Banning smartphones in schools only perpetuates the spread of disinformation

The Sunday edition of leading Spanish daily El País focuses on disinformation, carrying a series of reports, opinion pieces and interviews, following the line of many other international media, books and reports concerned about one of the big issues of our day.

The World Economic Forum’s 2024 global risk report highlights disinformation as the greatest danger we face, given its power to affect how we deal with the dangers posed by the climate emergency, the economy, pandemics and many others. Our ever-present smartphones and social networks give us unprecedented access to information, and yet it seems we barely know how to use them properly.

The root cause of the problem is clear, but we refuse to address it: EDUCATION. Faced with the technological revolution of the last decade, we have abdicated all responsibility for teaching young people how to use their critical faculties and common sense, with near-universal agreement that smartphones are “dangerous”and should be banned from schools. Unsurprisingly, instead of creating a generation of digital natives, we now have highly vulnerable digital orphans.

Our highly moralistic societies like to believe we’re “protecting” children, when in reality we are forcing them to learn by themselves, abandoning them to their…