Teens Don’t Need No Thought Control

Avery Schromm did not want to be surveilled.

Her charter school in California implemented an updated laptop policy in January that required students to do schoolwork using school-issued Chromebooks, which had monitoring software installed, exclusively inside and outside the classroom. “Administrators reserve the right to examine, use and disclose any data found on the school’s networks in order to further the health, safety, discipline or security of any student or other person, or to protect property,” the new policy stated. In other words: You should have no expectation of privacy.

Schromm, who is 17 and a senior, told me that what bothered her the most was how abruptly the new policy was rolled out, with too little regard for student and parent input. So she decided to take action. The night the policy was introduced, Schromm sent the entire student body an email that included a survey asking her peers for feedback.

About a third of her classmates answered, and 90 percent of those respondents agreed with the statement “Being required to use a device that is explicitly ‘not private’ makes me uncomfortable.” A majority of the students who took the survey also worried about being monitored outside of instructional time and about how their data might be stored.

Schromm’s proud mother, Carly Perlman, was one of the people who reached out to me after I wrote in a previous newsletter that I wanted to hear from people who know Luddite teens and students pushing back against tech use in their schools. I wanted to talk to the kids themselves because we already know that a lot of parents, teachers and administrators are waking up to the negative effects of a tech-addled childhood. But if we want the culture as a whole to become more skeptical of tech use in school and out, high schoolers need to be on board, too. They are about to be adults, using their free will to make decisions about tech use outside their parents’ purview and the all-seeing eye of GoGuardian.

Broadly, teenagers’ feelings about technology are mixed. Depending on the survey, between 60 and 75 percent of teens support cellphone restrictions in their schools. Nearly half say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age, though they do think it can be used positively, especially for socializing with friends. On artificial intelligence, teenagers are somewhat more positive than negative about what they expect will be the societal impact of A.I. over the next 20 years, though they also feel a lot of uncertainty.

Speaking to Schromm and several other teens who object to certain kinds of tech use in their lives, I think the most appealing anti-tech messages to their Gen Z and Alpha peers will be about privacy and fighting the establishment, whether the establishment is their school administrators, tech companies or a society that devalues their own creative contributions and humanity. Some of these teens find that being extremely online is a depressing way to live, and they want a future that involves more embodied activity (music, animal care and crafting all came up as nonscreen alternatives) and real-life connection. But this desire has to come from them, not as a lecture from the adults around them.

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Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

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