The issue is one of judicious allowance of smartphones — teaching students about time management and their phone use. A phone is not a "cigarette" in the sense that it is not universally and simply a cause of harm.

I can use a web browser or a smart phone to look up information for my job, or to educate myself on physics regarding communications and distances to Voyager 1 and 2.

Or I could use my smartphone to browse TikTok videos or to post political rants. Even then, if I watch TikTok I might be watching a solar observations, learning about coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares from Professor Nixy, or I could just be watching the lastest dances. If I were on Twitter/X, I could be learning about breaking current events and world politics for my social studies classes, or I could be listening to the rants of some idiotic get-rich-quick dudebro.

You could have a graphing calculator on your phone. A skymap for astronomy. Programming tools. Or... you could just fill it with games.

The tool isn't the issue. It's the judiciousness of the mind using the tool.

There is a time of day to do my work, and a time of day to have fun. We, as a society, as parents, as educators, are continuously failing students in terms of educating them on time and attention management, on effective learning and research techniques, and on properly using the once-supercomputer-level tools and technology they have in their hands every day.

Having spent time in the classroom teaching math, I believe it would be better to have smartphone use tied to attention span ("Okay, for this part of the class, all cellphones need to be put away..."), outcomes ("You did great on the quiz. Feel free to browse the web as a reward."), and so on.

Showing a student how to use a graphing calculator is awesome because it lets them finally understand equations. Seeing them plotted out. It's not just x's, coefficients and exponents. It's shapes and patterns.

This is entirely dependent on the school, the teacher, the grade and the class. Yes, I know the difficulty of teaching young men and women when cell phones are right there in front of them. High school you can hope to appeal to their better nature. Elementary school? Yikes. I don't think that's doable. Maybe with some better elementary level individuals. The kids minds are often just not equipped at that age to be able to discipline themselves. You'd have to have clear "all phones away" protocols. Maybe allow them to have it at recess and lunch. That sort of thing.

To my mind there needs to be a tiered approach. Different schools, different grades, different classes should have different protocols. I'd hate to be the middle school woodworking teacher who saw kids lose fingers because they weren't paying attention to a safety lesson then started haphazardly using a table saw.

Unless, of course, the teacher made them all watch a safety video on the table saw, and then take a quiz to prove they were paying attention.

Also, my fear: prohibition generally doesn't work. This "ban the phone" thing sounds swell and great until the first time a school is sued, perhaps because of some emergency issue where the parents could not get ahold of their kids urgently.