Well, here in Australia schools seem to successfully ban phones during school hours.
Perhaps "Kids who don't want to learn" is not a constructive way to look at the issue. Maybe "Kids who are engaged with something other than what is going on in the classroom" would be more useful. That goes for covert books, magazines, hunger, lack of sleep, drug addiction, unstable home life, personal drama, or any other distracting factor. Teachers and schools have existing strategies for these ranging from internal and external referrals, social support and psychologists, learning disability specialists, temporary removal from the class, etc. Some students will fail, but you should never brand kids as write-offs or uninterested, that's akin to giving up on them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As for separating higher motivation and engagement students from the general student body, gifted and talented programs continue to exist for this purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education
I attended such a program in Sydney Australia at ages 11 and 12 then a similarly academically tested high school. In the former and most of the latter case I found it to be quite positive experience, but lack any point of direct comparison. There were still troubled kids, drugs, etc. Mostly it was still slow and not very challenging. However, there were virtually no distracting elements in an average classroom whereas my understanding is that in many countries, high school teachers may often be unable to maintain a genuinely focused and academically engaged classroom. To me, this sounds like a state-mandated waste of time for all involved.
These days, where switched on kids can grok arbitrary subjects through the internet within seconds, what's the point of rote schooling? Perhaps we need to reduce the classroom hours expected of children and increase other activities, this would partially recognise the declining utility of rote knowledge in the workplace. This touches on the greater social problem, which is that post industrial revolution schooling largely performs a child minding function. What do we do with the kids if they're not locked in school? State and other schooling often also seeks to ingrain what IMHO are various negative, outmoded and incorrect ideas (much of religion, false assertions of the representative nature of a local "democratic" system, nationalism, etc.) in the student body. Home schooling is a good antidote but comes with its own challenges.
There are significant numbers of kids who have been trained not to want to learn in America because America is deeply anti-intellectual and teaching to excessive standardized testing drives what little curiosity there was out of greater numbers of them. As a result of this and wildly inappropriate teacher performance measurement, the really good teachers who inspire kids get frustrated and leave. As a result, most American public schools are watered-down, don't care about excellence, and are de facto prison daycare with absurd levels of performative testing pantomiming a quality education while being anything but. It's not the teachers' fault but the parents, voters, school districts, state education boards, and past US presidents who all share in culpability.
Don't take anything out on anyone. The modern problem is often the systematic destruction of gifted and talent programs, advanced placement, discarding of merit-based entrance, and of excellence that attacks gifted students in every way imaginable.
Perhaps "Kids who don't want to learn" is not a constructive way to look at the issue. Maybe "Kids who are engaged with something other than what is going on in the classroom" would be more useful. That goes for covert books, magazines, hunger, lack of sleep, drug addiction, unstable home life, personal drama, or any other distracting factor. Teachers and schools have existing strategies for these ranging from internal and external referrals, social support and psychologists, learning disability specialists, temporary removal from the class, etc. Some students will fail, but you should never brand kids as write-offs or uninterested, that's akin to giving up on them which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As for separating higher motivation and engagement students from the general student body, gifted and talented programs continue to exist for this purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_education
I attended such a program in Sydney Australia at ages 11 and 12 then a similarly academically tested high school. In the former and most of the latter case I found it to be quite positive experience, but lack any point of direct comparison. There were still troubled kids, drugs, etc. Mostly it was still slow and not very challenging. However, there were virtually no distracting elements in an average classroom whereas my understanding is that in many countries, high school teachers may often be unable to maintain a genuinely focused and academically engaged classroom. To me, this sounds like a state-mandated waste of time for all involved.
These days, where switched on kids can grok arbitrary subjects through the internet within seconds, what's the point of rote schooling? Perhaps we need to reduce the classroom hours expected of children and increase other activities, this would partially recognise the declining utility of rote knowledge in the workplace. This touches on the greater social problem, which is that post industrial revolution schooling largely performs a child minding function. What do we do with the kids if they're not locked in school? State and other schooling often also seeks to ingrain what IMHO are various negative, outmoded and incorrect ideas (much of religion, false assertions of the representative nature of a local "democratic" system, nationalism, etc.) in the student body. Home schooling is a good antidote but comes with its own challenges.