Overcoming the digital divide

The late Sir Ken Robinson, a British advisor on education, had a very instructive talk on how the Victorian-era school has been designed essentially to procure well prepared bureaucrats (scribes and accountants) to feed the human-powered computer that was the British Empire. The effect of this policy was felt as the change in prestige of both manual work and literacy: where artisanship or industrial work were perfectly good career paths for many, they came with notable hardships and health risks that were not present in the clerical option. On the other side, while literacy had been the realm of a few book worms who spent their days among ink and paper, to the point that most people had to resort to these few to have letters read or written for them, now everybody was more or less able to read and write, even if it was just clumsily.

The second and also very important way in which this policy affected all of us for centuries is that concepts like "fun", "art", "expression" and "empathy" were considered unproductive and were therefore largely banned from schools. A significant portion of the most critical human skills were removed from the daily experience of the kids precisely at the moment where they were developing their personality. The consequence of this banning is that many generations have grown with the idea that school is "not for fun" and should focus on "useful knowledge".

Photo: John Hain on Pixabay

The knowledge economy has recently demonstrated that those strongly appreciated skills of the Victorian society are, by far, not enough. In a first step it was necessary to fill the minds of the new workers with knowledge that they could apply to their work, and now its is getting even further, because the actual knowledge is becoming less important to the benefit of the ability to acquire new knowledge. And yet, we keep teaching in the schools the same orthography, arithmetic, etc. as 150 years ago.

But fortunately, even if the core curriculum is still the same, there have been improvements in the appreciation of other matters, such as creativity, physical exercise and even digital technologies. However, we cannot forget that education (in particular public school) has two very important social roles to play that can be easily overseen: the first one is to server as a mixing place, getting students from different background to get in touch with one another, and allow the better-offs to experience (at least to some extent) the advantage they have, and the worse-offs to have an expectation of where they can get to. The second role is even more important, because schools should actively compensate for the disadvantages that some students suffer simply by the situation they have been born to: if they have not father figure at home, a counselor can fill the gap at least to some extent; if they do not get a decent breakfast or lunch at home, the cafeteria can supply them. And the same applies to the technology gap: kids whose families cannot afford adequate devices to access the digital world should be provided by the school. However, that is not enough.

Yesterday evening Trevor came asking for help with his biology assignment. With the COVID-19 restrictions the teacher decided to give up on an actual test and asked each one of them to prepare a poster instead. Given that they had been working on the physical and chemical effects of medicines and drugs in the body, each one got a drug or a drug-related subject to work on, and this was all fine. However, I was surprised to see that the teacher very specifically asked the posters to be prepared with Adobe Spark, precisely at 2000 by 2560 pixels and some more details that I cannot remember. If they had been working with this tool all the year long, the request would not have surprised me, but Trevor told me that they had never discussed this tool before or even seen what kind of poster could be made with it. That is where I started to feel uncomfortable.

The concept of "digital divide" encapsulates the different life experience that citizens have depending on the expertise and access to the digital technologies. As with other technologies, such as health care or access to energy or drinking water, it means a significant advantage for those with access to it. If not managed correctly, this results in even bigger disparities among those who lived well (and could improve their living standards by using the new technology) and those who did not (and could improve their situation because they did not have access to the new technology). In the case of the introduction of a new tool in the school system, it can inadvertently enlarge the digital divide because those students who are technically savvy themselves (or have technically savvy parents that can help them) have an obvious advantage over those with less digital education. And this is an effect that, in my opinion, the school should avoid at all costs. A second, non-trivial issue was the fact that this assignment essentially required me, a parent, to learn to use the program so that I could help my son. Of course, I could have left him to fend for himself, but that is not the way we normally manage with this kind of problems in this house. 

So, while I was debating whether to write a letter to the teacher, or to involve the PTA or to do just nothing, I asked Trevor to start to get acquainted with the program to try to get a first impression of how hard it would be for him get the assignment done on his own or with my help. Luckily, the application is prepared to provide very impressive results out of the box with little effort, so it looks that we have avoided a crisis. Still it would have been nice if the teacher would have pointed out that this was an easy-to-use tool that, even if they had not discussed it in class, everyone should be able to get a hold of without too much trouble.

The digital divide is a very serious problem particularly because it can drive people down a spiral that always increases inequality in society. And while I am all in favor of everyone harvesting the fruit of their own work, nobody should pay a higher price just because they were born in an unlucky family. I have not suffered that situation, but I know quite a few people who have and I do not think they have done anything to deserve such a hard life. That is why I think schools should always pay attention to these issues. Have a nice evening.