Opinion: The Digital Divide between the Rich and Poor

There is an important topic in the communication area, which is the digital divide, meaning the gap between people who can access the internet or can’t. But nowadays, there are more and more people have internet access, but the gap still exists, and even get larger, just like the help of quality resources from internet or distance education can rarely help the children from the rural remote countryside.

 

Sesame Street(1969), language learning TV show(the 80’s), and the distance education(now),etc. those are things to help the qualified educational resources not longer limits by time or location. But eventually, what they did is to increase the difference between the children of affluence and poor children. The existence of these continually intensifies the polarization between the rich and poor.

 

With the development of the country, the probability of a county that can’t access the internet or can’t pay for a phone has been cut down. Even the Dongchuan, a poverty county that I taught the class for four months as a volunteer assistant teacher, and a county that in the lists of the country’s key targets for poverty alleviation, have televisions to watch. Most people have their devices, which means have the equipment to receive the educational resources. Howver, they are just from a situation that they can’t watch the online resources because can't afford devices, to another situation that they won’t watch the resources because  of no one forces or supervises them.

 

I believe the education is a process that helps everyone, no matter what the talent or individuality he/she is, can overcome their weakness of human nature, and finally involved the society and creat fortune by themself.

 

Most rural children of China are taken care by their grandparents while parents left the rural area working in big cities. Their ability of independent study has been weakened because they lost the force to supervise them.

 

Taking myself into consideration, I can’t stop myself staying online, watching TV series hours a day, but I still get into the college to receive a higher education, is that exactly because I have the stress from my parents, my teachers, or classmates, etc. I have to actively or maybe passively achieve the goal of study or work.

 

As for now, what I have thought about is that a quiet educational place and a group of reliable companion are the keys to improve the education's quality of rural distant areas.