The Time Has Come for Phone-Free Zones
By TMP 43rd Editorial Board
Before you roll your eyes, consider this: can you hold a five-minute conversation about a serious topic without stealing a glance at a screen? The answer for many of our editors at The Milton Paper—who all freely choose to proofread 800-word articles every week—is no. In that vein, the Seattle Children’s Research Institute found in a 2025 study that teenagers spend nearly a quarter of their schooldays on their phones.
As we’ve grown up, we’ve replaced the hours of free time that took forever to melt away when we were kids with the dizzying rush of an online life that greedily eats away our existence. During the few minutes of free time Milton students are afforded, we instinctively fill the silence with scrolling. Even with others present, we’ve normalized half-conversations, with our attention split between screens and faces. Decidedly, our ability to exist on the web has corroded our capacity to exist in the world, with each other—it is that damn phone.
Phone overuse is a stain on our personal cognition and our social efficacy. The Iraq and Vietnam Wars brought about massive protests at Milton, and as recently as the Black Lives Matter movement, students staged sit-ins. All those topics were divisive in their time, but students found a way to coordinate around a genuine wish for social change. Yet modern telecommunication has rendered not just corporeal action but even purely verbal conversation increasingly implausible. Rather than acting on what we believe, we resign ourselves to tacitly posting Instagram stories and hiding from difficult political realities in our online lives.
Arguably even more concerning is the virtual extinction of boredom, of those empty spaces that once fostered creativity and self-reflection. Historically, mind-wandering has led to innovation, but today we condition ourselves to extinguish boredom instantaneously by reaching for the phone. Developing good ideas requires sustained focus. ‘Eureka!’ moments do not come from neatly choreographed thought. Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Marie Curie—these creators owe the formation of their pivotal ideas to daydreaming, boredom, and playful experimentation. The result of Milton students’ loss of boredom has been a collective decline in our capacity to pursue unique long-term interests, and we have become less innovative and have less to learn from one another.
In sum, this hyperconnectivity reduces our overall capacity as humans. Phones’ corrupting influence on our capacity to exist in the world, our willingness to act on our convictions, and our ability to learn and innovate will likely be with all of us when we graduate high school and college, on our wedding days, when we witness the births of our children, and at loved ones’ funerals. We at The Milton Paper find that intolerable.
Evidently, much of the corrosive impact of phone usage comes from its ubiquity; the phone can be found in every place on campus, at all times. The first step we can take toward imagining a reality not defined by phones is by creating pockets of space and time at Milton where phones are absent. We suggest the following phone-free zones: Cox Library, all classrooms, all active assembly spaces, and Forbes Dining Hall. Enforcement can run the gamut from adult supervision to “phone hotels” to the disabling of WiFi and nonemergency cellular data.
We know that such a proposal would never come to pass without obstacles and objections; still, every seemingly crucial use of a phone in our daily lives can be supplanted with some discomfort. Phones degrade our humanity, and we must always choose discomfort over degradation. If these changes are instituted, we may reconnect with our physical and social realities in unexpected ways. We might find a new friend or an offline hobby; in the meantime, we should try to find them anyway. Our precious days are going quick. What will we do?