The headteacher of a school in Tashkent writes about the rule that everybody said would fail.
A year ago this September, our school introduced one simple rule. Pupils put their phones into a locker at the gate in the morning, and they take them back at four o'clock.
I did expect complaints, and they did come. Parents wrote to say that their children needed to reach them. Teachers asked who would supervise three hundred lockers. And a boy in the eleventh grade, Bekzod, collected two hundred signatures on a petition against the rule and left it on my desk with a polite note.
I read every letter, and I answered every one. Parents can call the school office at any time, and they still do. But I kept the rule, because I wanted to see what one year would show.
Here is what it showed. I am not a scientist, and one school is not a study, so I offer these as observations, not proof.
The library lent more books in the autumn term than in the whole of the previous year. The two table-tennis tables in the hall, which had stood unused for years, now have a queue at every break. And the noise in the canteen has changed. It is louder. Pupils do talk to each other now, across tables, between classes, in a way that I had forgotten was possible.
Not everything worked. Lockers broke, keys went missing, and one cold morning in January the queue at the gate reached the street. We have fixed most of these problems, but not all.
And Bekzod? In October he started a chess club. It meets every lunch break in Room 14, and it now has forty-one members. Last month he wrote a short article for the school magazine. Its last line was this: "I did hate the rule. I do not hate it now, and I am a little annoyed about that."
So, after one year, my answer to the people who wrote to me is careful but clear. I do believe it works. If you doubt it, do come and see us at lunchtime — but bring a chess board.