Laptops have become an integral aspect of higher education, especially as more students bring them into the classroom. Some professors, however, have moved to ban them. Though I believe the argument for banning laptops is inadequate, any benefits from such a ban will be short-lived.

A few months ago, I had an interesting discussion with Ben, a friend finishing up his last semester of law school. He mentioned that some professors at the law school banned laptops from the classroom, and felt that this was a good decision. As a computer science student who lives and dies by the laptop, I naturally disagreed with him.

The most popular argument for such a ban describes the extent to which laptops distract their users, thus degrading the quality of student engagement and participation. I concede that individuals who use laptops in class can be distracted, but I don’t think this alone decides the debate.

Some distractions might be wholly unproductive, like using social media or playing solitaire (does this even happen anymore?), while others are much more justifiable. Perhaps a student was interested in a particular point of the lecture and wanted to learn more - having a laptop in this scenario allows the student to deepen his engagement with the material. Ben described a classmate who, as an editor of a law journal, had significant extracurricular responsibilities that he would work on in class. Undoubtedly this prevented the classmate from devoting full attention to the class, but then again, given the decision to either attend class sans laptop or not attend at all, that classmate would choose the latter.¹

Professors who advance this argument would probably note that the student who explores relevant issues on Wikipedia or does outside work in class is diminishing his learning experience, that dedicated attention to the class is ideal. I tend to believe that students in institutions of higher education are intellectually mature enough to make this decision for themselves. Professors don’t know the case-by-case factors that compel students to become “distracted” on their laptop; to issue a blanket decree in this manner would prevent some students from being able to make the optimal decision. I’m sure many would agree that a partially-distracted student in class is better than no student at all.

The stronger argument for a laptop ban has to do with the community-wide effects of laptop use. For some students, seeing a sea of laptop screens in front of them in the lecture hall can be distracting. In other words, laptop use not only distracts the user, but threatens to distract conscientious students trying to pay attention. This variant of the negative externality argument is fairly weak; someone who wants to pay full attention to the professor probably doesn’t care that much about spying on their classmate’s Facebook activities. Besides, if this causes a significant problem to a student, they should just sit in the front.

The other, more potent line of reasoning describes the collective diminishing of the educational experience when people don’t actively participate in class. It’s no coincidence that law professors seem to be spearheading these bans, since law classes typically rely on Socratic-style discussions rather than standard lecture. This, in particular, is a difficult problem. Most classes that run this way tend to reward participants and punish non-participants through some sort of participation component to grades. However, it certainly isn’t satisfying to a professor to just hand out poor grades to their distracted students and forget trying to advance the discussion.

In these contexts, non-participation usually arises from some deeper issue. Maybe the student is highly introverted or finds little interest in the class. It’s likely that without a laptop’s distractions available, the student’s next most interesting activity in class is to pay attention. Yet a ban merely serves as a temporary fix for a deeper problem: given the voluntary nature of higher education (students choose to pay money to attend, they choose their majors and courses, they choose to attend class, etc), if the class is consistently less interesting than mind-numbing social media updates, perhaps it isn’t being taught effectively. Removing laptops seems a bit heavy-handed and misdirected when attempting to solve these all-too-common problems.

Banning laptops might produce effective results, if effectiveness is defined solely in terms of paying attention in class. This comes at a cost, whether by preventing students from efficiently taking notes², looking up concepts in class, or even compelling students to not attend class at all. Professors have the authority to institute such bans, and it’s possible that the decision ends up being a net positive one, even taking into account the concerns and tradeoffs I’ve discussed above. Nevertheless, this kind of solution will not last. Laptops play a major role in education, and numerous other forms of technology will further transform education in the coming years. Banning technology in favor of more traditional forms of learning is just lazy pedagogy.