Reporting at The Verge today about school technologies raises much deeper questions about how our society uses technological advances to handle an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic.
Although many options exist for migrating learning onto a videoconferencing format, writer Natt Garun illustrates how access remains a significant problem.
“Despite the many tools at teachers’ disposal, many of their students aren’t able to connect due to a lack of computers, stable internet connections, or support at home to keep them focused on schoolwork,” Garun writes. “And even when they are able to log on, students still struggle in a variety of ways to follow along in their new learning environment — something teachers are finding that no amount of apps can help them resolve.”
We’ve seen the same argument before, applied to various fintech advances – when governments ponder how to integrate new frictionless transactions into an economy, one of the big caveats is the massive number of un-banked or people without resources to jump onto new digital platforms.
In so many ways, the school question is a bellwether for what happens in the business world, with consumer-facing technologies that don’t have the proper societal support.
If students don’t have bandwidth and workstations, they’re cut off from in the digital learning ecosystem the same way that the un-banked are cut off from the economy.
The juxtapositional problem is exemplified by Garun’s quoting of Simone Rowe, a language arts teacher in Brooklyn:
“The move to digital learning has been very hard especially with the population that I serve,” Rowe says. “Over 90 percent of students need free or reduced lunch.”
Arguably, this would’ve been a problem in any American era, and even though the hardware has become pretty abundant, we still struggle to maintain bandwidth in many American communities, to the extent that Google launched its balloon platform years ago to try to bring digital access to unserved areas. Fast forward to the present time, when many Americans still get their connectivity in public libraries – which are now closed.
“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says 34 million Americans lack access to broadband internet. The report is an annual assessment required by Congress,” reports the National Apartment Association, a tracker of a primary American under-class: tenants. “Last year, the FCC found that 55 million lacked high-speed broadband access. Ultimately, the report found that access for all Americans is not advancing in a ‘reasonable” and “timely’ fashion under the 1996 Telecommunications Act so the FCC plans to move to ensure more progress.”
In the end, issues highlighted by both Garun’s story and barriers to larger blockchain adoption in the U.S. point to a society that’s top-heavy – laden with abundant technological advances, but sorely lacking the resources to provide equity to citizens.
This, more than anything, may be what raises the fears of a “two Americas” scenario – the lap of luxury for a lucky few, and a backward, primitive existence for the rest. It’s something that our public advocacy infrastructure wants to prevent, and an important consideration for any new tech developments nationally.
