That can be seen as "poorer people don't have enough access to the Internet" or as "the people in charge created too much reliance on the Internet". If COVID had happened 30 years ago, the risk tolerance would be different and we'd be much more reluctant to close schools for an extended period of time.

Okay? By that logic, the entire world has created too much reliance on the internet.

We closed school when we had no power for 4 days two years ago. To extend your logic, schools have created too much reliance on electricity. If this was 100 years ago, the buildings would be different and we wouldn't have needed to close schools for an extended period. That argument doesn't make sense or have a purpose, but it makes just as much sense as your argument, to me.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, I guess is what I'm getting at.

What I'm getting at is that to whatever extent poorer kids are falling behind academically right now, it isn't really for lack of Internet access, but because we made policy decisions assuming everybody could learn-from-home for months.

That's fair, but lack of internet access absolutely is a major problem. I still don't understand why you would try to remove that from the policy decisions about learning from home.

Yes, but it didn't happen 30 years ago. We have the ability to let kids learn from home and save more lives by doing so.

Except for poorer kids where "learning from home" isn't working. I think this approach that "we can just stay home and do everything online, we're saving lives, everything's fine," is generating a lot of unforeseen costs to society in the longer term.

I agree.

He is making the point that young people have found it hard to learn over the lockdown because of not being able to have access to education. He said, "A shocking number of kids in the UK don't have meaningful connectivity."

This has nothing to do with the toxicity of social networks.

I believe that connection to educational services should be free for all families that can't afford it in the UK.

>His point is that young people have had to rely on the internet for education most of the past year and that’s been difficult for less wealthy people.

I think that needs to be qualified because this kind of argumentation tends rely on naive and simplified tropes and stereotypes of various class groups.

What are you on about? Wealth and income are absolutely tied to ease and quality of technology/internet access in the home. That's not a stereotype, it's a fact (at least in the US).

I'm not trying to be flippant, but do literally any cursory search related to income and technology and you'll find many, many, many scholarly articles supporting that statement.

I have to assume that the lesson holds true for other countries, though I do need to admit ignorance to that fact.

>Wealth and income are absolutely tied to ease and quality of technology/internet access in the home.

And you think fiber internet, a MacBook Pro, iPad, and a big screen tv equates to better grades? Better learning? Better education? When it comes to education a book, pencil and paper and a teacher is all you really need. Heck, technology may even be a hindrance because of the distraction aspect.

There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.

It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society. A child growing up in a single-parent home, especially where drugs or alcohol is an issue and living in a crime-filled, violent neighborhood (defund the police!) will be challenged. You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.

>fiber internet, a MacBook Pro, iPad, and a big screen tv

No, but I (and this is not meant to be hateful) do believe you are out of touch with the reality of this situation. It's not about having fiber, it's about having anything except dial-up or a cell phone as an option. It's not about a macbook pro or an ipad, it's about not trying to do your homework on a shared family smartphone. The television isn't even a thing, not sure what that has to do with anything.

>There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.

That is a very bold statement. Please cite.

>It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society.

This is also a SUPER bold statement. Please cite.

>You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.

And yet, wealth and parent income are consistently shown to be the greatest predictor of future achievement, even when controlling for other variables such as ethnicity, gender, location. My citations:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40037226?seq=1

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J134v11n02_05

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1519867?seq=1

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490...

And that's just from 30 seconds of searching while out of the office. If I was at the office today, I could cite any number of the books and articles on my shelves on this subject, as this is literally what I have built my career in higher education on.

>And that's just from 30 seconds of searching while out of the office.

So you google around for 10 mins, to cherry pick studies, that you didn't even bother to read, as a way to confirm your preconceived conclusion? You think that this is a valid way of argument? Uh huh. Cherry picking data to fit a preconceived conclusion is how science is done ... right?

Right now we're graduating functionally illiterate kids at incredible rates. Tell me the MECHANISM (not correlation) by which low-income equals to illiteracy in the context of our society which provides schools, school-buses, books, and teachers. By the way, every single school in America is good and is staffed by good quality teachers.

Having grown up in my city's immigrant ghetto (surrounded by Eastern European, Iranian, Filipino and Hong Kong immigrants), in a low-income (but loving) household with no English knowledge, and being an immigrant myself, I always like to see how those who grew up privileged see everyone else. I really do want to know your MECHANISM of how low-income translates to illiteracy (as an example). And on a slight tangent, in my personal experience, the most lectures on poverty and privilege I get are from people who were born in the country and grew up firmly in the upper middle class.

I can guarantee you're going to find low-income households with academically high performing children, and here we're talking about just literacy (not even high academic achievement). Quickly enough you'll find that income is not a good gauge and that other factors dominate.

How much access do kids have to books and a teacher right now if they don't have internet access?

Our library has contactless pickup, so you can still get books. But only provided you first go the library website over the internet and reserve them.

Our library has a Kindle lending library, provided of course that you access the library website to check them out and download the book to your ~$100 Kindle device over the internet.