Gov. Kim Reynolds recently announced she intends to ask lawmakers for a ban on cellphones in Iowa’s K-12 classrooms.

The idea has merit, but the ban treats a symptom of what ails our children’s learning rather than the root cause.

Unquestionably, our children spend too much time on screens.

Children ages 8-10 spend about six hours a day on screens. Kids ages 11-14 spent an astounding nine hours on screens. And teenagers 15-18 spent about 7.5 hours on screens, per an October report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mental health professionals warn that the increased time in the overstimulating environments of smartphones and other screens leads to anxiety and depression as well as interrupting sleep.

Some of my students come to school bleary-eyed with phone batteries nearly dead, asking if I will charge them for them. (Per school policy, I don’t.) I ask them why they don’t charge it overnight. The answer: They were up most of the night on the phone.

But there’s a larger issue that won’t be solved by taking cellphones out of the classroom: the decline in literacy.

Kids aren’t reading online. They’re looking at videos and pictures. The most popular online destinations for teenagers are YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, per the Pew Research Center. They are all visual media that require little to no reading.

This isn’t all bad. I once changed the timing belt in my car in the parking lot of an auto parts store using a borrowed long wrench and a YouTube video.

But reading activates different parts of your brain than videos. The mind is much more passive when watching videos than reading.

The curriculum I teach from asks students to look at the methods authors use to tell stories or relate information and the structure of texts. Many of my students struggle because they don’t need to do this kind of thinking when they’re watching “Skibidi Toilet” and “Ram Sam Sam trio Cow” on TikTok.

We’ve fostered a culture that craves constant entertainment. Schools pressure teachers to make content engaging for students.

For the student, engagement means “fun.”

But many things about learning the English language are not fun: including nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, direct objects, conjunctions, and subjective, objective, and possessive pronouns. Sometimes you just have to learn things.

The tool we most often use for education is reading. But if the primary way you grew up communicating was through photos and videos, being asked to figure out how language and books work is a much longer bridge to cross for many students than it used to be.

This is not a weakness in this generation. I know that if I had today’s devices when I was a boy in the 1980s, I would behave the same way as modern children. I am lucky that I did not.

My generation was the last to grow up at a time when the TV stations signed off by playing the national anthem. The world as we understood it came to a stop. It was time to go to bed. There is no pause in modern American life, especially for our youth.

Technology always advances faster than our ethics and social norms. We have had the internet since then for less than 30 years and we still struggle for ethical and healthy ways to use it. Media critic Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea of a global village in his 1962 book, “The Gutenberg Galaxy.” But that did not come to pass either. Our policies and ideology are more isolationist than at any time since before World War II.

We possess all the technology necessary to become the most educated society in the history of the world. But we have used it to build silos around ourselves and wrap ourselves in joy buzzers.

I am reminded of a quote from Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith: “If humans had a button on their chest that gave them an orgasm, they would press it all day until they passed out.” Now we essentially have such a button, and we’ve put it in the hands of our children largely unsupervised.

Why would kids read — a slow, silent, and thoughtful act — when every viral video, meme, movie, TV show, song, or any other genre of entertainment is at their fingertips?

How do we fix a culture that is sliding into a post-literate age?

Maybe the cellphone ban in classrooms will help. But it doesn’t address the deeper cultural problem: The unceasing noise from nonsense has overwritten the collective desire for thoughtful reflection — which is the very definition of good readers.

Fred Rogers, the late children’s television host, pondered this question in the late 1990s. “Oh, my, this is a noisy world,” Rogers said in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. “What can we do to encourage people to have more quiet in their lives, more silence? Real revelation comes through silence.”

Cellphones and other devices deliver the noise. Limiting access to them in the classroom is a good idea.

How do we limit the mass production and distribution of noise? I am stumped, but I hope Reynolds and the lawmakers at least consider the bigger problem.

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Daniel P. Finney wrote for newspapers for 27 years

before being laid off in 2020. He now teaches

middle school English.