Are Smartphones Really Making Kids Dumb?

After decades in the classroom, award-winning teacher Steve Gardiner, of Billings, Montana, became acutely aware of a new problem making it difficult for his high-school students to learn. Ironically, it was the so-called smartphone. “The phones were disruptive and distracting—the most disruptive and distracting thing in the classroom in my 38 years of teaching,” Mr. Gardiner, now retired, told The Epoch Times. “Students could not stop looking at them. And when they weren’t looking at them, they were thinking about looking at them. I called it an addiction.” Experts now are calling attention to how smartphone use in the classroom can have negative effects on learning and safety at school. They show evidence that suggests allowing students to keep the devices with them during the school day leads to poorer academic performance, and sometimes even compromised safety and an increased chance of devastating consequences of bullying....