From the Pantone Color of the Year to the TIME Person of the Year – and everything in between – I enjoy seeing our selections for the symbols that represent each year. I eagerly await the annual announcement of the EducationWeek Education Word of the Year, and this year did not disappoint: cellphone ban.
According to Evie Blad from EdWeek, “a swirl of political, societal, technical, and practical currents converged to help a phenomenon—the ‘cellphone ban’—rise to prominence in 2024, making it Education Week’s word (or phrase) of the year.”
I am not sure what this says about me, but I genuinely got a kick out of the fact that the education “word” (singular) of the year was, notably, two words. I had double the fun when the Oxford English Dictionary provided me with the same entertainment by naming the Oxford Word of the Year 2024 the decidedly two word phrase: brain rot.
brain rot (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.
It is impossible for me to see these phenomena as unrelated. Both “cellphone ban” and “brain rot” capture our cultural curiosity and concerns about the impacts of technology and social media on our society and children.
While the term “brain rot” was coined in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”), our current culture uses the term to explain the seeming effects of consuming content, particularly on social media, that is brief and bereft of any meaning.
Cellphones, by contrast, are a mere 51 years old. However, school cellphone bans have seen their own resurgence in 2024. New York City public schools, for example, reinstated a cellphone ban in 2024 that was previously reversed in 2015. The cellphone ban conversation accelerated in March 2024 with the publication and widely read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. In the book, Haidt argues for phone-free schools and no social media or cellphones before age 16. In June 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General recommended a social media warning label: “social media is associated with significant mental health harms in adolescents” as a result of mounting research studies that drew such conclusions. And by December 2024, nearly half of the states implemented policies that banned student cellphone use during school.
Here at SDPB’s Teacher Talk, we were on trend in 2024. We discussed Gina Benz’s blogs about Student Cellphone Use and Learning to Sit with Emotions, Not a Screen as well as my blog To Post or Not to Post. We talked with TikTok South Dakota teacher Gabe Dannenbring in our Teacher Famous episode. And, Lori Walsh’s team directly explored the question: Do cell phones & social media belong in the classroom? during a full hour of In The Moment.
We shall see how the cellphone ban conversation unfolds in 2025, provided we do not become afflicted with brain rot. Until then, I just have one word for all of you: like and subscribe to SDPB’s Teacher Talk wherever you listen to your podcasts.
The views and opinions expressed on SDPB’s Teacher Talk are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of South Dakota.
