we didnt have clean drinking water either, or daily showers, we lived without soap for millenia

We've been without a lot of things for millennia

For me school was a great way to learn almost nothing of any use while occupying 11 years of my life with pointless time filing busywork that I hated every hour, minute and each and every eternal second of of. The only thing worse than school has been work and my consolation is that at least it's not forever!

Yeah I think the adverse effect of handing an iPhone to a 10 year old in Atlanta, when that teen is still highly impressionable unrestricted and unsupervised access to the internet is far worse than handing a kid a Gameboy on which they can only game, or a Walkman on which the worst thing they can do is listen to Cardi B.

About 'better at hiding them'; maybe so; but that will largely be down to how the rule is enforced. Some schools basically just say "please don't carry your phone. Put it in your locker." In those schools, basically every student has their phone in their pocket. Whereas other schools are more strict about it. The phone can be confiscated on site, and in some cases require the parent to collect it. In those cases, compliance goes way up.

As for 'no phones for teachers and admin'; unfortunately, some of the jobs and responsibilities of teachers are done using a phone. Teachers are required to carry a phone during yard-duty, for emergency purposes. And teachers often use their phone to mark class attendance rolls. ... But its definitely a bad look when a teacher is walking down a school corridor staring at their phone while student phones are banned.

As for the reasons for the ban... well, they are many and varied - including all of the things you mentioned. (liability, mental health vs bullying in particular, and distraction from class activities.)

Does anybody but me remember when schools banned walkmen? What about portable CD players? Gameboy?

Except none of these things were feeding Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan garbage straight into their highly impressionable skulls.

I, for one, support the banning of phones in schools. The social media addiction has been shown to cause depression, particularly in girls, and the brainwashing is ever more apparent.

If anything, this policy fails by not going far enough. I question whether kids should have access to social media at all before a certain age.

there is no "the" answer but it can be part of an answer.

I think it is fine but we also need lessons to properly interact with the technology. Scams, fraud, disinformation and checking sources were handled very abstractly at best and archaic at worst.

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren't as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was "improved atmosphere," in which case it's still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking "dealing with phone bullshit" off the teachers' plates.

It is. Phones are the #1 distractor in school

This mentality is why I almost failed higbschool. Boredom fails us who need to be constantly invested.

Maybe if school wasn't 95% time filing garbage and busywork. I'd take a crashcourse video over what they served in school any day and hour of the week.

Doesn’t matter if the teacher is an absolute gem and knows how to captivate kids who want to learn. Most kids prefer the dopamine hit from social media and other phone usage compared to actually learning. It just ruins it for kids who actually want to learn.