It's not cell phones though, is it? It's all the non-phone things cell phones do. It's TikTok and other such sites. But it's not those sites as such, it's what those sites are teaching kids. It's their content. If their content were good the results would reinforce education - but their content is malevolent.

The messaging kids are getting can be identified as a fragmented whole. It's an anti-human philosophy fragmented into short bits of often expertly produced video. These penetrate kid's minds like little sugar coated bullets of dopamine. Hundreds of them are taken in over time and slowly reassembled in each child's brain into an entirely alien ontology, a profoundly flawed epistemology and a malign alternate history of the world. All this gradually prepares the child into accepting an anti-enlightenment, anti-technology outlook. It sets children against civilized culture, often against their parents, their country, their actual history and in particular against their own abilities and unique individuality. We can all see it. It's past time to recognize it.

As you are an educator, my question to you is, is the content you explicitly, (and more importantly, implicitly), teach in the classroom directed at counteracting this external messaging? Do you teach positive things about the modern "western" world? Or do you, for one example, always sneer a bit when explaining how Capitalism works to drive wealth formation? Do your kids leave your class filled with ambition for what they intend to achieve in their lives here in those parts of the world where so much is possible to them? Or do they run home to their cell phones and computer monitors for a dose of those short nihilistic (and currently antisemetic), TikToks that confirm the priors they've absorbed in school and project them further than you, yourself would dare to go?

There is one durable rule that applies to each successive generation: Young adults become more consistent and active carriers of the moral messages they've absorbed in childhood. Today, one such message they've absorbed is very clear: "It's all no good. Tear it all down. Hate the able. Venerate the unsuccessful- no matter why they are so." This should not be a surprise to anyone. This, after all, is the distilled essence of what much of media, movies, lyrics and public education have been telling them, first in the form of self-effacing humor and more recently as strident moralizing. (Consider for example how human beings were portrayed in the movie 'Avatar'.) This has been going on not just since 2012 but since about 1960 and even decades earlier. It's an anti-cultural message that has grown stronger with each generation. Today it's erupting into multiple demonstrations of raw, self-righteous hate.

So yes, it will most certainly take a lot more to fix this than banning cell phones during school hours.