A teacher did all he could to keep kids off phones

It feels obvious why phones dominate this environment. If you had a 1:1 teacher/student ratio, nobody would be compelled to distract themselves because the learning is paced for them, not the average of the whole. There's time to catch up on Instagram because roll-call only requires you to answer once. There's time to check Twitter since you finished your test early. The number of places where kids are expected to simply do nothing is absurd - of course they're distracting themselves. I read Treasure Island during my mandatory poetry class, is that a reason to confiscate fiction novels from school premises for their distracting and addicting nature too? The problem is with how we teach.

I'm in my 50s. I've been online since I was a teenager.

In the last few years I found that I have to work places where I cannot connect. No wifi, no smartphone, no hotspot. Otherwise I check out and play on the internet.

If you look around, you'll see plenty of adults who, as soon as something gets boring, pull out their phone.

Correction: for many of those adults the phone is always in their hand; it does not need to be pulled out.

Perhaps "Kids who don't want to learn" is not a constructive way to look at the issue. Maybe "Kids who are engaged with something other than what is going on in the classroom" would be more useful. That goes for covert books, magazines, hunger, lack of sleep, drug addiction, unstable home life, personal drama, or any other distracting factor. Teachers and schools have existing strategies for these ranging from internal and external referrals, social support and psychologists, learning disability specialists, temporary removal from the class, etc. Some students will fail, but you should never brand kids as write-offs or uninterested, that's akin to giving up on them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As for separating higher motivation and engagement students from the general student body, gifted and talented programs continue to exist for this purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education

I attended such a program in Sydney Australia at ages 11 and 12 then a similarly academically tested high school. In the former and most of the latter case I found it to be quite positive experience, but lack any point of direct comparison. There were still troubled kids, drugs, etc. Mostly it was still slow and not very challenging. However, there were virtually no distracting elements in an average classroom whereas my understanding is that in many countries, high school teachers may often be unable to maintain a genuinely focused and academically engaged classroom. To me, this sounds like a state-mandated waste of time for all involved.

These days, where switched on kids can grok arbitrary subjects through the internet within seconds, what's the point of rote schooling? Perhaps we need to reduce the classroom hours expected of children and increase other activities, this would partially recognise the declining utility of rote knowledge in the workplace. This touches on the greater social problem, which is that post industrial revolution schooling largely performs a child minding function. What do we do with the kids if they're not locked in school? State and other schooling often also seeks to ingrain what IMHO are various negative, outmoded and incorrect ideas (much of religion, false assertions of the representative nature of a local "democratic" system, nationalism, etc.) in the student body. Home schooling is a good antidote but comes with its own challenges.

Judging by my previous addiction, I would say youtube desktop and youtube mobile experience is on par, also I believe TikTok is more comfortable on mobile(I never used it though). Same applies for the rest of social media. When you are sitting in a class and splitting your attention between what is being taught and your distraction, that distraction is unlikely to be some serious activity, because serious activities demand full attention

So you have a choice:

- make-yourself-a-desktop which is time-consuming, has dubious reward(what linux can do that Windows/MacOS can't?[1]) and is not comfortable to use everywhere

- phone that gives you all the means to distract yourself, is always in your pocket and requires no effort

If you don't explicitly aim to avoid the latter path I don't see any reason to choose your method

[1]: Having said that, I would never put windows on a personal computer. Answering my own question, there are certainly needs where Linux fits better, but for general desktop not so much

“I would walk up to people and say ‘give me your money’ and they would clutch it, and I would say that’s what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take away their bottle.”

Does that sound stupid? Because it is. Their phone has the distinct quality of being theirs. Demanding someone turn over their possessions to you is not going to be met with acquiescence.

Though I’d also say they’re doomed without better teacher compensation. Probably both.