This morning I was on my way back from school, and, while I was listening to Uno, Nessuno, 100Milan on Radio 24, I heard someone recounting a story.
It comes from France, where for days the protests by high school students have been growing ever more intense. Schools blocked, clashes with the police, students arrested, injured, tear gas.
The day before, October 6, Le Grand Continent published a long piece with a straightforward title: Et si l’interdiction du portable avait déclenché la révolte des lycéens? Translated: and if the ban on mobile phones had triggered the revolt of the high school students?
Written by Guillaume Thomas, a pseudonym behind which hides a high school teacher from the outskirts of Paris. A person who doesn’t watch the protests on television, but is a kind of infiltrator: he talks with the students who occupy, he meets those hit by tear gas, he enters the schools and asks: do you at least know why you are protesting?
The answers are confused.
The Palestine. The cafeteria. The right to go to the bathroom during class. Too many hours at school. The teachers who are missing. The conditions of the buildings. The future. All at once. Then, however, the teacher makes an observation.
Since September in France the ban on cellphone use, already planned for schools and collèges, has been extended to high schools as well. It is an official government choice: during the school day no smartphones for students. And Thomas notices that something has changed.
Last year, during breaks, he saw thirty kids bent over thirty screens. At lunch, the same thing.
Thirty teenagers in the same room and almost no one speaks to the person sitting half a metre away.
This year there is no phone. And the students, the teacher says, are more lively. More agitated. More disorderly. More childish. Also more unbearable, he adds. And at that moment a doubt occurs to him.
Perhaps the cellphone ban does not explain at all what is happening in France. It would be absurd to claim that thousands of students started protesting because someone banned TikTok. He says it himself: he only offers a possible “trigger hypothesis.”
And this is the line that struck me: and if, lifting their eyes from the feed at last, those youths had simply started looking around?
Because when you look up, the world reappears. The one sitting next to you reappears. The peeling wall reappears. The teacher who has been away for three weeks reappears. The classmate who tells you that the same thing happens in his class reappears. The future they promised you, and the one you can begin to glimpse, reappears. And, above all, the adults reappear.
Those who explain how dependent you are on your phone while checking WhatsApp at dinner. Those who tell you to switch it off and then grab theirs to check a notification. Those who confiscate it at school and five minutes later use their own to take roll.
It’s one of the sharpest and most successful turns in the French piece: the boy looks at the adult who took away his smartphone and sees someone just as dependent as him.
And then a thought hits me. Let’s really do it. Seven days with the phone turned off. Everyone.
Students, teachers, parents, administrators, journalists, politicians. Inside and outside the school. Seven days without that thing we pick up the moment there’s even a half-second of emptiness.
I’d like to see what would happen after the initial nervousness. When we could no longer hide in the scroll, the notifications, the videos, the chats.
Perhaps we would simply start looking around.
And then another problem would emerge. Because we would have plenty of reasons to be angry. Wages that aren’t enough. Schools crumbling apart. Hospitals overwhelmed. Unaffordable rents. Precarious jobs. Young people seeing their future shrink. Exhausted adults running on without knowing quite where.
Perhaps we have become so accustomed to that small glowing rectangle that we don’t even notice everything outside of it that should make us lift our heads.
Seven days without. I don’t know if it would spark a revolution. But surely we would stop pretending that everything is fine.
My Best Friend Is a Ghost
Geography of a Perfect Pain
That Place You Call Home
The Heart Doesn’t Go to Sleep
Yet We Fall Happy
THE AUTHOR – Enrico Galiano, a Friulian teacher and writer born in 1977, who is in the classroom as much as on social media, knows how to speak to young people.
After the success of novels (all published by Garzanti) such as Yet We Fall Happy, All the Life You Want, Happy Against the World, and Stronger Than Any Goodbye, he published a remarkable book, Just a Moment to Return to Childhood, illustrated by Sara Di Francescantonio. He then returned to fiction with Sleep Tonight on My Heart, and, always with Garzanti, released his first essay, The Art of Making Big Mistakes. With Salani, Galiano published his first youth novel, The Secret Society of Word-Savers. And Garzanti published his second essay, School of Happiness for Eternal Repeats.
After the novel Geography of a Perfect Pain, he returned to books with A Life Isn’t Enough, and then published, again with Salani, the second book for young readers, The Incredible Adventure of a Super-Mistake. With Garzanti in 2025, the novel That Place You Call Home was released, and with Einaudi Stile Libero, in 2026, The Heart Won’t Go to Sleep.
His new book is My Best Friend Is a Ghost (Salani).
Here you can read all the articles written by Galiano for our site, with whom he has been collaborating regularly for several years (also with videos for Instagram and TikTok).
