I am a developer and I agree with you.

A blacklist isn’t a good approach on its own - you could never predict all the possible apps you might need to block. But it is a perfectly reasonable failsafe for “content rating” and would probably even provide some valuable app-level feedback for the platform to use to check up on apps that are gaming their rating.

A whitelist approach is a reasonable overall approach and to some extent I guess you can implement this by allowing any content rating but requiring approval to install an app. At least I think you could do it this way. Like I said the settings are a bloody mess and hard to use so I’m only ever 80% sure of what’s actually happening.

Yes, that wasn't a punch on the teachers, but the school and maybe Apple. They could simply sell pre-configured devices and it wouldn't make much of a difference in their pipeline.

That site was one of the few we were actually allowed to use. I destroyed everyone in Lemonade Stand

Yeah. My kid doesn't go to a school where they use computers or iPads this way, but I have to assume that lessons are done on device and therein lies the problem. Can't confiscate the device because then the kid can't do the lessons. So now teachers have to fund classrooms partially out of their own pocket, spend unpaid time outside school hours to do marking and lesson planning, and play IT. Teachers already have a lot on their plates without adding an extra burden that the administration should be addressing properly.