Educational Inequalities in a Digitalized World

In the last two years, two major wars broke out: one between Russia and Ukraine and the other between Israel and Palestine. One of the greater long-term effects of the war concerns education. During warfare, many schools have been destroyed, and displaced children are often deprived of stable learning conditions. In Israel and Palestine, more than 800 schools were destroyed; in Ukraine, more than five million young children have found their education disrupted. War has brought severe damage to the local education system in affected areas, affecting the educational development of local students in severe ways. For these children, the wars have resulted in an unfair disadvantage in their access to opportunities and growth.

The pressing educational challenge for students in war-affected regions calls for global attention, and the recent digitalization of education further exacerbates the disadvantages faced by these students. These students have limited access to digital devices or the Internet. As distance learning and online education continue to play a crucial role, the inequality in access to digital devices has become a significant barrier for underprivileged students worldwide.

The inequality caused by the digitalization of education is manifested in various forms. Firstly, online learning might expose students to the prevalent unequal treatment of women in the digital world. Online abuse is a common issue that women often face on media platforms. From abusive words to severe forms of harassment such as cyberstalking, women experience abuse online as much as 27 times more than men. Digital security is an issue waiting to be addressed so that both genders can enjoy the benefits of learning on the Internet.

Another contributor to the inequality in access to digital learning is financial affordability. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, around 41% of the participants with yearly household incomes below $30,000 don’t own a desktop or laptop computer. Students from these households will face difficulty in completing their homework online. In addition, the lack of access to the Internet also hinders some families from taking advantage of online education. According to a study in 2021, full digital access remains lower among Latino (63%), Black (71%), and low-income households with school children (59%). A stable Internet connection is a luxury in rural neighborhoods and suburban areas where educational resources are in urgent need. A study by CEIC shows that by the end of December 2023, the internet penetration rate in rural China is 66.5%. In other words, one-third of the rural households in the country with the highest number of Internet users do not surf the Internet. These inequalities reveal how deep-rooted societal disparities are made more prominent in the age of digitalization. Colored people, people of low income, women, and people from rural regions find it more difficult to fully access digital devices and high-speed Internet, thus missing many opportunities they would otherwise get to enjoy.

In addition, the recent development of artificial intelligence generates new inequalities in society while rapidly shaping our digital landscape. For one, the training of AI models is based on datasets with internal bias. For example, female voices are sometimes less likely to be understood than male voices, and words such as “nurse” and “babysitting” are more closely connected to women than to men. AI, as the newest technological product of human intelligence, is inheriting the prejudiced social perception toward women, which worsens the online environment for female users. What’s more, many AI models have proficient mastery of languages more commonly used on the Internet, such as English, but there is little data in minor languages available to train them. A potential consequence of such inequality in training is that less attention is directed towards languages with few users or languages with limited online presence. For speakers of these minor languages, such differences are barriers that prevent them from enjoying artificial intelligence as others do. Even for people who don’t face inequalities in artificial intelligence, using AI is costly. As Prof. Ahmed Banafa points out in his recent article on LinkedIn, the construction of large-scale AI models will require quality data for their training, which can cost the developer millions or even billions of dollars for its development. These products tend to be costly and thus out of reach for students facing financial hardship.

Nevertheless, artificial intelligence is certainly a step towards a better future for students. In many schools, artificial intelligence has already been incorporated into the classroom setting, and students are encouraged to use AI to assist their learning. Some educators use AI to help design more effective ways to teach those in need, such as blind and deaf students and poor children in rural areas. With the support of government policy and community collaboration, artificial intelligence can prove pivotal in advancing equality in education.

As people nowadays become increasingly aware of the gender, ethnic, and income divides contributing to inequality in a digitalized classroom, it is more important than ever to call for measures to bridge this gap. Through these collective efforts, we strive to fulfill the essential objective of education: to create an equal world where all students have access to knowledge and digital learning tools to support their academic journey, including those developed using AI.