While teacher strikes took place this week in many academies and the news is filled with school violence phenomena, we asked Jean-Luc Vannier, Psychoanalyst and Lecturer at the University of Côte d’Azur, Edhec, and Ipag (Nice & Paris) about his opinion on the measure to ban mobile phones in schools.
*Nice-Premium – What do you think of the measure taken by Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer to ban mobile phones in schools and high schools?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – The word “ban” is in this measure. A term that can be associated with others: norm, rule, law. Shouldn’t school be, among other things, a place to deepen and integrate these concepts? It is generally families who provide their offspring with these devices, which sometimes aim more at containing parents’ psychological anxieties. The suffering of separation is not always where one believes it to be. Moreover, the ban marks a break from the family environment, a positively symbolic castration that can promote the re-symbolization and the re-sanctification of the school perimeter. This is not the least of the issues in these times of school violence.
*Nice-Premium – Won’t children’s need to stay connected suffer as a result?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – This need to stay connected deserves clarification as it tends to create confusion: it dramatizes individuality, reduced to solitude and mistakenly equated with isolation. Indeed, having a mobile phone facilitates, to put it simply, belonging to a group identity and connecting with the world. But is it not, perhaps, the tree hiding a true jungle? Despite appearances, are we not witnessing a dilution of the individual, of the being in the true sense, into the crowd? Doesn’t the tendency toward communitarianism, not to say ghettoization, indicate that man unloads into a mass, an individuality that has become too heavy to carry? The potentially infinite and anonymous connections offered by mobile phones do they not absorb their owner, much like the black hole phenomenon in astronomy, into a completely disembodied “high tech” cosmos?
*Nice-Premium – Yet the mobile phone has become part of daily human life?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – If you look at how young people – including my students at the University of Nice Côte d’Azur – use their Smartphones, you will see that the “smart” clearly outweighs the “phone”: the mobile phone is no longer used for phone calls. Talking on the phone is desperately “has been.” Now, people “chat,” “connect,” “watch videos”: audible speech is completely outdated, replaced by the absolute rule of the image and infiltrated messages, compromised by phonetic onomatopoeia and emoticons. The emotional density of conversation, the emotional dialogue is being replaced by the thinness and often deceptive superficiality of snapshots. All of this to say: “Where are you? What are you doing? Do you love me?”
*Nice-Premium – Don’t young people have a coded telephone language?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – Considering their frustration, just like that of my younger patients, who can no longer find the words to express themselves accurately, one might doubt it. The reflective elaboration of language has resigned in the face of a metalanguage about which we might wonder, as the late Hellenist Jacqueline de Romilly did, if its syntax is capable of helping to build and consolidate a psychic structure: isn’t the correct arrangement and spelling of the word in a sentence the corollary and the signifier of the self’s place in the world? Another observation imposes itself regarding the purposes of the Smartphone in light of the many games contained in their software: socialization of boredom.
*Nice-Premium – What would be the negative effects of mobile phones in terms of education?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – The excessive use of mobile phones – “it’s stronger than me” Freud could have written – like the reliance on new technologies, underlines what I call new pathologies of connection and attachment. Firstly, the inability, experienced as a vital imperative, a matter of life or death, to refrain from instantly responding to a received message, then the sudden and recurrent appearance of messages and other alerts creates an infernal spiral of informative zapping: the disastrous effects on concentration are evident. This often requires planning classes that are rhythmically and thematically sequenced.
*Nice-Premium – Any examples?*
Jean-Luc Vannier – Students, and probably the students in the previous classes from which they come, can no longer read academic texts in full: too long! The class hour must also be divided into two or three segments to secure sustained attention from the students. The modern teacher, unfortunately, resembles a juggler with Chinese plates: doing several things at once and urgently – including a plate for discipline that the students no longer truly understand the meaning and significance of – to awaken and maintain the amazed wonder of the audience. Good luck!
