[orf]

> Which will primarily hurt the ones who were using them for more interesting purposes.

I guess they can record the lecture with a voice recorder (very cheap on Amazon) and get the lecture slides afterwards, like everyone else.

It's pretty simple: thing A is widely misused and is causing problems to 99% of people. Banning it has a huge net-positive effect, despite having perhaps a negative effect on 1% of people.

Worth it.

[Danihan]

You could use the same logic to ban all sorts of things for adults. And many governments do, to everyone's detriment. Alcohol prohibition says hello.

It's exactly this type of generalized authoritarian philosophy that keeps the War on Drugs going strong.

[orf]

Alcohol doesn't cause problems for 99% of people though does it.

You can apply that argument to anything banned. Why ban anything at all, why not let kids drink in class? Because it causes a lot more harm than good, especially in a learning environment.

So, we restrict things. You might not agree where the line is drawn, but there is a line and its position is obviously subjective. I guess we can measure the effectiveness of this on learning and with feedback from the teachers though.

[Momquist]

If the ban is limited to a specific space/community (school or classroom), then it's completely different from alcohol prohibition and more akin to the ban of smoking in restaurants, which is accepted by most people even the smokers themselves.