Should social media be banned in schools?

A school that removes the platforms for the day teaches nothing about using them

Question: Should social media be banned in schools?
Position‹2 of 2: No, social media should not be banned in schools
Argument1 of 2›: A school that removes the platforms for the day teaches nothing about using them

The argument

Opponents of banning social media in schools argue that the purpose of a school is to prepare students for a world it does not control, and that the platforms are a permanent feature of that world. A student will leave school into work, study and public life in which these services are how coordination, news, reputation and much social contact happen, and in which no authority will remove them at the door. On this view a ban buys quiet during the school day at the cost of the one period in a young person's life when there are skilled adults on hand to help them handle these tools badly and then better. The skills at stake are specific rather than vague. Opponents list judging whether a claim circulating in a feed is credible and who benefits from its spreading; noticing when a recommendation stream is steering rather than serving; recognising the difference between an argument and a pile-on; managing one's own attention deliberately rather than by removal of temptation; and understanding what a permanent record is and what it costs. Each of these is teachable, and opponents argue that each is best taught in the presence of the thing itself, with a teacher able to interrupt and discuss what has just happened. Opponents add that removal does not produce self-regulation but postpones it. A student whose use has been suppressed by rule rather than shaped by practice arrives at the point of unsupervised access with no developed habits and no experience of having governed their own attention. The alternative opponents favour is structured use: devices away for particular tasks, explicit instruction in platform literacy, and norms arrived at with students rather than imposed on them.

Premises

[P1]Students will use these platforms throughout adult life in settings where no authority will remove them. [P2] The relevant skills, from judging credibility to managing one's own attention, are teachable and are best taught in the presence of the thing itself. [P3] Suppression by rule postpones self-regulation rather than developing it, leaving students unprepared at the point of unsupervised access. [C] Schools should therefore teach structured, supervised use rather than ban social media outright.

Counter-arguments

Proponents of a ban reply that the teaching argument assumes a lesson schools are not in fact delivering. Platform literacy appears on few timetables, and where it does it occupies a fraction of the time the platforms themselves consume, so in practice the choice is not between banning and teaching but between banning and leaving students to the feed. They also argue that the analogy to adult life is weak, because adults are permitted many things children are not, and the question is what serves a child at this stage. Finally they argue that it is not possible to teach attention in an environment engineered to break it, any more than one could teach quiet reading in a room with a television on.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That adults use these platforms freely does not settle what serves a child, since schools restrict many things that are later permitted. [Rejecting P2] Platform literacy is taught in very few schools and occupies far less time than the platforms consume, so the lesson this argument relies on largely does not happen. [Rejecting P3] Self-regulation is not postponed by protection; children develop it as they mature, and protecting them meanwhile is part of what a school is for. [Rejecting C] Structured use requires the teacher to police a boundary the platforms are engineered to erode, which is why it tends to collapse into unstructured use.