How America Outlawed Adolescence (2016)

> One monday morning last fall, at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, a 16-year-old girl refused to hand over her cellphone to her algebra teacher.

I was never a fan of teachers confiscating things, but there is a long history of certain items or activities being prohibited in classrooms, often for sensible reasons.

As the article notes, vague state laws, criminalization, and selective enforcement are a lousy combination. But clearer local school rules and consistent enforcement might have prevented the issue in the first place. Were phones permitted in classrooms at this school? If so, what was the issue with having one? If not, why did students have phones anyway?

Perhaps there could be more collaborative development of rules and enforcement policies, with participation from teachers, students, and parents.

I am coming from the opposite side. Restraining mechanisms in schools are much weaker where I live and since I happen to know a few teachers I know very well that the teenage classes often become pure chaos and hell, typically in the classes formed of teenagers with lower educational attainment.

Few misbehaving and defiant teens have immense power to impose disastrous externalities on their peers and the teachers. Too disastrous, in fact, to just let it go.