The smartphone of discord: from an educational tool to a danger to memory

If you enter a third class of the Piero Bottoni scientific high school in Milan, you should not be surprised to see the students fiddling with their mobile phones. They are doing physics lesson with Professor Alberto Martelli. "The smartphone has proved to be an extraordinary didactic tool – the teacher declares – I would say indispensable. When we study the motion of bodies, I have the object that is moved resume with the camera of the mobile phone, then with a special software we make all the measurements". The same happens at the Peano technical institute in Turin. "I leave it on the counter available, like a notebook or a book. And I ask you to use it to search for words or to read a text" explains Maria Rosa Quaglia, Italian teacher and library manager.

But not everyone agrees. Senator Andrea Cangini has promoted an investigation into digital abuse. "All the experts we are listening to – the parliamentarian warns – agree on the risk of irreversible damage to children and adolescents: I believe that it would be appropriate to introduce an absolute ban on smartphone use for children under the age of 14. Not only in school. ". The explanation is that the excessive use of the tablet would gradually lose the classical faculties of human intelligence: memory, critical spirit, attention, understanding of things. The brain is a muscle that, underused, would lose elasticity and therefore processing capacity.

There is no certainty about who is right between the two schools of thought. Certainly, if on one hand technology is useful for everyday life, on the other it is also true that there are more and more children who can no longer hold a pen in their hands.