What Happens When a School Bans Phones? Ask ICS Bangkok

At the International Community School of Bangkok, ninth graders don't carry personal phones during the school day. They use school-issued devices instead, and the high school doesn't allow devices outside the classroom without teacher permission. It's a policy the school has lived with long enough to see what it changes, and on a recent episode of Students Incorporated, high school principal Amber Quick described exactly what she's watched happen since it took effect: more students out at lunch playing volleyball or cards, fewer heads bent over a screen, a real drop in phone use across the high school. That single rule also puts ICS Bangkok several steps ahead of an argument that dozens of national governments and more than half of America's state legislatures are only now having in earnest.

The episode paired student co-hosts Josiah and Proud with two of the school's senior educators to dig into one question: what happens to a teenager's sense of self when so much of it now gets built, tested, and judged on a screen. Quick, who spent 17 years in international schools in Hong Kong and Thailand after eight years in the United States, and who is now in her eighth year at ICS, didn't hedge her verdict. "I would say overall, it's made it harder," she said of social media's effect on identity formation. "Adolescence is a time when identity forms through trial and error in real life... social media tends to short-circuit this process."

A Rule the World Is Only Now Catching Up To

ICS Bangkok's device policy, developed independently as a campus decision, mirrors what has become a genuine global movement. In 2023, UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report called for a worldwide ban on smartphones in classrooms, citing studies from Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom in which removing phones improved learning outcomes. The organization has tracked the policy's spread since: by the end of 2023, 60 education systems, or 30 percent of countries, had a ban on smartphones in schools written into law or policy. By the end of 2024, that had climbed to 79, or 40 percent, according to UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report.

The United States has moved even faster. As of late 2025, 31 states and the District of Columbia required school districts to limit or ban cell phone use in classrooms, according to tracking cited by the Paragon Institute, with most of that legislation passed within the year. California's Assembly Bill 3216, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024, requires every school district in the state to adopt a policy restricting or prohibiting smartphone use during the school day starting in 2026. New York City's public school system, the largest in the country, rolled out its own ban for the 2025-2026 school year, requiring students to power down personal devices for the full instructional day.

The early data on outcomes is more complicated than either side of the debate tends to admit. A National Bureau of Economic Research study of Florida's statewide cellphone ban, reported on by Chalkbeat and the Hechinger Report, found reading and math scores held roughly steady in the first year, then rose modestly in year two, with the largest gains in schools where phone use had previously been heaviest. But the same study found student suspensions rose 25 percent in the first month of the ban compared to the same month a year earlier, with in-school suspension rates for Black male students climbing 30 percent at the most affected schools, a disparity that had mostly faded by the following year. It's the kind of uneven, real-world result Amber Quick has already had to reckon with in miniature: asked point-blank whether the policy solves everything, her answer was "No, absolutely not," but she called the trade-off, more face-to-face conversation, fewer disrupted classes, "hugely positive" overall.

The Book Behind the Policy

Quick repeatedly pointed to a single source for her thinking: Jonathan Haidt's 2024 book "The Anxious Generation," which argues that a "phone-based childhood" replaced a "play-based" one once smartphone adoption crossed the halfway mark among Americans, a threshold Haidt dates to around 2012. Haidt's numbers, drawn from U.S. federal health data, are stark: emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-to-14-year-olds rose 188 percent for girls and 48 percent for boys over the 2010s, while suicide rates for the same age group climbed 167 percent for girls and 91 percent for boys. Rates of major depression among 12-to-17-year-olds rose 145 percent for girls and 161 percent for boys, and anxiety diagnoses among college students jumped 134 percent over the same window.

That timeline lines up with the sheer scale of what social platforms now claim as an audience. DataReportal's Digital 2025 Global Overview Report counted 5.24 billion social media user identities worldwide as of early 2025, equivalent to 63.9 percent of everyone on Earth. Quick's read on what that scale does to a developing teenager is unsentimental: normal adolescent identity formation runs on trial and error conducted in front of a small, forgiving audience, and social media replaces that with a permanent, searchable one. "I do feel like teens today don't have the freedom to mess up without fear of it being known, criticized, posted, shared," she said. "And that's a heavy burden to carry."

Comparison That Doesn't Land the Same Way Twice

Quick described the effect as strongest around what researchers call upward social comparison, the tendency to measure yourself against people who appear to be doing better, and said it hits differently by gender. For girls, she said, the comparison tends to run through appearance, popularity, and lifestyle; for boys, it's more often status inside gaming or online communities. Recent research backs up the split. A 2022 study of young women published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that time spent browsing Instagram was linked to lower body appreciation, an effect fully explained by upward comparison with influencers rather than with real-life friends. A separate 2025 study of Polish adolescents published in the journal Children found that heavy internet use, more than four hours a day, was tied to measurably lower self-esteem, with the effect concentrated among girls and largely independent of their actual body size. Quick's summary of the mechanism matched the research almost exactly:

The online world asks people to perform and not to grow.

Building an Identity That Isn't Rented from an Algorithm

The episode's second guest, the school's headmaster, known on the show as Mr. Luke, framed the stakes in less clinical terms. He told Josiah and Proud that ICS tries to root student identity in "character, values, and for many of us, our faith" rather than in follower counts, and described his approach to the subject as curiosity over fear: asking students to interrogate how a platform is shaping them rather than issuing a blanket prohibition. On a campus he described as a mosaic of cultures and backgrounds, he said building a shared standard for digital citizenship means anchoring conversations in traits that translate across cultures, honesty, empathy, accountability, rather than assuming every family defines privacy or respect the same way.

Looking past phones to what comes next, Mr. Luke argued that artificial intelligence will test the same instincts in a new form. Rather than trying to out-pace students technically, a battle he conceded the school will lose, he said the goal is teaching the underlying judgment: whether a tool is being used to think harder or to skip thinking altogether. "The apps and everything will change," he said, "but you will have integrity, character, wisdom, and discernment."

His closing advice to students and parents doubled as a rebuttal to the idea that any school policy, phone ban included, does the whole job on its own. He urged teenagers to ask a plain question before posting: does this online version of me match who I actually want to be? For parents, his advice was to build a habit of conversation sturdy enough that kids feel safe describing what happens online, not just to monitor it after the fact. And for everyone, adults included, he offered the same caution that shows up throughout the research: a highlight reel is not a life, and building an identity that can survive contact with one requires practicing being a person somewhere the feed can't reach.

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