possibly keep up with notes? And what would I do during lecture if not respond to emails, work on other assignments, and cast occasional sideways glances at my phone?

Halfway through the second class, I found myself paying attention. The no-tech policy had suddenly become…useful.

Try it out, just for a few hours. Put all of your tech away. Print out your readings or do your problem set on paper. Attempt — really, deliberately attempt — to concentrate.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll experience a nearly somatic response: a sense of restlessness, and then a lurch of panic when your phone or laptop isn’t there.

That panic isn’t just a passing feeling; it’s a symptom of something more. Tech is where a student’s attention span goes to die. It bounces around like a rogue pinball, pulled in twenty different directions, never landing on anything long enough to study it meaningfully. What’s left of our limited cognitive wares is hardly enough to read a lecture slide, let alone engage with it.

Slowly and without ceremony, tech’s assailants — short-form content, incessant notifications, a steady stream of news, information, headlines, and their accompanying pings and vibrations — work to erode our focus. A 2023 study even suggests that the mere presence of a smartphone device could degrade attention.

More than anything, tech has become a pacifier for anything and everything uncomfortable in the classroom. Boredom. Frustration. The exasperation of not “getting it” right away.

Students are so accustomed to the paternalism of constant stimulation that it’s disorienting without it. To stay with an idea or problem long enough to realize its complications — that existential fact of being a student — has become a stranger to the modern classroom.

In the sudden vacuum, we’re not quite sure what to do with ourselves. So the second we feel challenged, or frustrated, or (so often) bored, we turn back to our screens.

But learning — true learning, learning that pushes us into the terrifying but rich stretch of productive doubt — happens squarely in the middle of this discomfort. We need boredom to form new ideas. We experience frustration when we’re on the edge of realizing something new. We become increasingly waspish thinking about things that seem unclear — but what’s unclear is actually most important.

For the tech enthusiasts who allegedly take faster notes on their laptops (arguably at the expense of comprehension) and cite the many extensions and apps that promise efficiency, there are bigger questions: Is the point of learning really to minimize difficulty?

When we attempt to eliminate every bit of friction in the process of learning, we learn less. Learning isn’t easy. It’s active, not copy-and-paste. It demands that you sit with what’s hard.

When we bring tech into the classroom, we disrupt this job. It’s not that we don’t want to learn. It’s that it’s much easier to avoid discomfort when we have direct access to a bright hunk of metal that’s literally designed to keep us scrolling.

Students need to learn. To engage earnestly with course content. To talk with professors and peers, to question them, to push ourselves past the surface and into something deeper — to focus, not on just the takeaways and answers, but on the subtleties you can only understand by thinking deeply and critically.

My favorite lectures are the ones that leave me scribbling down a long list of questions instead of a clean list of answers. In my favorite seminars, every student has a stake in the conversation: Hands are raised, points are proposed and contended with, and accounts are refined and refined again. More often than not, these are the classrooms where phones are kept in bags and laptops remain firmly shut.

No-screen policies don’t undermine student autonomy. It gives our autonomy back to us. It’s a different, better kind of freedom — not the freedom to do what you want in class, but to do what you should.

Zoe Yu ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.