The underlying issue is obviously that children have nothing better to do than to be on a smartphone and that school is an oppressive, boring, hostile, unnatural environment.
The answer isn't to take away their coping mechanism, it's to treat a human child like it should be treated. A young boy should be offered opportunities to partake in martial arts clubs, hunting clubs, robotics and programming competitions, fitness training, house building projects, general machinery and electronics projects and on and on the list goes. My honest opinion why society absolutely refuses to help children is because it is full of adults who envy and fear the children. They know that a 12 year old could do 80% of their job within a year if given the smallest amount of encouragement and instruction. Real life isn't allowed to compete with the virtual world, that's why the virtual world is winning in the child's life.
America use to have technical and vocational secondary schools, I went to one of the last ones in a top 3 major city, right before the last remnants of that legacy were phased out. In the 1960s, my high school had automobile shop, architectural drafting, wood shop that produced professional level artifacts at the senior level; in the 1940s, it had put together a plane. Today, it is yet another "college prep" competing for funds via standardized testing results, segregating students who are capable at purely academic demands and exercises from the vast majority of everyone else.
This shift was likely initiated both by the beginnings of austerity in the US and by a trends towards a cultural prejudice toward being able to work right out of high school (likely incubated that austerity), an outcome in no way exclusive to blue-collar work, but carried that connotation anyway and so became frowned upon (I distinctly remember this being a problem in the 90s, even though my grandfather worked his entire life at a General Electric factory, had bought a home for his family of 6, etc)
All the above sounds great but costs money. In the UK, the ruling class have consistently cut school budgets in real terms over decades. For example, music lessons are 30 to 1, sing or bring-your-own plastic recorder. For sports day, my child wasn't in the top few of the class that got to actually run on the last patch of grass that hasn't been sold off.
So… forgive me for jumping onto that, but I found the way you phrased it interesting - is it only boys allowed to do all that stuff? What are girls supposed to be doing, knitting and cooking?
i've been wanting to out-compete the current schooling paradigm by using kids as little innovators and having them graduate with the skills to set up or participate in a functional business, no college necessary.
