The day before spring break, a protest erupted when school safety agents confiscated cell phones from students entering the Secondary School for Law, one of the city’s small public high schools. The regulation banning phones and electronic devices is almost 20 years old, but it was the strict enforcement of the regulation that prompted the walkout by an estimated 200 students. When the police deemed some of the protesters to be disorderly, arrests were made. An advocacy group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care offered its support to those who were arrested, on grounds that the protests were a constitutionally guaranteed exercise of free speech, and that police exceeded their authority by restraining and arresting them.

A little over a year ago, I wrote that school administrators were virtually powerless to stop the possession and use of the phones in our schools, unless Chancellor Klein received permission from the FCC to turn our schoolhouse buildings into cellular “dead zones” blocking the transmission of cell phone signals. It seems movie theater owners have encountered similar disruptions in their theatres and want permission to jam the phones.

The president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, John Fithian, opined, “I don’t know what’s going on with consumers that they have to talk on phones in the middle of theatres.” If Mr. Fithian visited a New York City public high school, he would realize that many of his patrons are high school students who’ve become addicted to cell phone abuse in the schools. If they have no sense of decorum in the schools, you can bet that they won’t know how to behave in other public settings.

Do children need cell phones? The dean’s office in my school makes a phone available to students who need to call home. If a parent is looking for their child, we find their schedule on our computers and put them in touch with one another within minutes. None of this has prevented parents from calling their children in class to give them an “important” message, or from having children call home to tell a parent that another student is bothering them or they don’t feel well. When the disruptive student is brought into our office, they respond by telling us that “my mom called, and my mother is more important than school.”

Well, that’s hard to argue with. What could be more important than mom? The mother of one of the arrested students said the phones were vital to parents who wanted to get in touch with their children during an emergency.

We confiscate cell phones on a daily basis and have run out of room to store them in our safe. We have an epidemic of student cell phone thefts, and rarely are they recovered. We investigate and usually learn that the student “loaned” the phone or gave it to another student when they asked to see it. At times, “asking” to see it is little more than mugging through intimidation, but most of the time it is just stupidity. The phone gets passed to another student, and, before you know it, nobody knows where it is.

Cell phone abuse undermines school discipline. Consider the situation in a high school of 2,500, where there are hundreds of cell phones. Imagine the manpower and storage space needed to voucher and return every phone. Remove the ban on cell phones and all semblance of classroom decorum will disappear.

In the landmark Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, that ruled that the wearing of black armbands by students in school to protest the Vietnam War was protected free speech, Justice Hugo Black issued a prophetic dissent warning “… I repeat that if the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools, can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary.”

We’ve long since crossed that Rubicon. Justice Harlan joined Justice Black in opposing the expansion of these free speech rights of students. He observed that “The original idea of schools, which I do not believe is yet abandoned as worthless or out of date, was that children had not yet reached the point of experience and wisdom which enabled them to teach all of their elders. It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that ‘children are to be seen not heard,’ but one may, I hope, be permitted to harbor the thought that taxpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.”

Unfortunately, Black and Harlan were on the losing side of the argument, and we are living with the consequences today in our schools. Don’t expect any changes in the schools or the movie theater until the wisdom of Black and Harlan once more dominate our sensibilities.

Mr. Epstein is a dean at Jamaica High School.