This article is adapted from Ted's Smart Thinking podcast Episode 390: A Discussion With An Australian Principal About Australia's Social Media and Cell Phone Laws in Schools.
It was tomorrow when I sat down to record this conversation. Literally. My guest was starting his day in Melbourne, Australia while I was ending mine here in Wisconsin. That time difference felt like the perfect metaphor for the conversation we were about to have, because in a lot of ways, Australia is living in our future.
I talked with Lars Andersen, principal of Thornbury High School in Melbourne, about what has happened in Australian schools since the country banned mobile phones from classrooms six years ago, and more recently passed laws that keep kids off social media before age 16 and stop algorithms from following children around the internet.
Lars is not new to this work. He grew up in a small steel town in northern Sweden, trained as an English and literature teacher, moved to Australia in his twenties, and has spent 26 years in education, the last several as a principal. He has watched this unwind happen from the inside.
Here is the part that stopped me. This year, Thornbury graduates its first class of seniors who have never once had a cell phone during a school day. Six years of a ban, start to finish, for one group of kids. And next year, incoming seventh graders will not be issued laptops at all. Books, paper, and face to face discussion instead.
Lars told me what changed when the phones disappeared. Recess and lunch got louder in the best way. Kids moved more, played more, and talked to each other again. Cyberbullying dropped because so much of it depended on a device being in a kid’s hand in the first place. In the classroom, teachers stopped competing with a screen for a student’s attention.
He also told me something that should stop every one of us in our tracks. When he showed his year 11 literature class an AI generated paragraph without telling them ahead of time, the students booed him. They told him flat out that they would rather read something imperfect that he wrote himself than something polished that a machine produced. They wanted his ideas, not a shortcut.
Here is what I keep coming back to. Kids have not changed. The world around them changed. Lars agreed with me on this before I even finished the thought. Young people still walk into a building wanting to be seen, wanting to make friends, wanting a teacher who is good at teaching. That part is timeless. What is not timeless is what we handed them.
I have said this before and I will keep saying it. Kids did not invent vaping. They did not invent the iPhone. They did not design an algorithm built to be addictive. We did that, or we allowed it, and then we got frustrated with them for behaving exactly the way that technology was engineered to make them behave.
What struck me most is the analogy I could not stop thinking about during the interview. Three decades into the industrial revolution, a group of young people looked at the smoke in the sky and the rivers nobody could swim in anymore and said, wait a minute, something is wrong here. We call them the first environmentalists. I believe we are watching the same thing happen right now with technology. This generation of kids is going to look like a bunch of weirdos for a while, just like those early environmentalists did. And then they are going to hand us a smarter, safer way to use all of this.
So what do we actually do with this? A few things Lars and Thornbury are proving out right now.
Set a clear, simple rule and hold it. Not used, not visible, from the start of the school day to the end. No frisking anybody, no chasing phantom violations. Kids adapt fast once they understand the boundary is not moving.
Redesign instruction instead of just removing the device. Thornbury did not just take laptops away and hope for the best. They trained teachers to build slides with minimal text, to leave more wait time after a question, to sit with a student’s answer instead of rushing past it with a quick “great job” and moving on. That is the real work. Removing the phone is easy. Teaching differently because the phone is gone is hard, and it is the part that actually matters.
Build in structures that force real thinking. Lars described running Socratic circles in his literature class, students facing each other, wrestling with hard questions out loud, no devices anywhere near the room. It is old. It is simple. And it is completely AI proof, because it depends entirely on a human mind doing the work in real time.
Lead by example. Lars told me he now brings a pad of paper to his own staff meetings instead of a laptop, and he remembers more of what was discussed because of it. If we want kids to put the phone down, the adults in the building and the adults in the meeting room need to model it first.
Buffalos do not wait for someone else to tell them the storm is coming. They see it, they turn into it, and they get through it together. Australia saw the storm of unchecked technology in classrooms and in kids’ pockets, and instead of waiting for a perfect consensus, they walked straight into it. Six years later, they are graduating a class of seniors who know what it feels like to grow up with their attention intact.
Here is your smart thinking for this week. Reflect on the impact technology has had on your own attention span and your own wellbeing, not just your students’ or your children’s. Then list one or two ways you could apply what Lars and his school are doing, whether that is a clearer boundary at home, a redesigned lesson that asks more of students and less of a screen, or simply putting your own phone away at the next meeting you walk into.
We are not going to get this right by accident. It is going to take a policy, a process, and the courage to say enough is enough, the same courage Lars and his colleagues in Australia have already shown us. The good news is we do not have to guess what happens next. They already showed us.