r/mildlyinfuriating • u/TheAeroplaneBear2906 • Jul 16 '26

Unskippable ad Clear Backpacks + Pay to Keep Your Phone

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My freinds school is now requiring these items, and is also using AI to promote this 🫠

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u/TheMaidenOfDragons Jul 16 '26

Genuine question - I guess I’m confused because I haven’t been in middle school in almost two decades, but phones have never been allowed to be used during school.

Why can’t the old rules still work? If a teacher sees you with your phone, they send you to the office. The punishments escalate from there.

I just really don’t understand how capitalism needed to be inserted in this equation by charging to lock phones up.

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u/HawaiiLife745 Jul 16 '26

It comes down to an issue of scale. 10 years ago, the number of students who had a cellphone was a fraction of what it is now, and the number of students who were bold enough to use them during school was a fraction of that.

Now, if every teacher properly punished every student who ever used their phones during class, the system would get clogged. There simply isn't enough man-hours to call every parent, write every incident report, and verbally scold every student.

I'm not saying this is the way things should be, but it is a reality in a large number of schools.

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u/ToobularBoobularJoy_ Jul 16 '26

10 years ago? Try 15 years ago. I started jr high 10 years ago and basically everyone had a smartphone by then. I was the last person in my grade to get one and that was a few months into grade 7 (first year of jr high where I'm from). We were sneakier than kids now, I'll give you that, but all of us had them.

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u/gustavessidehoe Jul 16 '26

Shit, if we consider pre-smartphones, most kids at my school had cell phones in 2006. They were just flip or slider phones and they absolutely did sneakily text at school.