What Happened When My Yale Students Gave Up Their Phones For Four Weeks |
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Guest Essay
By Colleen Kinder
Ms. Kinder is a writer and an instructor at Yale Summer Session.
Since 2014, I’ve led a study-abroad writing course for Yale University in Auvillar, a village in the southwest of France. For many of those years, I’ve experimented with requiring these students to go completely offline for our month together. No texting, no Googling, no posting photos of duck confit on Instagram. Most of my students last summer were born around 2004. They had cellphones in their hands as early as the second grade; by middle school, Instagram and Snapchat dominated their social lives, and TikTok and ChatGPT have defined their college years. You might think enforcing a technology ban gets harder with each passing year.
In fact, it’s gotten easier. In 2017, the first year I instituted an internet sabbatical, my students flinched at four weeks without the web. Even after I collected their SIM cards, many students wanted to hold on to their phones, claiming they were essential for photos or music or time keeping. But by 2025, any resistance had faded away. My students hungered for an absolute disconnect. Last summer,........