Imagine monkeys on meth and you basically have the school environment.

I think the students are doing more "system integration" work than your factory workers are doing with their day-to-day handling. So they're touching all of the GPIO pins immediately after shuffling across the carpet to rub 18 balloons against themselves, connecting every GPIO pin to every other GPIO pin just for fun, rebooting by unplugging the power, etc.

If the Raspberry Pi had 5V compatible GPIO and SD cards stored data permanently immediately after fsync() returns, the Pi would have been much more successful in the educational environment.

While I can’t say my factory workers were keen on opening them up and poking around they did have a habit of hitting them with forklifts.

I have a friend who has two children who are now allegedly young adults. They smash about 1 phone each per six months and one laptop screen each per three years. Their iPads are somehow intact, but dented to fuck. I, myself, broke a laptop screen when I was 16 (1999) by kneeling on it while it was open and concealed under my bedclothes. In the intervening 24 years, I have broken zero (0) laptop, desktop, PDA, or phone screens except by activities that I knew might result in their destruction (i.e. disassembly without proper tools under an understanding of 'either I manage to fix this right now or I order a new one and it arrives tomorrow’).

All this to say: kids are just rough on shit. They're inexperienced with potential failure modes and thus fail to anticipate what precautions might need to be taken in trying to avoid them. But they mostly grow up (after killing a few pieces of hardware).

Crikey. Mine all have iPads and iPhones and have for a long time. They haven't broken anything yet!

Same here; multiple broken phone screens (and we're not buying him a new phone every time it breaks, he gets hand-me-downs at best), laptops (he managed to cram a power cable into the HDMI port in a panic, closed a laptop with probably something like a pen in between shearing the hinge, he probably punched it out of frustration / wanting a new one and blamed it on "some kids that used it as a shield"), multiple broken bikes, etc.