Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by arguing that children should rarely, if ever, participate in digital spaces. As a result, many schools in the US now demand that students seal their smartphones in magnetic pouches. A number of countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and France, are even considering or have already implemented bans on social media accounts for children and teenagers.

Such restrictions, however, are not the tools of liberation we may imagine them to be.

In fact, for some children, the internet may be one of the last remaining spaces where they can grow up doing what children everywhere have evolved to do: independently play and explore with their peers.

Here is more from anthropologist Eli Stark-Elster.  I would add a point.  I do accept the evidence suggesting that limiting or banning cell phones in schools brings marginally better academic results.  Yet the people who advocate such policies never point out that so many schools are just deadly dull and not very intellectually stimulating?  Often what is on the phone is in fact more interesting and sometimes more instructive as well, even if the students do worse in terms of the standards set by the school.