In 2022 there were 16,864 schools without internet connection in Argentina and the national State distributed 610 thousand netbooks: barely 40.7% of the 1.5 million promised for that year. The data arises from a request for access to public information made by the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) and Amnesty International Argentina to the Ministry of Education of the Nation, which was released today on the occasion of the world internet day.
Although the official goal was to ensure the “pedagogical connectivity” In 90% of the country’s schools, it was only possible to reach the 56.5%: 28,479 of the 50,382 existing educational units. This figure implies that more than 16,800 schools remain disconnected. However, from the Ministry of Education of the Nation they assured that 81% of the school enrollment has access to the internet.
The digital divide It was at the center of the agenda in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic and the suspension of face-to-face classes evidenced -and deepened- the inequalities between the children who had access to devices and an Internet connection and those who did not have these resources to support their schooling. Official data collected during the pandemic showed, for example, that close to a 60% of state school students do not have a computer at home available for educational use or a quality internet connection that allows them to complete school tasks. In contrast, among those who attend private schools, this percentage drops to 20% for computer access and 35% for Internet access.
Given this scenario, in 2022 the national State had allocated more than 90 billion pesos to Connect Equality: It was the second educational program with the highest funding, surpassed only by universities. However, of those funds only 43 billion were executed: 47.7% of what was prescribed. That Budget cut explains the failure to meet the objectives, they explained from ACIJ.
During 2022 they delivered 612,504 netbooks in 8,217 state high schoolsas reported by the Ministry of Education of the Nation to infobae. The figure supposes that there are more than 880,000 students who did not receive their device, estimated from ACIJ. From the Ministry they indicated that in 2022 the acquisition of one million netbooks was managed, whose tender has been awarded.
Specialists have warned about the fluctuations in public policies and financing of educational connectivity since the launch of Conectar Igualdad in 2010. A report by the Observatory of Argentines for Education showed in 2022 that the level of investment has been very uneven: it reached 12.9% of the national education budget in 2011, and remained relatively high in 2013 (9.6%) and 2014 (7.4%), but fell below 3% between 2016 and 2020. According to that document, the years with the lowest national investment in digital education were 2019 (0.9%) and 2020 (0.8%).
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Although 2021 marked a significant increase in investment, from ACIJ they warned about the under-execution of the budget assigned to digital educationboth in 2021 and 2022: the announced financing was not fulfilled. Francisco Rodriguez Abinallawyer and coordinator of ACIJ’s Social Rights for Children program, told infobae that the declaration of the Internet as a public service “positions the State as the guarantor of access.” In this sense, it questioned that, in its responses to the requests for information, the Ministry of Education attributed the non-compliance in the distribution of devices to import barriers: “If this is a public policy priority, the State should not function as watertight compartments, where one ministry prevents another from executing its policies.”
Rodríguez Abinal stressed the importance of Conectar Igualdad and noted that ACIJ’s concern focuses on “promoting that the State execute the resources assigned according to the budget law.” The organization’s statement said that “It is essential that the State execute the resources provided for and comply with providing technological equipment and internet connection in schools, especially those located in popular neighborhoods and rural areaswhere there are great difficulties in accessing these rights”.
Fabio Tarasow, academic coordinator of Flacso’s Education and New Technologies Project (PENT), pointed out that “at the global level, apart from Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, which operates outside the education system, there are not many successful examples of a sustained digital education policy in time”. And he pointed out that “access to devices and the internet is only the starting point to solve the digital divide. The most important thing comes later: What do you do in the classroom so that this investment has value and generates digital citizenship?. Boys may have a fluid use of technology, but that does not imply a critical usewhich is what the school should build”.
For his part, Alexander Artopoulosdirector of research and development at the Center for Pedagogical Innovation at the University of San Andrés, estimated that the figures for pedagogical connectivity are even lower than those reported, since teaching and learning activities in the classroom require a higher connection quality than the administrative tasks of the school secretary. Artopoulos indicated that “pedagogical connectivity requires at least one 100 kbps connection per student, which means that a school with 50 Mbps could have room for about 500 students.”
The lack of connection implies excluding students from the learning necessary to live in the knowledge society, stated Artopoulos: “In order to teach a child to search for information on the Internet or to dialogue with an artificial intelligence, obviously it is necessary to have the Internet. In that sense, it is useless to discuss what to do with ChatGPT if you don’t have the classroom ready”. For the specialist from the University of San Andrés, the main problem for the consolidation of a digital education policy “is not economic”, but has to do with “the technical-pedagogical skills of the ministries of education, which until now have given obsolete and ineffective answers”.
Although the pandemic is behind us – and with it, classes via Zoom or WhatsApp – the problem of the digital divide is more urgent than ever. According to Tarasow, “the explosion of the artificial intelligence makes a new internet user appear: he is no longer the one who searches Google and critically evaluates the various sources, but now gets a single answer from ChatGPT. It is our responsibility to train students to be able to question those answers”.
The data indicates that, for many Argentine schools, dialogue with the digital environment is still a pending challenge. In the final scene of the famous movie blow upby Michelangelo Antonioni, a group of mimes and clowns they play tennis without racket or ball. Something similar seems to be happening in disconnected school classrooms: how could students learn about artificial intelligence, digital citizenship or computational thinking without computers or the internet?
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