Thousands of new efterskole students moved into boarding schools across Denmark on Sunday, August 9, arriving to markedly stricter mobile phone rules than in previous years.
The trend was described in reporting by DR, published on the first day of the new intake. At many schools, phones are collected on arrival and handed back only after an initial period. When they are returned, they are covered by tight restrictions.
According to Torben Vind Rasmussen, chair of Efterskoleforeningen, a growing number of schools are introducing significantly more restrictive rules on students’ use of and access to their phones. He told DR that the rules students meet are strict, and more restrictive than in the rest of Danish society. Per Vind Rasmussen, young people are keen to attend an efterskole, and it is a condition there that schools build frameworks prioritizing analog community life.
At Dronninglund Efterskole in North Jutland, phones may only be used in students’ rooms. They are locked away at night, and the internet is switched off during those hours. Headteacher Bitten Schjødt Kjær said the aim is to protect the school community, describing the phone as too strong a magnet that pulls children and young people away from fellowship.
One of the new students at Dronninglund Efterskole is 15-year-old Astrid Frey Knudsen. She told DR that she normally uses her phone around four hours a day and is used to few rules about it. She expects the change to be difficult, but believes she can manage it, and does not consider the rules unfair.
Knudsen said her understanding is that the schools want students to meet each other as they really are, rather than sitting together on TikTok. As she described it, the restrictions create space for students to actually meet.
Rules tightened again this year
Dronninglund Efterskole discusses and refines its phone rules every year, and did so again before the start of this school year, DR reports. Schjødt Kjær said she can easily imagine a future where phones stay at home entirely, creating fully phone-free efterskoler. She said she would not rule that out.
Nordfyns Efterskole has also tightened its rules year by year, according to headteacher Mogens Zabel. He said the period during which students may have their phones has been narrowed, so they still keep them, but for shorter stretches of the day. As stated by Zabel, the goal is for students to be present where they are, rather than inside their phones.
Zabel described the school as a space where staff want to teach students to look inward and ask who they are, instead of mirroring themselves against the whole world. The focus, he said, is on being together with the people sitting right next to and across from them.
