Technology, Equity and Equality in Education

The Paradox in Education

If the future of education offers teachers, books, conversation, and critical thinking for some, and algorithms, robots, and screens for others, technology will not have closed educational gaps - it will have institutionalized them.

By Maria Mercedes Mateo-Berganza Diaz

Teachers and books for the rich, robots and screens for the poor?

When we talk about technology for education we think of tablets, laptops, robots or interactive platforms with which children learn new (coding) or traditional skills (mathematics) better or faster.

Raised like this, it seems inevitable to imagine that students or higher income schools have the most access to this type of resources.  But, what would happen if access to technology in the coming years is not a privilege, but the cheapest way to access educational services?

Thus began an article recently published in The New York Times: "Hypocrisy thrives at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the heart of Silicon Valley.  This is where Google executives send their children to learn how to knit, write with chalk on blackboards, practice new words by playing catch with a beanbag and fractions by cutting up quesadillas and apples.  There are no screens — not a single piece of interactive, multimedia, educational content. The kids don’t even take standardized tests(...)".

Surprising, isn’t it?

Latin America and the Caribbean is investing more and more in technological equipment and digital resources to close the skills gap in the labor market and the learning gap between high and low income students.

By contrasting these efforts with the New York Times description of how the most privileged learn, it is worth wondering whether technology, after all, could potentially increase inequality in skills and learning.

The lessons that matter the most

One of the core objectives of education systems is to promote learning that prepares children and youth not only for the labor market, but also to contribute to create more prosperous societies.  It is known that to access good jobs, a combination of technical skills and soft skills is required.  This is nothing new.  What is changing is the relative distribution of both.  Although cognitive skills are still strongly related to results in the labor market (in terms of participation and income), their importance has been falling in the last two decades, while returns to soft skills have been increasing.

This trend is not accidental: to survive in the world of automation, it is a priority to teach young people what machines cannot do, because jobs that require imagination, creativity and strategy are more difficult to computerize.

An interesting fact comes from a study conducted by Google in 2013 to understand if their recruitment strategy focused on "hard skills" in computer science was appropriate.  The results showed an uncomfortable reality: seven of the eight most important qualities shared by the highest-performing employees were soft skills such as being a good coach, communicating and listening well, knowing their colleagues well, empathy, critical thinking, problem solving, and connecting complex ideas.  The technical competences in STEM fields came in last.   

Learning while knitting: something more than a trend

Faced with this boom of soft skills, learning to knit, write with chalk or practice new words while playing with balls are activities that go beyond a Silicon Valley fashion.

This type of education becomes a strategy to innovate, as the article in the New York Times said: "While Silicon Valley's raison d'être is to create platforms, applications and algorithms to generate maximum efficiency in life and work (a "frictionless" world, as Bill Gates once put it), when it comes to their own families (and also developing their own businesses), the new masters of the universe have a different sense of what it takes to learn and to innovate: it is a slow and indirect process, it is necessary to meander, not run, allow failure and chance, even boredom."

To close the skills gap in the region, we cannot forget the fundamentals behind this approach, but without losing sight of the fact that technological change comes at a galloping pace and offers new possibilities for children and young people.

The New Frontier of Educational Inequality

Today, the question that opens this article is no longer a simple provocation.  The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence—capable of teaching, assessing, providing feedback, and personalizing learning at scale and at very low cost—is redefining what we mean by education and how it is delivered.

Educational technology is increasingly emerging as the most affordable and scalable way to provide educational services, especially in contexts marked by teacher shortages and limited resources.  Automated tutoring, adaptive platforms, and AI-based assistants promise to expand access and close learning gaps.  Yet this same promise carries a profound risk: that machine-mediated education becomes the norm for lower-income students, while more privileged settings continue to invest in deeply human educational experiences—rich in teachers, dialogue, critical thinking, art, philosophy, and time to learn without haste.

The paradox becomes clearer: the more sophisticated the technology, the greater the value of what is human.  And that value is not distributed automatically or equitably.  In a world where algorithms can deliver content, practice skills, and optimize learning pathways, the central question is no longer whether to use technology.  The question is what kind of learning we reserve for whom.  If technology is used to replace—rather than complement or enhance—the pedagogical relationship with teachers, vulnerable contexts risk drifting toward an even more stratified education system: automation for some, humanity for others.

The real challenge, then, is not to incorporate more devices, but to clearly define which learning experiences are non-negotiable for all.  Educational innovation is not about cutting costs through screens, but about ensuring that technology amplifies—rather than substitutes—what makes learning profoundly human.

