[kelnos]

I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".)

(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)

[accrual]

> played games on our graphing calculators

Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.

[welcome_dragon]

I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted.

I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.

Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?