Irish Examiner view: Access to tech is a further inequality in our classrooms
'Irish Examiner' Education Correspondent Jess Casey reported the ESRI's concerns about mandatory use of tech in the classroom. Stock picture: Alamy
The attractive thought that schools are places where socially disadvantaged students are on the same playing pitch with better-off peers is challenged by an ESRI paper on technology in the classroom.
Parents would be understandably dismayed to hear of an athletics event where some students wear high-performance trainers, others muddle through with bog-standard runners, and another bunch of competitors are barefoot.
Technology has brought many advantages to all of our lives, not least in the educational sphere. But the ESRI report, detailed by Education Correspondent Jess Casey, urges caution when it comes to introducing touchscreen notebook devices as a mandatory element for studying and homework.
We look to education to break down inequalities. It is less than reassuring to read in this analysis that, in the schools surveyed, only 17% of Deis schools examined were running such a programme, compared with up to 90% for some other schools.
The cost of a device can be in the region of €700. As an additional bill for hard-pressed families facing into one of the most expensive periods of the year, especially when there is more than one school-going child, it may simply be beyond the reach of many.
A school may second-guess the reaction of parents to this kind of bill and take the executive decision to divert away from this kind of take-home technology and to stick closer to chalk and talk, pen and paper. Either way — be it a family struggling to pay for a new mandatory technology or a school deciding to do without the devices — the potential is there for new inequalities.
In the first instance, a child’s parents are stretched. In the second, the school in a disadvantaged area may be doing without technology that is benefiting schools in better-off areas.
The inequalities could extend to gender as well as social disadvantage in the sense that the introduction of tech schemes such as these is happening in 42% of boys’ schools and only 19% of girls’ schools.
In a nutshell, the working ESRI paper says that a student’s access to digital learning and technologies is increasingly dependent on their family’s ability to pay. It adds that, without strategic intervention, further expansion risks deepening the inequalities that are already there.
The call for “standardised guidance” is understandable, but a recent statement from education minister Hildegarde Naughton would suggest that this is not necessarily in contemplation. The minister advised, in a reply to a parliamentary question, that concerned parents should raise any issues with the school or board of management, and that the schools are recommended to have a device loan scheme.
The minister said the introduction of such take-home technology is the choice of the schools, not the department. And, crucially, “there is no dedicated funding scheme” for the technology.
While it is easy to find agreement that no child should be disadvantaged, it is far more difficult to find a source of funding from a squeezed family budget, from many schools and, it seems, from the department. Maybe the tech companies themselves might help.
One of the cornerstones of medical practice is that prevention is better than cure.
There is an abundance of common sense in the recommendation made by consultant geriatrician Rónán Collins, in an illuminating interview with Irish Examiner Health Correspondent Niamh Griffin, that more can be done to screen for preventable heart illness and, in the process, save lives.
Hopefully, he won’t meet resistance in giving prevention its central position in contemporary healthcare.
It is understandable that screening programmes would concentrate on an older cohort where the risk of stroke or heart attack is proportionately higher. But Collins advocates reducing the age to 40 to catch those cases of risk in lower age categories. The tragedy for some families is that a cardiovascular issue becomes apparent not in the course of an early screening, but when someone has a stroke or a heart attack.
Collins says that, with timely intervention, 80% of these issues could be prevented. Like any screening programme, it is a crucial diagnostic tool, but it is not itself a treatment.
Any additional screening would have to be accompanied by the availability of affordable treatment programmes and medical support structures. There is little point in telling someone that they are at a particular risk unless they are also told that the help they need is at hand.
For instance, even as it is, South Tipperary Stroke Communication Group warns that stroke survivors “fall off a cliff” when they leave hospital due to gaps in rehabilitation services. In terms of screening, we could do worse than listen to what the doctor, Collins, ordered. When it comes to services, listen to the stroke group in Tipperary.
The Department of Health might groan under the pressure of even greater investment in a new programme. However, when the numbers are crunched and, more importantly, when the lives hanging in the balance are considered, the more pertinent question is whether we can afford not to do it.
The CSO points to the spectacular rise in electricity consumed by data centres when compared to domestic use. The figures may be new, but we can easily figure from the ubiquitous screen in our hand that AI’s exponential growth has to pull fuel from somewhere.
It probably suits us to think that the internet is some nebulous thing unless, of course, its physical infrastructure is next door with the meter running so fast that the bills for houses go up faster because of the demand.
We might pause to consider just how much of our electricity is necessary for us to keep scrolling. In 2015, data centres were consuming 5% of metred electricity. The CSO tells us today that by 2025, it accounted for 23%.
We may not like to hear how many gigawatt-hours are being gobbled to fuel AI’s expansion, potentially to do many of our jobs. Labour is calling for the brakes on “these runaway energy vampires”. But it does not look like the genie will be put back in the bottle anytime soon.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
