I get you want to not have them use them during class but that is the general policing class behavior that teachers are supposed to do. Why ban them during breaks when it doesn't hurt their studies?
It will still be allowed to use mobile phones for "emergencies" from what I read, i.e. a teacher is not here and a child wants to contact a parent regarding that.
If that happened in my son's school (he's 5) I would expect one of the pupils to simply wander into another classroom, or reception. Given the number of parents who work full time I'm not sure what good a child phoning their parent is going to be.
In the highly unlikely event I need to contact my child, I will phone the school and they will pass on a message.
While school lunch is a slightly different situation, I think it still applies that without phones kids will be forced to communicate more directly with each other.
Having lived through the horrors of the pre-smartphone days, I can tell you that this wasn't the case. See, for instance: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/1a/a1/7b/1aa17b28aad6df78a2e1d2016... or https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/540/1*U36hBj8i-C7JJJxS4M...
(Edit: I should mention that I'm citing my Dad in my head here, who is an embarrassingly social creature in situations where I would never strike up a conversation. He spent a lot of time travelling around Europe in the 70s staying at youth hostels, e.g. in his university vacations.)
I believe this need is fulfilled by things like Tumblr now, where there are close nit communities centred around specific (often odd) interests and identities, who are vastly geographically spread. The same could be said to an extent for other social networks too, of course, including this website :)
You'd be essentially cut off from your friends back home (apart from maybe a daily email session), so you made new friends wherever you went. You'd go down to the common area of the hostel (or the beach bar near your bungalow in SE Asia), and strike up a conversation with pretty much anybody, since everybody there was traveling as well.
Now I can, sadly, verify that backpackers spend their common-area time on their phones, going about their usual business with their normal "friends". With the only difference being that they're now trying to upload photos that will make those friends jealous enough to leave a like.
I think I liked it better before.
Don't conflate what you would do with the general case - I, for one, -might- venture to a common area but it's extremely unlikely I'd ever consider trying to strike up a conversation.
Worldwide, as observed during 15 years of ~6months/year traveling. Most travelers during that period were, in fact, open to speaking to one another.
And again, in the last 5 years of doing trips on several continents, people you see at "the bar down at the beach" are usually looking at their phone, even when seated at the same table as other travelers.
That never used to happen. And I bet if we crossed paths back then and I asked you where you were from, you would have replied. And we may have even had a conversation.
But isn't this subject to mild confirmation bias? Because you won't have seen the people who aren't in the common room.
Never ever done that and I did travelled alone a bit. I know one person pulling this off, all other people I know would not have done so. Once someone tried to befriend me too much, but I found that uncomfortable (personality mismatch mostly).
For that matter, most people travelled with friends or friends groups and not alone.
It is cool that you was such person, but most people were not.
I'm generally all for the ban, though. I think the bads of the phone outweigh the goods in a school setting.
I don't see the analogy really. A closer analogy would be 'imagine if they banned portable games consoles'.
School isn't just about academic study, it's also where you make friends and learn how to interact with others.
I think mobile phones get in the way of this by enabling kids to just communicate within already established cliques?
Trust me, they already do that for the most part.
But, I can look back and be grateful there were no smartphones to hide behind, otherwise there are some hang-ups I might never have gotten over.
But something that would allow me to hide a bit in elementary scool would be welcome. I did not learned anything about communication when forced into those situations, I was just lonely and miserable.
Growing up with 3 sisters and learning at an early age what mental cruelty is.
If it was me, I'd do it for practicality. It's easier for a wholesale ban than try to implement some system where you allow a forbidden item for some, but not all of the time.
Even keeping track of which phone belongs to who for every kid in a school would be more than I would be arsed to deal with.