Because if the future of education offers teachers, books, conversation, and critical thinking for some, and algorithms, robots, and screens for others, technology will not have closed educational gaps—it will have institutionalized them.

Learning to learn again in the age of AI

In April 2025, the IDB released AI and Education: Building the Future Through Digital Transformation, a report that examines the role of artificial intelligence through the lens of what we already know from decades of digital education.

We invite you to explore the IDB’s latest report on Artificial Intelligence and Education, and discover how teachers across Latin America and the Caribbean are already integrating AI into their classrooms — based on new data from CIMA Note #37, drawn from the international TALIS 2024 survey. 

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The Poverty Pandemic

Correcting course to accelerate poverty reduction

By MARI ELKA PANGESTU

On End Poverty Day we must respond to current challenges in ways that do not further impoverish the poor today and focus on creating opportunities that they can enjoy tomorrow.

On End Poverty Day this year, it’s hard to find cause for celebration.  The COVID19 pandemic triggered a historic setback, pushing 70 million people into extreme poverty in 2020 – the largest one-year increase in three decades.  

The war in Ukraine deepened the global economic slowdown, which is now in its steepest decline following a post-recession recovery since 1970.  At this rate, nearly 7 percent of the world’s population – almost 600 million people – will still be struggling in extreme poverty in 2030.   

Whilst the picture is sobering, it is a wake-up call for us to think and act to correct course. It’s important to remember that many of the development challenges we face today did not start with the pandemic.  Riding on the momentum to build back better, it’s a good time to review deficiencies of past policies and underinvestment.  

We must correct course now across a comprehensive range of policies and step-up global cooperation for a lasting recovery to move towards green, resilient, and inclusive development.  

In any crisis, it is the poor that are hit hardest.  According to the latest World Bank analysis, the poorest people bore the steepest costs of the COVID19 pandemic: income losses averaged 4% for the poorest 40%, double the losses of the wealthiest 20% of the income distribution.  

It is the poor who do not have the resources to cope.  During the pandemic, strong fiscal policy measures did help to protect poor and vulnerable people, but poor countries were less successful than rich countries.  With less to spend, low- and lower-middle income economies offset barely a quarter of the impact on poverty.

What may be even more worrying are the long-term consequences of multiple overlapping crises, which could worsen poverty in the near future if we do not accelerate action.  Losses in learning and human capital, as well as climate change are among the most critical.

Losses in Learning and human capital: As a result of prolonged school closures and shocks to household incomes during the pandemic, learning poverty has increased by a third in low- and middle-income countries.  This means that an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds are unable to understand a simple written text. 

Today’s students could lose 10 percent of their future average annual earnings as a result.  Youth have also suffered a loss in human capital, in terms of both skills and jobs. 

Short-term declines in youth employment can lead to more frequent unemployment spells, lower future wages, and increased social unrest.  Beyond reducing incomes, the decline in human capital will lead to lower productivity and less inclusion for decades to come, hindering growth, increasing poverty and inequality.

These trends can be reversed if countries act quickly and decisively, guided by evidence on what works.  We must keep schools open, assess students and match instruction to their levels, streamline the curriculum and focus on foundations  - especially literacy, numeracy, and core socioemotional skills.  And we need to create a national political commitment for learning recovery, guided by credible measurement of learning.  We must not forget to invest in girls’ education – which may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.

Climate change: The climate crisis is already here, and it could push an additional 132 million people into poverty by 2030.  The adverse consequences of climate change—water scarcity, crop failure, food insecurity, economic shocks, migration, and displacement— can multiply threats by exacerbating conflict, reducing economic opportunities and social cohesion, as well as straining public institutions.

We need to make sure that climate is integrated into development and ensure a well-managed ‘just’ transition towards clean energy sources in a way that protects people, communities, and the environment.  

Developing countries face a triple penalty – they pay more to provide electricity services; they are locked out of economical clean energy projects; and they are locked-in to fossil fuel projects with high and volatile variable costs.  We will need impactful programs and projects, adequate public policies, and significantly increased funding from multiple sources. Countries need to also invest in adaptation and resilience.

A resilient recovery will depend on a wide range of policies, including fiscal reforms that reorient spending away from subsidies toward support targeted to poor and vulnerable groups, and improvements in efficiency and efficacy.  Prioritizing long-term growth requires appropriate investments in crisis readiness, too. 

COVID19 showed us how progress achieved over decades can vanish overnight when such readiness is lacking.  Public investments that support long-run development, such as investments in human capital of young people or investments in infrastructure as well as research and development can have a positive impact on growth, inequality and poverty decades later.

We must respond to current challenges in ways that do not further impoverish the poor today and focus on creating opportunities that they can enjoy tomorrow.

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