A debate about this in the Netherlands ended with a strong advice from the government to ban smartphones and watches in classrooms.

It does have a positive impact, yet I keep thinking about why we teach the way we do. Is the problem not that the ‘classroom’ is outdated and not serving the educational needs of today?

As a greek I have one thing to say:

You use phones in classrooms?

So do teachers. It still doesn’t stop it.

Regardless of what I think about cellphone usage in the classroom. I don't think this is something that UNESCO should have saying in. And definitely not be able to ban. Nor do I belive government should have saying in. This just should be the decision of each school on how they want to approach this.

Access to a dictionary or thesaurus, or the dozens of mathematical axioms and theorems were were expected to know intrinsically might have helped.

In retrospect despite the well-meaning intent of some of my teachers, the institution of the unified school district of my childhood acted in bad faith. It was interested in the containment of children. It allowed for abuse. It taught false propaganda as truth and fact. It deserved far more mischief and resistance than it received from my class.

And schools in the states have gotten only worse, not better.

Without an uncompromised educational system it is up to our youth to teach themselves, to recognize for themselves they're being molded and constrained to serve as interchangeable, disposable laborers and solders within vanity projects of plutocratic billionaires, in a society that is not yet working towards sustainability through their lifetime.

Outside of subjects they are interested in, learning about anything can be quite boring. Even if it's a necessity, it's obvious why a child ends up being distracted by an object essentially designed to be their interest.

The problem with banning these devices in classrooms is that unless you enforce it in any meaningful way, it ends up just being a game of hide and seek with minimal consequences to them (short term at least).

UNESCO calling students to stop using their phones is even less effective than the teachers themselves trying to do it, and we already know how that turns out.

Definitely support the ban, even with laptops back in the uni days it was too easy to get distracted, I can't imagine smartphones now with all the attention-grabbing apps on them.

Well I, an utterly insignificant individual, don't.