The phone ban has had a big impact on school work

You've definitely used Twitter, even if just to see an announcement or something. Too much important information has been posted there over the last decade for anyone online a lot to have been able to avoid it.

A few decades ago (before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the WWW), I attended a fairly large public elementary school, and it seemed that most of us just walked (or rode bikes) to/from school.

Sure, a few kids got rides on most or all days, and many rode a bus (sometimes a school bus, or sometimes a church or YMCA bus that ferried kids off to supervised after-school activities). We might get a ride to school if we were running late in the morning, or get picked up if we had an appointment after school, or if the weather was awful. (And I made sure to have a good look for my grandpa's car every afternoon: Every now and then he'd show up seemingly at random, and we'd go get ice cream.)

But at 3:00PM, what broadly happened was that we filtered out onto the quiet sidestreets that bordered the school and [eventually] made our ways home.

The daily line of cars was short enough that it didn't take any particular special consideration to manage: Folks just parked on streets that weren't used for lining up school buses and it all seemed to work fine.

It worked fine. It seems a bit chaotic in retrospect, but it really was just fine. Nobody got kidnapped or murdered. If we were late getting home it was because we were just out fucking off somewhere being kids.

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Nowadays, I do some work sometimes at much smaller public elementary schools that requires me to take a break when the hallways are flooded with kids, and that gives me opportunities to passively observe what goes on.

Every afternoon, rain or shine, a huge organized line of cars appears, on dedicated pavement that did not exist decades ago, and organized individual dismissal of kids into their requisite cars begins. It looks like madness to me. Some cars even show up an hour and a half or more before dismissal, and the drivers seem to remain in the car the entire time -- just waiting.

So what changed?

To posit a theory: In this particular school system, reorganization didn't help at all. Schools were consolidated, and on average they shrunk (the big school I went to still stands, but it is empty). Due to what I can only presume is complete mismanagement, this lead to a lot of kids needing to go a school that was very far away and required riding the bus instead of just walking home.

But also: Parents of school-aged kids these days largely grew up with the Internet, and that made the world seem like a scarier place than it actually is.

Is your threat model really that people whose wedding you're attending are trying to exploit your phone..?

Not really, not if you secure your phone adequately, which these days is easier than ever.

It's unlikely there will be state actors at this wedding or whatever ready to open up your phone and swap out a chip.

Agreed, and they shouldn't need to be instituted, because they were already policy, weren't they?

I had a CD Walkman during high school. Was smart enough to never to bring it out unless everything else in class was done and neighbors had nothing to say.