I use my phone/laptop a lot in class too look things up. Like finding gifs of the stages of a beating heart, and generally, reading about the same topic being covered by the professor, but explained differently. It helps tremendously. That being said, there are certainly other people in any class that are on tiktok or whatever else and those people wouldn't pay attention with or without their phones. Take their phones away and they'll just distract themselves with something else. They don't want to be there and taking their phones away won't fix that; it will probably just make it worse.

This reminds me of the idea that violent video games causes violence; which they do, but only in people that are pre-disposed to behaving violently; and in those cases they're violent with or without the video games. It's the same with smart phones. They'll only distract people that are already going to be distracted. It's just a matter of what they're going to be distracted by.

The onus instead should lie with how the classes are delivered, and tangentially, how the entire system itself is funded.