The U.S. Surgeon General has issued a formal advisory (PDF File) warning on the harms of screen use among children and schools are squarely in the spotlight, with recommendations to ban phones bell-to-bell and shift classrooms back to physical textbooks and handwritten work.
The advisory championed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the most direct federal push yet to roll back classroom screen time. It frames screens as a public health concern requiring immediate action, invoking the precautionary principle: "action cannot wait until all evidence is available."
By The Numbers
- Teens average 4+ hours per day on screens while even toddlers average about 2 hours.
- Nearly 50% of adolescents say they lose track of how much time they spend on their cellphones.
- 5 out of 10 teenagers have experienced cyberbullying.
- Between 3.5% and 5% of children experience sextortion before adulthood.
- Research projects that by 2050, about 40% of children worldwide will be myopic, tied in part to prolonged screen exposure and reduced outdoor time.
What Schools Are Asked To Do
The advisory's school recommendations go beyond cellphone restrictions:
- Implement bell-to-bell phone bans for the entire school day.
- Invest in physical textbooks and prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities, and social activities for all grade levels.
- Assign work in books or on paper whenever possible.
- Move individual devices into a computer lab rather than the classroom.
- Build in more physical activity to help students hit the recommended 60 minutes daily.
- Carve out exceptions for IEPs, Section 504 plans, and health monitoring.
The Big Picture: The advisory cites NBER research showing Florida's school cellphone bans improved student outcomes, and it points to similar policy efforts already underway across roughly two dozen states.
Tech companies are also being put on notice as the advisory calls for default-off notifications on minor accounts, removal of infinite scroll and autoplay features for children, and an end to gambling-like design mechanics in apps used by kids.
How This Connects: The College Investor has tracked the widening gap between rising grades and falling test scores. ACT data shows the average adjusted high school math GPA climbed from 3.02 in 2010 to 3.32 in 2022, even as 2021 ACT test-takers posted the lowest scores in over a decade. A UC San Diego report recently flagged that roughly 1 in 8 incoming freshmen now place into math below high school standards — many of them students with strong GPAs and advanced coursework on their transcripts.
The Surgeon General's advisory points at one possible accelerant: classroom multitasking. It cites research showing that digital media multitasking during instruction negatively affected grades, test scores, recall, and reading. Bell-to-bell phone bans, physical textbooks, and pen-and-paper work are designed to rebuild the academic skills that grade inflation has been quietly papering over.
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Editor: Colin Graves
Robert Farrington is the founder of The College Investor and is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices on student loan debt and saving for college. He holds an MBA from UC San Diego Rady School of Management and has spent over 15 years researching, writing, and advising on student loans, 529 plans, financial aid programs, and saving and investing for young professionals.
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