I think most of you are wrong imho.
I go to school, I'm now starting Year 8, part of a program called "S.T.E.P." It's basically a class for the 'smarter' kids, and no it's not full of nerds as you'd expect. But our whole class is fed up because we get too much homework, we're doing too much after school, after school is supposed to be a 'free time', school goes for just over 6 hours and that's all we need.
People have phones and iPods here, but no one really texts in class because our school has a rule of 'no phones on or to be seen in class' which I completely agree with. Now, iPods aren't really banned, it depends on what teacher you get, most will say no because they can be used as a distraction, but some teachers say yes because music can calm us down and stuff like that, make us think or give us a bit of rush.
We get too much homework for school, I think that all together we should abolish the whole homework thing. It's like they think all we do in our lives is school and work. But no, we have lives, we spend time with family, we have our private stuff to do, we have dreams that we want to achieve.
In general, school is a screwed up place, why? We learn nothing, I won't say all but a lot of kids don't concentrate because the teachers don't teach us interesting things. It's all, okay everyone answer all the 750 algebra equations from the board, every single day it's the same crap in Maths. English, basically we called it the sleeping class because the teacher explained things far too long and we didn't learn anything. I promise you we didn't learn anything pretty much. It was just...spell this random word we don't even know what it means or never heard of, and never will hear of.
Some subjects however we did learn, like Science, my teacher didn't like me much and I wasn't the best at it, but hey, I liked learning interesting things like Space, cells etc.
Work doesn't need to come home with us, because that's our time, that's FREEDOM time, that's family time. That's my time.