2023-08-31 06:35:00
The contrast is striking. This August 30, Release echoes the “Cartables solidaires” system, deployed by the Samu social and Dons solidaires, and intended for poor families preparing for the start of the school year for their children. Inside, are offered: notebooks, sheets, binders, complete kit. Inflation has been there, which particularly affects school supplies; according to the Trade Union Confederation of Families, the increase peaks this year at 11.3%, and in elementary classes, it swells to “23% for an average basket, because the demand for equipment is greater”. The back-to-school allowance, which has been revalued, only partially fills the gap, and the delivery – as precious as it is – of these 2,700 solidarity schoolbags for the whole of Ile-de-France seems quite derisory in a country where 9 million people live below the poverty line.
Contrast striking, because this same August 30, in the emission Télématin of France 2, it is also question of satchel. But not quite the same. This is connected. That is to say that the diaries, notebooks and other files it contains can be scanned by the student via his mobile phone and then integrated into his reminder functions. Better, for the modest sum of… 140 euros, the schoolboy is equipped with a pen which automatically scans what he is writing and which, thanks to an integrated microphone and loudspeaker, records and can trace second by second for example what the voice of the teacher expressed. ” Fabulous “, exclaims the presenter. Fabulous perhaps. Surely indecent, for those who immerse themselves in the reality of a digital divide which substantially aggravates inequalities in access to learning.
The accelerating effect of the pandemic
The Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal spoke widely, in this new school year, on the return to the original agenda of the baccalaureate exams, and on the ban on wearing the abaya in school grounds – welcomed by a teaching body helpless in the face of the growing number of this attack on secularism (according to state services, 4,710 cases listed in 2023 once morest 2,167 the previous year, i.e. a leap of 120%). Did we hear the successor of the decried Pap Ndiaye – relocated, only a few days following his ministerial ousting, ambassador to the Council of Europe – comment on digital exclusion or marginalization in education? Not yet. But it is far from being reduced.
The Covid-19 crisis has inflamed the gaps. As a Senate report on “digital exclusion in education” demonstrates, the pandemic has caused a “forced march towards all-digital”. Concrete and commendable initiatives were deployed (“My class at home”, “Homework at home” and “Learning nation” schemes, development of digital work environments (ENT), loans of computer equipment, etc.), but they might do nothing in the face of systemic inequalities which, even today, relate to the appetites of students… and teachers, the quality of internet coverage, the rate of equipment in homes, the control of tool, etc Unquestionably, the digital tool can reduce some of the inequalities suffered by downgraded youth; but how can one deny that it is also (and more) a cause of their aggravation?
The fantasy of egalitarian technology
Illectronism strikes all population. In the 2022 edition of its digital barometer, Arcep establishes at 54% the percentage of French people experiencing “at least one form of difficulty which prevents them from carrying out online procedures”. Figure up by… 16 points compared to 2020. Are only seniors disqualified? The youth, which we guess is so agile with their smartphone and video game consoles, would they be spared? Again, the shower is freezing. Nearly 30% of 15-29 year olds say they have little or no skills in digital administration (Arcep), and one in five young people concedes a digital incapacity in “information”, “communication”, “software” and “problem solving” (INSEE).
Paul is the son of senior executives living in a pretty house in Bordeaux, and from his vast room he gets information, plays, orders, communicates, works, creates from his MacPro 16” equipped with powerful software; Sophia lives in a low-rent housing in a rural area cut off from internet coverage, she shares her room with her two young brothers, and their single mother herself “digitally excluded” does not have the financial means or has not considered a priority. to equip the household with a computer. Imagine the hiatus in terms of awakening, taste and learning, SO school then student, SO access to jobs of the future, SO emancipation, accomplishment, self-realization? This photograph is not a caricature, it is the demonstration that the generation digital native is a chimera, that the startup nation prophesied by Emmanuel Macron as soon as he was elected in 2017 is a decoy. It is, finally, the proof that the promise of technological innovation: plugging the gaps that crack society, warding off the injustices secreted by social inequalities, is not always fulfilled. And it is not the indecipherable telluric upheaval generated by artificial intelligence, the algorithmic jungle, quantum physics, conversational agents, or the exploitation of data that will bring populations destined for drowning back to shore. Which, already, will be in the front line with regard to the jobs eradicated by these technological breakthroughs – the report of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on “the impact of generative artificial intelligence on the quality and quantity of jobs”, published on August 21, ensures in particular that low- or medium-skilled women in office jobs will be particularly affected, due to technological automation.
The symptomatic example of Sweden
The example of Sweden is symptomatic. In the spring, the center-right government put an end to the experiment, unique in Europe, initiated by the national agency for school education (Skolverket) for the benefit of “all-digital” learning. In question, the “retreat of skills in terms of reading and comprehension”, a deficit of concentration and assimilation, questions regarding the long-term effects of overexposure of young children to screens, the vulnerability of technological tropism. And also the perception of a possible deterioration of inequalities depending on the homes from which the students come. In other words: such a digital strategy can reduce inequalities if it is deployed intensely, totally, rigorously – to the point of raising awareness among “excluded” parents -; it increases them if the requirement of fairness is lacking.
The illusion, the fantasy of a less unequal society thanks to technologies will thrive as long as the disparities in learning and culture of technologies continue to be abysmal. No offense to the scientists, to the technical techno-solutionists, no innovation is spontaneously synonymous with Progress. She aspires to it only to the test of the interests of man, of the designs of humanity. In a shared and fair sense.
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