Would you expand on why this is "batshit insane"?
Phones are one of the most ubiquitous pieces of tech on the planet, have several very beneficial uses, make it easier to connect and stay in touch with friends, etc. Teaching kids how to use the technology responsibly and appropriately at an early age seems the exact opposite of "batshit insane" to me.
They do not and cannot realistically do this. Meanwhile, it's like they're letting them walk around with gameboys that can also be (and constantly are) used to clandestinely bully people and take creepy photos and share them and shit. It's plainly insane.
[EDIT] Further, they're at school. How much "stay[ing] in touch with their friends" do they need to do?! They're either in class, so shouldn't be fucking around on their phones (the problem: they do, a lot, and at least around here most admin won't take their phones away or ban them from having phones at school for it) or they're between classes or at lunch or whatever and can just talk to their friends.
I guess we disagree on the fundamentals. I believe kids can be taught how to interact with technology responsibly. In fact, my whole goal as a parent is to teach my kid how to responsibly navigate through life (which has increasing amounts of technology that they must eventually learn how to interact with).
Sometimes they need a bit more hand-holding (e.g. parental controls on a phone so it isn't a gameboy) until we can properly discuss something and settle on appropriate boundries. Other times they surprise me with how responsible they are. But if you're starting from a position of "kids can't learn to use a phone responsibly", I'm not sure what to say.
A school cannot do this while doing all the other stuff they have to do, and you don't get to teach your kids' peers not to do horrible things with their devices.
AFAI am concerned teaching them responsible use would include teaching them that a smartphone has no place in school. Shit, they never let us carry dumb phones and it was only near the end we could even keep them in our lockers, and that was the right decision. I don't think they let our predecessors carry Electronic Football around at school, either, and that was also the right call, despite those devices posing ~no danger and being about 1% as disruptive as a smartphone.
Isn't the responsible use of a phone during school to turn the phone off?
I graduated from a relatively affluent public high school in 2006, and a significant number of students had cell phones in school. It was common for teachers to take student's phones - most of which could only text/call - if they used them during class.
Giving them unrestricted access to phones is not how you do this. That’s like saying that for every kid who wants to eat ice cream for dinner every night, that you’d give them an unlimited supply and “eventually” they’ll figure out why that’s not good (after they’re already morbidly obese and have diabetes).
The starting point for a limitation is that they have to be forced into the limit (by the parents setting and enforcing the rules), which mentally creates a baseline of what’s acceptable vs not. Then you can progress into something that’s less restrictive over time, which is where the shifting of responsibility happens.