Using a phone during class was indeed never an option, but, can I ask you since you went to school with smartphones (I am much older): Is your experience that most students pull their phone out as soon as they exit the classrooms? Do they spend most of their breaks on their screens? If so do you have the feeling you have poorer conversational skills because of this and would you not rather have just enjoyed school engaging with the people around you?

I see youngsters now that have hundreds of messages a day, on many platforms, and consequently hours of screen time a day. Does it not feel like this time would be better spends in face to face engagements?

I read about girls that are just tired, they have a good time, everybody gossips on Social Media, they have to maintain "status" there, streaks, presence, likes, it never ends, last thing before sleep, first thing after waking up. It sounds so exhausting.

Banning cell phones from class hours doesn't actually change the social media rat race in any way. You still have to maintain presence. That's just part of being social.

We had the same distractions before smart phones. We would just hide in the computer lab and browse the Internet while playing games and trying to look busy. A hundred messages sounds like about a half hour of conversation on any chat platform.

We would still play games on our calculators, sign in to IRC, and post on forums. Now it's cell phone games, discord, and twitter but really it's the same shit.

The idea behind banning cell phones is more about attention span and the unfortunate reality of constant dopamine hits.

Yes, there were distractions in my time as well, but I would say it's quite different because now you don't have to go anywhere, you can just pull out your phone mid-conversation and 'be somewhere else'.

I do think (hope?) the temporary removal of dopamine hits works in the long run. If I'm regularly not near my phone to check on whatever, the impulse to grab my phone is removed, because I'm engrossed in other things. Do that often enough and it may just wean people off of this online crack.

I went to grade school in the 80’s and high school and college in the 90’s.

It wasn’t anything like you describe at all. For better or worse people did actually talk to each other.

And while we did call each other on the phone reasonably often, generally when you weren’t in the room with someone you weren’t communicating with them at all.

I believe most UK schools have the same policy. However, I've heard from teacher friends that it's difficult and time-consuming to enforce -- kids will do anything to sneak in a bit of phone time during lessons.

If you really needed to use it, you had time between periods and during lunch.

The people campaigning about this are concerned about that too.