Want Kids to Stay in School? Let Them Keep Their Phones.
In 2023, I volunteered at a rural high school in China’s southwestern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. My job was to oversee student activity spaces, and one of my most frequent companions was Zhi Le — a pseudonym — a student in his third and final year. Zhi typically showed up when he was supposed to be in class, greeting me politely before sitting down and taking out his cellphone to video chat with his girlfriend, who had already joined the workforce.
After two months of this, Zhi dropped out. The inciting incident? His phone was confiscated.
At the time, I hadn’t considered how cellphones might be linked to the dropout rate. Yet after a year of research, I’ve discovered that for quite a few rural school dropouts, losing their phone was actually a direct cause.
With the advent of the digital era, cellphones and other digital devices have become integrated into childhood development from an early age, whether in China’s affluent urban spaces or its impoverished rural areas. However, cellphone usage affects children differently depending on where they grow up, just as school systems in different regions have distinct attitudes toward student cellphone usage. And as I learned, for students in rural schools, cellphones are so much more than mere devices for scrolling the internet.
Students who dropped out of school because their cellphones were confiscated — including Zhi — typically received their first smartphones between the third grade and their first year of middle school. Some even owned multiple cellphones at once.
This is not unusual. Most of the students at the school where I was based hailed from villages, and their parents generally worked far from home. Their first smartphones were mainly for keeping in touch with their parents.
However, high schools in rural areas generally have strict rules governing cellphone use. Many studies have shown that, in the absence of parental guidance, there is a serious issue of cellphone addiction among “left-behind kids” in the countryside. Indeed, I often saw groups of students huddling together at boba tea shops and restaurants near the school to play games or scroll through short videos.
This is a key reason schools prohibit cellphones: Teachers believe phones can distract students and be temptations that end up hindering their academic success and ability to pass the college-entrance examination, or gaokao.
Enforcement can be draconian. Students are subjected to full-body scans and bag checks when they enter campus. And because many rural students attend boarding schools, the rules mean students are expected to give their phones up for the entire week.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — students still exhaust themselves trying to circumvent the rules, including by passing cellphones through gaps in the school fence, arriving at school early to avoid inspection, and using whatever pretext they can find to ask for leave and get off campus. Locations with weak teacher supervision — such as bathrooms and dormitories — are cellphone oases.
Gradually, I came to understand why cellphones were so important to students. Student life in rural areas is relatively closed off and confined to campus, where the school constantly hammers home the idea that their only goal should be studying hard to get into a good university. However, not all students identify with this target. Many students assigned to low-level classes because of their poor test scores asked me: “What are we doing in school? Why do I need to go to university? How much money will I make from university?”
Given the fierce competition in rural areas, low-scoring students quickly lose confidence in their academic prospects and feel they have little hope for higher education. In essence, the message touted by these schools — that high test scores can change students’ destinies — loses its meaning for many once the first report cards are in. As the school pours resources and attention onto promising students, the rest just kill time, sleeping, reading, or chatting in class. Cellphones allow this group to enter a virtual world beyond the physical bounds of school, offering a space with another meaning.
For Zhi, those daily video calls with his girlfriend were a rare emotional outlet in his otherwise monotonous student life. Like many of his peers, he used his cellphone to chat with friends, play games, or watch videos beyond the direct control of the school. The devices provided psychological havens after they lost their sense of purpose and direction in school while also alleviating their boredom and isolation.
For some students, phones even provide an alternative to exam-driven education. One of my research participants — I’ll call him Wenjie — liked to mull over the kind of complex topics that rarely come up in rural classrooms. For Wenjie, the resources his cellphone provided transformed him from a passive receptacle of knowledge into an active explorer. This in turn helped him realize that he could learn for himself, rather than within the confines of his region’s evaluation system. Online, he taught himself basic computational skills, such as C++, Java, and advanced math, along with several related reference works in English.
But his cellphone usage violated school regulations, and Wenjie’s phone was eventually confiscated after a teacher discovered it. Unable to change school management regulations and unwilling to abandon his own interests, he chose to leave school.
My interviews and experiences that year helped me realize why something as seemingly trivial as having a cellphone confiscated could be enough to cause students to drop out: For these students, cellphones functioned as important spaces of meaning. Whether they were using their phones to study independently or seeking emotional solace and entertainment to relieve their boredom, the spaces of meaning they had built outside of the school’s dominant discourse collapsed once their cellphones were confiscated, throwing their lives off-balance.
Ultimately, the issue boils down to how we view education. Only by truly understanding how cellphones create meaning for teens can we understand the real reasons they are so dependent on their devices. Then we can actually guide them on how best to use cellphones — or, better yet, help them find the deeper educational meaning and guidance they clearly crave.
This article was co-authored by Cheng Meng, an associate professor at Beijing Normal University.
Translator: Hannah Lund; editor: Cai Yiwen; portrait artist: Zhou Zhen.
(Header image: Visuals from Sylverarts/VectorStock and Aleksandr Zubkov/Getty Creative/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)
