Mobile Phones in Schools / Colleges: Should we ban them? (Student Assignment)

For long the use of mobile phones in classes have been considered as a vital threat to the system of education, but for as far as the student may be considered, the mobile phone tends to open a new doorway to isolated and some reliably accurate educative facilities such as the internet and the now available touch screen phones that provide faster shorthand notes, that almost anyone who uses a mobile phone can make use of.

However, the largest threat it poses, serves as a distraction that includes games, text messaging, facebook and others. Social networking, texting and playing music during class is distracting even to the educator. But everyone and anyone has mobile phones; including lecturers as well as their students, leaving no clear division between the former and the latter.

Mobile phones are multi-useful and provide innumerous features and applications to both educate
and entertain. Thus, we must include the importance that is poses on communication and information technology, those very providers of a vastly sought out market of knowledge and most modern necessities.

We often hear teachers asking the students to check spellings for certain words in class for which the students ought to carry dictionaries. And pocket dictionaries rarely have meanings for those big words. Even the basic model of colour mobile phones has a dictionary application which can be used. On the other hand if students are going to browse the internet for every question asked in class, there is no fun in learning.

In schools and colleges, a lot of sexual harassment and other forms of harassment takes place; the educators upon the students as well as the other way around and within the students as well. Having a mobile phone through which photos can be taken, videos and audios be recorded; solid evidence is available to expose classroom atrocities. However the mobile phone itself shouldn’t be a mode of harassment.

Education has simply become the platform by which the development of the future and the scaling of economic growth may stand, as mobile phones are only the beginning as cheaper outlets of what is to come in the near future, such as tablets and PCs, which are almost the same length as an A4 sheet and only a few centimeters thicker than paper, which allows more portability than carrying 10 -15 books across town to class everyday. Most cellular phones nowadays, can function similarly as computers enabling faster access to information "on-the-go".

But where does all this lead to? Is self learning the new course to education? Have the old school methods stayed too loyal to tradition, to lose face to modern means of application and knowledge?
Has teaching become only a mere profession than the great educative force it once used to be,
that led many different men and women to their desired goals?

It is clearly a reflection of the changing times, to see the hungry student in the chambers of learning,
To be more absorbed by "angry birds" than angry educators.

- [Submitted by: Sruti, MD]

Word Count: 500