Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. The author of four books, his new study of the Ken Curtis administration is due in the spring. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

In these far from bipartisan times, it was heartening to see during the recent “State of the State” address that the call by Gov. Janet Mills for a “bell-to-bell” ban on cellphone use in Maine’s public schools fell on generally attentive ears.

While there’s still some concern for “local control” — a bill on the subject before the Legislature last year was watered down — somewhere between 20 to 30 states are already implementing bans, so this is hardly a radical idea.

Bath-area RSU 1 was the first Maine school district to test the concept, and the results were so positive that it soon become permanent. Portland, the largest district, implemented a ban for the current school year and, despite some initial resistance from students, it was quickly accepted there as well.

As experienced teachers well know, “paying attention” is the first and perhaps most important condition that fosters learning in almost subject. RSU 1 reported immediate increases in personal interactions, fewer disciplinary reports and better attendance.

Cellphones have become so ubiquitous that at first we didn’t notice how they had infiltrated the classroom, especially after the pandemic, when the habits of “remote learning” were accepted without much question.

Adults have more or less figured out how to deal with distractions created by instant access to almost everything, but phones’ unsuitability for classrooms has imposed unique challenges. Schools are the largest investments we make in young people, and their successes and failures are closely bound to what kind of state and nation we will become.

So it’s important to pay attention to research that it’s not just phones, but screens that may make it more difficult for children to learn at levels they did even in the recent past.

It’s long been known that literacy, the most vital of all educational measures, increases in homes with print books, and adults who read regularly to children. The difference is considerable: children from book-filled homes complete three more years of schooling than those without books, nearly the difference between a high school and a college education.

What’s startling, though, is that more recent studies involving e-books show no such positive correlation, as summarized by Eric Kube on Epoch Health. MRIs of middle school students show that reading print books significantly increases brain region connections for language skills and cognition over those who use only screens.

The differences register at an early age. In two groups of preschoolers, traditional story time — with an adult reading from a book while the kids asked questions and interacted — showed increased attention spans. Those who heard an audio version of the books with illustrations on a screen actually regressed, showing brain wave alterations associated with ADHD.

As Maine tries to figure out how our state reading scores have declined, especially since the pandemic, these are important clues. As someone who grew up long before screens began to be seen as learning tools, the distraction and discontent in too many classrooms doesn’t seem surprising.

Human-to-human interactions have always been at the heart of learning. Even those whose school experiences were far from optimal can usually remember a teacher who made a difference in their lives. Our uncritical adoption of technology, on the theory that what’s new must be better than what came before, has led us astray.

It’s not as if everyone needs to be a reader — though it might be the quickest way to improve our public discourse — but that we must have a core of critical thinking, of the ability to reason and explore alternatives, if we are ever to emerge from our current rut.

Newspaper readers, we hardy few, may not be the people we most need to persuade. But structuring educational environments so literacy occurs naturally, and not as an afterthought, could be the most important thing we do for our kids.

We might, while we’re at it, ask a few questions about AI fervor, which is, among other things, raising electric rates and straining the grid. Rather than assume an electronic way of doing things is better, why not ask for proof?

I once joked that the phone system would collapse once the entire nation was on hold at the same time. Now we can’t even get a human being to put us on hold, instead being referred to an AI “assistant.”

Perhaps this will work for a few, but interacting with our fellow humans, with all our quirks and flaws, for me will always be superior to a machine, however sophisticated. The jury may still be out, but establishing cellphone-free zones in schools would give us all a ray of hope.