What would Mr Toad make of school phone bans?

Why phones are more like cars than cigarettes, via Agatha Christie & Wind in the Willows

In the last 12 months or so, there has been a rapid, almost palpable, change in attitudes to children and technology. A number of anti-phone pressure groups like Smartphone Free Childhood have sprung up, while many countries are starting to legislate for various kinds of phone bans: Australia banned under-16s from social media in December 2025, France is moving to ban social media for under-15s, Denmark announced plans to ban under-15s in November 2025, Norway raised its age limit from 13 to 15, and Malaysia announced a ban for under-16s coming in July 2026. In the UK, the House of Lords voted in January 2026 for an amendment to ban under-16s from social media, and the government has launched a consultation on the issue.

I am supportive of these moves, but I have also been somewhat surprised by the speed of change. I’ve been consistently anti-phones in the classroom for well over a decade now, and I’ve become used to having polite disagreements with people on the other side of the debate—which, until recently, was most people.

Over the last few months, I’ve visited quite a few schools and have been astonished to find that there was no argument to be had. I would say the thing I have said for ten years, brace myself for the usual objections, and instead I’d hear “yes you’re totally right. We’ve had a phone ban for x months and I can’t believe how well it’s going.”

How social change happens

In the past, I have compared attitudes to mobile phones in the classroom to attitudes to cigarettes.

I am constantly drawn to this analogy because the shift in attitudes to smoking occurred as I was in my late teens and early twenties and was probably the first time I realised that the social norms of my childhood were not permanent fixtures.

In the mid-90s, smoking in public places was normal and commonplace. I remember the first time someone suggested you might ban smoking in pubs, and it felt as crazy as suggesting you might ban drinking in pubs. People went to pubs to smoke! That was the point! But within a decade, a public smoking ban was in place and we were all wondering how we put up with smoky clothes for so long.

But phones aren’t like cigarettes

However, smoking is not the ideal analogy here, for a couple of reasons. Cigarettes have very few upsides, whereas mobile phones have lots. Cigarettes are also not that central to society, whereas if you got rid of all mobile phones in the world tomorrow, society and the economy would grind to a halt.

A better analogy—but an older one, which no one today has a memory of—is the invention of the automobile. Like phones, cars very quickly established themselves as vital and irreplaceable. They also had terrible downsides, and precipitated a culture war which in some ways is still smouldering today. If we go back to that moment in time, we can learn a lot about the way forward for the use of technology in education.

A literary-historical interlude: cars in the early 20^th century imagination

The light fiction of the early 20th century is littered with the impact of the automobile.

One of the funniest and most famous is Mr Toad, from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). After encountering his first car on a sleepy country lane, he is entranced and can think of nothing else.

They found him in a sort of a trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. At intervals he was still heard to murmur “Poop-poop!”

“Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!”

Before long, he steals a car and goes on a joyride.

He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

If Mr Toad were alive today, he’d be running the MrToadLambo Youtube account, full of viral livestreams of him in car chases on the M25. He’d have a memecoin called PoopPoop and on X, he’d complain about the “legacy mindset” of speed limits.

The Mr Toad-style roadhog was not an isolated figure. Thirty-one years later, Agatha Christie wrote one of the best-selling books of all time: And Then There Were None. The premise of the book is that some people have committed acts which are not legally crimes, but which are morally criminal and therefore deserve punishment. One of them is a young man, Anthony Marston, who has killed two young siblings while driving recklessly:

‘Of course it was a pure accident. They rushed out of some cottage or other. I had my licence suspended for a year. Beastly nuisance.’

Dr Armstrong said warmly: ‘This speeding’s all wrong—all wrong! Young men like you are a danger to the community.’

Anthony shrugged his shoulders. He said: ‘Speed’s come to stay. English roads are hopeless, of course. Can’t get up a decent pace on them.’

The book was published in the very early months of World War II, and I think there is an obvious political undercurrent. The Nazis were obsessed with youth, speed, and technological progress, and Hitler had made new roads and new cars symbols of his regime.

You can also see clear parallels with debates about social media and mobile phones today. The pro-car lobby, which disproportionately consisted of young men, felt that their opponents were creating a moral panic that turned commonplace everyday accidents into existential threats. The anti-car lobby was more middle-aged and female, and they thought their opponents were proto-fascists intent on destroying the lives of poor children.

In Christie’s autobiography, she wrote about her own experience of car ownership. She bought her first car at a time when there was no driving test. She could barely drive when, in 1926, she had to drive her husband to work because of the General Strike. She made it back from Hounslow to Sunningdale (about 15 miles!!) just about in one piece, but a neighbour who saw her parking up said ‘I saw the first floor driving back this morning. I don’t think she has ever driven a car before. She drove into that garage absolutely shaking and as white as a sheet. I thought she was going to ram the wall, but she just didn’t!’

