Since 2014, I’ve led a study-abroad writing course for Yale University in Auvillar, a village in the southwest of France. For many of those years, I’ve experimented with requiring these students to go completely offline for our month together. No texting, no Googling, no posting photos of duck confit on Instagram. Most of my students last summer were born around 2004. They had cellphones in their hands as early as the second grade; by middle school, Instagram and Snapchat dominated their social lives, and TikTok and ChatGPT have defined their college years. You might think enforcing a technology ban gets harder with each passing year.
In fact, it’s gotten easier. In 2017, the first year I instituted an internet sabbatical, my students flinched at four weeks without the web. Even after I collected their SIM cards, many students wanted to hold on to their phones, claiming they were essential for photos or music or time keeping. But by 2025, any resistance had faded away. My students hungered for an absolute disconnect. Last summer, all seven of them — without wringing their hands — turned in their phones.
What I witnessed in the four weeks that followed has convinced me that we owe it to today’s college students to create internet-free spaces, programs, dorms and maybe even entire campuses for students committed to learning with far fewer distractions. There’s constant talk these days about how higher education needs reimagining in light of artificial intelligence, but we’re mistaken if we think A.I. is solely responsible for our broken system. I get the sense from my students that A.I. feels like the sour icing on an already bitter cake. Adults need to step up and set parameters so that it’s not on these kids to self-regulate.
My student Devin described his usual writing process to me: “Every 10 words, I’d be on my phone.” Another student, Gaby, who’d had a smartphone since elementary school, was even more tethered: “I was always trying to finish work as quickly as possible so I could get back to my phone.” Their generation has a word for such compulsive phone use: rotting. My students knew they were rotting, but knowing didn’t help them stop.
Not even Will, the self-proclaimed Luddite of my class, had found a way to exist in college unassaulted by distractions. Sometimes, he’d go to a cafe and purposely not get the Wi-Fi password. But even then, simply knowing that someone might text his phone and interrupt his flow kept him from ever sinking fully into a story or idea.
When I was in college more than 20 years ago, I could walk into the library and vanish into the making of an essay for hours. I think back on those times — of real struggle and hard-won satisfaction — and I’m livid for these kids. Not only have we failed to shield them from notoriously addictive technologies; we’ve digitized every corner of academic life. Papers are due via online portals, and campus events are announced on Instagram. It’s nearly impossible to navigate college without minute-by-minute connectivity.
In France we did just that. Yes, my students wrote on computers, but they were without Wi-Fi. If anyone was desperate to research something for an essay draft, they’d make appointments to (briefly) use the laptop of my program assistant — in and out. Once they finished their daily writing assignments, they printed them and at 6 p.m. on the dot, I showed up to gather the pile. On weekend trips, I handed out paper maps and set them loose in Bordeaux. They took to the streets like flaneurs of old.
At the end of such a day in France, my students weren’t pining for two hours on Instagram. If I’d handed them all devices at 6 every night, I’d have witnessed a lot of rotting. Here’s what happened instead: Ping-Pong, knitting, charades, climbing hay bales, letter writing, stargazing, sitting through two-hour dinners with nary a device on the table. Between bursts of writing, my students actually rested. Like the kids that they still are, they played.
After four weeks of these new rhythms, my students were raving to me about the effects: Will was sleeping more deeply than ever before, Gaby was reading quickly again, Devin had shocked himself not only by his output (15 essays in four weeks) but also by how long (a full six hours) he could just sit in a room — alone — and write.
In the time that I’ve taught this course, I’d never seen a bigger difference between the writing in Week 1 and the writing in Week 4. Over and over, with audible surprise in their voices, all seven students expressed what parents and educators thrill to hear: I have it in me.
Before everyone flew home this summer, I pulled my students aside, one by one, to scheme about how an internet sabbatical might work back on campus. Dare we dream? If disconnecting had such profound effects on them — everything from deeper sleep to quicker reading, wilder creativity to greater confidence — mustn’t we?
No one was more ready to dream than Devin. He’d found it so potent to draft his essays without a wireless internet connection that he took it a curious step further, lowering the brightness on his laptop screen until it was totally black, typing without seeing his words on the screen, as though the glow alone might spoil his new flow. He told me that his best writing came out of in-class writing prompts, when I forced my students to write, by hand, during seminars. The farther this young man got from technology, the more he seemed to grasp and demonstrate his creative powers.
Going offline could be the cornerstone of an entire college program. Why not create a tract for kids who yearn to disconnect, who just need structure and community around doing so?
This isn’t as pie in the sky as it might sound. Niall Ferguson, a historian and a trustee of the University of Austin, has argued that we need to reimagine higher education such that students spend seven hours a day in what he calls “the cloister,” an analog space without internet. In the cloister, students would read print books, discuss them, write essays, work through problem sets and take exams orally or on paper. Time in the cloister is counterbalanced with time in what he calls “the starship”— when students are back online “for the use of A.I.” If my students prove that the cloister works, they also prove that his vision isn’t ambitious enough.
Students today need a cloister that doesn’t collapse at the end of the day. I imagine students in an offline tract signing a contract in which they commit to abstaining from smartphones for some time. I can imagine flip phones (distinctive ones, to build identity and camaraderie) issued to them, along with laptops wiped of everything but word-processing powers (or, at a minimum, blocked from social media sites). Finally, I imagine an old-school computer lab where students get a limited number of hours of internet access per week — in and out.
Plenty of colleges today have spaces specifically for identity groups (at Mount Holyoke, the Mosaic living-learning community for students who identify as people of color) and even certain lifestyle preferences (at Brown University, a substance-free house). It’s time to accommodate students who have the will to disconnect, so that they can pull off — in community — what’s virtually impossible alone.
There are so many versions of what we did in France that would liberate students from distractions and put them in touch with their raw intellectual powers. This needn’t be a cloister-or-bust proposition. The more varieties we generate (phoneless weekend trips, two-month modules that require a disconnect, blackout study weeks), the more inclusive we stand to be of students of all kinds and in all situations, whether they are liberal arts or STEM majors or are holding down jobs and taking care of family members.
What’s paramount is that we don’t underestimate the current appetite for full immersions in the offline world. These days, my students seem to find disconnecting as exotic as France itself — a foreign place they long to know, explore and re-encounter themselves through, as we so often do in travel.
What my students made clear, however, was how essential collective buy-in was to our internet sabbatical — the fact that the seven of them had been all in. Will joked that a student going offline alone would need “an iron heart shield to protect against FOMO.”
When parents realize what a saboteur A.I. is for learning, they’re more likely to back an ambitious overhaul. I know such parents; I send emails to them every Sunday during my course. A few always reply to my assurances that their kids are alive and thriving: What an experience, they say. How lucky those kids are to be offline. Everyone — not just the young but also parents who’ve struggled to raise children in a world ruled by phones — is ready for sweeping change.
I’m no longer certain that the content of my course is where my greatest impact as a teacher lies. With the current generation, at least, what we as educators keep out is as important as what we put in. In creating containers, we give members of this technology-crushed generation a fair chance to be with their own thoughts, until they’ve made something of them and felt the oldfangled dopamine hit that comes with assembling meaning. I don’t know what we owe our students if not that.
Colleen Kinder is a writer for and a founder of Off Assignment. Her memoir about teaching on a ship is forthcoming.
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