RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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My high school had a smoking lounge. But don't let the term "lounge" fool you. There were no comfy chairs, no billiard table, not even any walls. It was outside, behind the school, a weedy area where students would gather before, after, and, I imagine, during class to get their nicotine fix.
This was in the late '70s. And if today it seems wildly inappropriate that a public school would facilitate smoking among teenagers, remember, back then smoking was considered nearly a human right, and there was a problem they were trying to address: smoke-filled restrooms. At least the lounge got smokers outside where they wouldn't impose their vice upon others.
Memories of the smoking lounge wafted into mind while I was on medical leave, when Illinois joined 38 states allowing cell phones to be banned during school next year.
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When Illinois first contemplated the ban, I was against it. Phones are part of our lives now, like auxiliary limbs. Schools would do better teaching kids restraint regarding their phones since they will be constant companions after graduation. The focus should be on harm reduction.
Then I thought about the situation some more and, through a superpower of mine called "changing my mind," decided that the ban is right. It helps that social media has degraded into an odious AI slop sink. Facebook imagines that my being Jewish means I want to view an endless loop of every antisemitic incident anywhere on earth, interspersed with agitprop about Israel, plus trite little tales about the Holocaust, which is being retrofitted into a feel good story of heroism, resistance, and survival.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't.
Meanwhile, Instagram served up so many snippets of "The West Wing" that I finally realized I could just watch "The West Wing" on Netflix and cut out the middleman. That's when I thought of smoking in school. We are biased toward the present and it's hard to imagine things changing. But change they do and today's necessity becomes tomorrow's puzzling affliction. Someday people gaping at their phones could be viewed with the same disapproval extended toward the miserable knot of coworkers puffing around the office entrance.
Social media is so harmful to teens, so toxic, schools are right to teach youth there is life outside their screens. And the smoking lounge made me wonder whether high schools might not only be right regarding phones, but a vanguard, pointing society toward where we should all be going, as they were with cigarettes.
In 1978, when I graduated from high school, the smoking rate among American adults was 36%. Today it is 10%, a triumph over damaging addiction, with countless years of life saved. (Though that might change now that the federal government is getting out of the "help people stay healthy" business).
Illinois banned smoking in high schools in 1990. Eighteen years passed before the state got around to banning smoking in restaurants. At the time, it was unimaginable — to not light up after a meal! Calamity. The restaurant industry would die . We journalists were dead set against it — what would a newsroom be if you couldn't grind out your cigarette on the tile floor? (The Sun-Times had its own smoking lounge; a truly repulsive little room that did have chairs, plus an enormous air purifier. I would go there sometimes to smoke a cigar and listen to Art Petacque reminisce about the mob).
While it's premature to predict society turning up its nose at phones, hints are there. Flip-phones are back. My two boys look at social media with a mix of contempt and indifference: it's something old people do to spritz the illusion of significance over their empty lives. I didn't even post the birth of my most recent grandchild — No. 3! — on Facebook, since his parents' attitude about the platform — a grotesque nest of senior citizens posting photos of lunch that nobody wants to see — had infected me. Plus I didn't want to get in trouble.
Now that my boys are adults, I try not to write about them much. They live their own private lives. But I do remember visiting my younger son in law school and watching him drop his phone into a hard plastic lockbox with a timer, so he could have no access to the phone for a certain span of hours while he studied. Back then it seemed almost an admission of lack of control. Just ignore it. But now I see how smart that was.
Big Tech is making a huge gamble, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the certainty we're going to surrender to AI and let it do all our thinking for us. Maybe we will. But maybe we won't. And maybe our schools can lead the way.
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