There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok. My point is that we should be developing tools to help students organize and index everything they learn so it can be put to use when they need to solve problems in the real world. Education as it's currently done mostly focuses on getting students to be able to pass some exam, after which they will quickly forget everything learned because it's no longer needed.
Taking away a student's most powerful tool is crippling their development capabilities. Education should focus on integrating and leveraging existing modern tools to empower student capabilities and problem solving skills.
A trite example: imagine a student has to solve a word search. For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually. But younger students could learn how to scan the grid with OCR tools, and then write a simple script to search for the words. Ideally students would be familiarized with a full set of advanced capabilities and programming tools to be able to outperform someone doing a manual search. This example is basic, but it can be extrapolated to far more practical real world problems.
Instead of giving students basic problems, unleash them on more complex domains without instructions and get them to engage with LLMs and other tools to try and solve the problem. Then if they get stuck, help walk them through arriving at the solution. This is what education should be about.
I want students to learn to leverage all of their tools to maximum efficiency. The goal isn't to get students to pass some stupid exam, it's for them to be able to solve complex problems in the real world.
An analogy. If we had a tree-climbing competition, where some students are allowed to use their hands and feet while others are only allowed to use their feet, I bet you that the ones that are allowed to use both hands and feet will be far more effectively at climbing. And the ones forced to just use their feet will be left wondering why they weren't allowed to use their hands.
"For an older person the only way to solve this would've been to perform the task manually."
It's quite possible the purpose of the word search is to train the child on their own visual pattern recognition, not their problem solving. Solving manually and writing an OCR program are teaching to two very different skillsets.
But more fundamental to my point is this: "There are more uses for smartphones than just Instagram and TikTok."
Yes, but without administrative-level filters and lockdowns, social media and garbage are inseparable from the phone. The solution would be for the school to offer a standard issue mobile device with whitelisted resources for the purposes of teaching.
Allowing students to have their personal, unrestricted phones out during class is to invite them to distract themselves from lessons and learning. It is to invite them to learn how not to focus on meatspace.
Banning personal smartphones and forcing kids to focus on the class is the objective, not to be arbitrarily Luddite.