But Christie also goes on to say that once she had learnt to drive, the experience gave her enormous pleasure:

Oh the joy that car was to me! I don’t suppose anyone nowadays could believe the difference it made to one’s life. To be able to go anywhere you chose; to places beyond the reach of your legs—it widened your whole horizon.¹

We are now fully in the doomscrolling era of the internet, but it is worth remembering that it was just as horizon-expanding and liberating in its early days as the car. And, similarly, as much as traffic and ragebait might annoy me, I do not want to live in a world without cars or mobile phones. They are both vital parts of the modern world. The task is to make them work to serve our aims.

With that in mind, here are five lessons we can learn from the early automobile debate.

1. Social norms matter just as much as legislation

One of the fascinating things about And Then There Were None is its focus on acts that were legal but frowned upon, acts where the social norm was in the process of shifting. It is astonishing for us to read it now and realise that the punishment for killing two children while speeding was just a year-long driving ban. But it is very hard for governments to legislate when the social norm is against it. Laws cannot get that far in front or behind of public opinion. If you had tried to implement a smoking ban in the 1950s, you would probably have had mass civil disobedience. Likewise, whilst I’ve been in favour of school level phone bans for a while, I’ve recognised that until recently it would have been exceptionally hard for a government to legislate for one, because not enough parents, students and teachers thought it was necessary, and you’d have had mass evasion of the law.

I think the time is right now for legislation. And the reason why we need a ban, and we can’t just depend on social norms changing, is that this is a clear example of a collective action problem: teenagers and their parents tell us that they would like to use their phones less, or give up social media, but they don’t want to be the only ones!

These kinds of co-ordination problems are the places where there is a strong case for government intervention, and where their intervention adds value over and above self-regulation.

2. Some kinds of regulation are fundamental and inevitable

Driving tests were one of the least controversial aspects of early automobile regulation. It’s arguable that in the modern state, the state monopoly of driving testing & licensing is one of its most fundamental functions (which is just one of the reasons why the breakdown of the UK government’s testing system is a really big problem.)

Similarly, another pretty fundamental and uncontroversial aspect of the modern state is its enforcement of age norms. You can argue about what age they should kick in, and where they should apply, but pretty much every state in the world provides children with special protections and restrictions. We frequently restrict childhood liberty, to the extent that most serious classical liberal and libertarian philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about why this is. JS Mill’s On Liberty is a great example - a book about liberty that spends large chunks discussing the education of the young.

3. Early regulation can get it wrong

Not all regulations are good regulations. The Red Flag Act of 1865 required early automobiles to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag.

I can think of a lot of current internet regulations that are not working brilliantly. Cookie consent warnings seem to be security theatre that cause a lot of hassle but don’t really address the big problems.

The Online Safety Act is a major piece of UK legislation that aims to protect children from the downsides of the internet. Critics say it is poorly drafted and will have a lot of negative unintended consequences. We will soon see who is right.

4. You can be pro and anti technology

Modern Germany has an extensive motorway network with no speed limits. It also has medieval town centres that are car-free. These are not contradictory. Likewise, it is possible to believe that schools should make use of a lot more technology in a lot of ways, whilst remaining largely screen-free for students.

5. Technology can mitigate technology

New technology will always cause problems. Most of the time, instead of getting rid of the technology, we prefer to use more and different technology to mitigate the problem. Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes and sat-nav are all examples of technology that’s designed to mitigate the negative impacts of cars.

I think this approach is the right one for education too. One technology we’re excited about at No More Marking is handwriting recognition. Before LLMs came along, handwriting recognition was a stubborn and seemingly intractable problem. LLMs have largely - although not completely - solved it. It is now possible to get instant and mostly accurate transcriptions of student writing, which in turn makes screen-free classrooms much more viable. Off-the-shelf LLMs are still not perfect though, and there is room for improvement, which is why we are working on optimising an open-source LLM to recognise handwriting with an even higher degree of accuracy.

And Then There Were Norms

The other big lesson from the car debate is that some of these debates never go away and are never truly resolved. Cars and phones are fundamental to modern society, and anything so fundamental will inevitably provoke conflict. The norms might change, but the arguments will remain.

1. Christie was not the only mega bestselling author of the 20th century who had trouble with cars. JRR Tolkien bought a car at around the same time as Christie and also seems to have struggled to learn to drive. He also wrote a book inspired by his misadventures, called Mr Bliss, but although it was written in 1932, it wasn’t published until 1982. Unlike Christie, he gave up driving at the start of the war and deplored the impact automobiles had on the Oxfordshire countryside.