Hawthorn College Students Voted to Ban All Wireless Technology on Campus

Students at Hawthorne College in Vermont have voted to ban all wireless electronic devices from campus when they return in January.

So not just laptops, but cell phones will be banned 24-7.

And students will have to take notes with pen and paper.

They will have to call each other on landline phones.

They will have to walk around campus and check their mail.

And I love this initiative from students to take back their learning and recapture some of what they've lost as college has just become another place to stare at your phone, just a very expensive place to look at your phone all the time.

So a couple of details about how this will work.

First, students will have their phones on campus, but they will be locked up and they'll be able to check them out briefly and able to use them in phone booth style rooms for short periods of time if they need to make a call or use an app.

or something like that.

The rest of the time, they are back to landline phones, which are being reinstalled in dorm rooms and classrooms and public spaces around campus.

There will also be computer labs where students can come 24-7 to do assignments.

So there's no more excuse of, I need it for schoolwork.

Good old fashioned computer labs can help with that.

And the mailroom is coming back.

Students will have mailboxes that they can use to send messages to one another and of course to receive mail.

And one more thing that's coming back is the old fashioned Facebook.

You may not know that the company Facebook was based on the idea of a printed freshman directory that colleges used to put out.

So Hawthorne College will be bringing that back as well with landline phone numbers to students dorm rooms so they can connect.

So if all of this sounds good to you, if you would sign up for that or if you would sign your kid up for that, let me know.

Unfortunately, the story I've just told you is not true.

There is no Hawthorne College and they have not voted to to bring back the low tech college education, but I think it is strongly I think there is a great case to be made for making college low tech and getting rid of the distractions that electronic devices are bringing into what is supposed to be a formative experience.

I think kids are realizing now that electronics are undermining their education.

They've seen the research that typed notes don't result in the same amount of learning.

You do better with handwritten notes.

They've seen their classmates shopping online when they're supposed to be paying attention, but they have their laptop open in class.

They have seen the cell phone addiction and the social media addiction and the vertical video addiction that is interfering with learning and social life on campus.

So I think there's real potential here.

Let me know what you think.

And you may be interested to know that this is not a totally unprecedented idea.

At least one school that I know of, Wyoming Catholic College, does ban electronics on campus.

But I think this could be a real movement, especially if it is led by students.

Let me know what you think.