Written by: Robert Brennan Hart
MY PARTNER AND I are expecting a daughter in April. Almost nineteen years to the day I welcomed my son into the world.
I’ve been thinking about what she’ll inherit. Not just genetically, but infrastructurally. The devices in our home, the reliable connectivity, the casual access to tools that will shape her cognitive development from infancy. The privilege of experimentation without resource anxiety. The luxury of learning through failure when failure costs nothing but time.
Then I think about the children who won’t inherit these things. Who are falling behind right now, at six years old, at nine years old, at twelve – not because they lack intelligence or curiosity or potential, but because they lack the infrastructure that schools now assume is universal. We’re determining their economic trajectories before they’ve had any opportunity to demonstrate capability. Before they can even articulate what’s being taken from them.
SCHOOLS HAVE BECOME unwitting architects of inequality they don’t fully comprehend. Teachers assign homework that requires internet access, learning platforms that demand reliable connectivity, research projects that presume device ownership. Not from malice, but from the systematic blindness that comes when infrastructure inequality becomes invisible to those who never encounter it.
A child arrives home to a household without broadband. Perhaps there’s a single aging device shared among siblings, perhaps not. The homework requires accessing an online learning platform, watching instructional videos, submitting assignments digitally. The child cannot complete it. Not because they don’t understand the material, not because they lack discipline, but because they lack the infrastructure the assignment assumes universal.
The teacher interprets this as disengagement. The pattern repeats. The child falls behind not in knowledge but in the documented evidence of learning that determines academic trajectory. They’re marked as struggling, as needing remediation, as performing below grade level. The categorization begins, and they’re eight years old.
Meanwhile, their classmates practice digital literacy unconsciously. They develop fluency with interfaces, comfort with different platforms, intuition about how digital systems work. They make mistakes freely because mistakes cost nothing – just try again, reload the page, ask a parent for help navigating the confusion. They’re building meta-skills in digital adaptation before they can articulate what meta-skills are.
The gap compounds daily. By middle school, it’s substantial. By high school, it’s often insurmountable. Not because the child who fell behind lacks capability, but because they’ve missed years of informal learning that can’t be recovered through formal instruction. You can’t teach someone in a six-week unit what another child learned through five years of daily practice.
CONSIDER WHAT THIS developmental arc looks like in practice. A child with home internet access encounters a concept they don’t understand in class. They go home, search for explanations, watch YouTube tutorials, find interactive demonstrations, experiment with different ways of understanding until something clicks. They develop not just knowledge but learning strategies – the meta-cognitive skills that enable future learning.
A child without home internet access encounters the same concept. They go home with the same confusion. They stay confused. The next class builds on that concept. They fall further behind. Eventually they begin to internalize that they’re “not good at” the subject. They don’t recognize that they’re not lacking intelligence – they’re lacking infrastructure.
The cruelty intensifies when schools begin deploying AI tools in classrooms. Adaptive learning platforms that adjust to student capability, AI tutoring systems that provide immediate feedback, tools that promise to personalize education at scale. These systems could democratize access to high-quality educational support. Instead, they deepen existing divides.
Because the AI systems work best with continuous engagement. The child who can access them only during school hours gets a fraction of the benefit compared to the child who practices with them nightly. The adaptive algorithms need data to adapt effectively – they need hours of interaction to understand learning patterns, identify knowledge gaps, optimize instruction. The child with forty-five minutes of daily school access cannot generate that data. The child with unlimited home access can.
We’re creating educational systems that require digital infrastructure to function, then maintaining the fiction that such infrastructure remains individual family responsibility. Children get tracked into different educational pathways based not on capability but on whether their parents can afford broadband and devices. The mechanism operates automatically, efficiently, with the appearance of fairness because the barriers remain invisible to those designing the systems.
BY THE TIME my daughter is school age, AI tools will be even more deeply integrated into education. They’ll be assumed infrastructure, the way internet access is now assumed. Schools will organize instruction around them, teachers will assign work that requires them, learning outcomes will depend on fluency with them. She’ll have access. Not because she earned it, but because she inherited it. She’ll develop AI literacy the way my son developed digital literacy – unconsciously, through daily practice, through thousands of small interactions that build into genuine fluency. By the time she reaches working age, she’ll possess advantages that appear to reflect her capability but actually reflect her access.
Other children won’t have these advantages. They’ll encounter AI tools at school, during supervised computer lab time, through brief exposures that teach them enough to understand what they’re missing but not enough to develop competitive fluency. They’ll watch classmates demonstrate capabilities they cannot practice. They’ll receive feedback that they’re falling behind without understanding that they’re behind in access, not capability.
The tracking will happen before they reach double digits in age. Their economic trajectories will be substantially determined by infrastructure decisions made by adults while they were children. And we’ll maintain the comfortable fiction that their outcomes reflect their merit rather than their inherited circumstances.
RECENT STUDIES OF educational technology access reveal the mechanism clearly. Students with home internet access score significantly higher on digital literacy assessments – not because they’re inherently more capable, but because they’ve had thousands more hours of practice. Students with personal devices complete homework more reliably – not because they’re more disciplined, but because they have the infrastructure homework now requires.
But these studies still treat the problem as individual educational outcomes rather than systematic inequality embedded in childhood development. They document the gap without naming what the gap produces: a mechanism for converting parental infrastructure into children’s educational advantages, then treating those advantages as the child’s individual merit.
The children without access don’t appear in the success stories. They don’t get profiled as examples of how AI tools personalize learning or how adaptive platforms improve outcomes. They simply disappear from the positive statistics, sorted into different trajectories before they’ve had any opportunity to demonstrate what they might achieve with equivalent infrastructure.
WE STAND AT a particular juncture where intervention might still prevent this inequality from hardening across generations: Where providing devices and connectivity to households with children might allow this generation to develop the digital fluency that will determine their economic viability as adults.
My daughter will enter a world that demands capabilities we can barely predict. But I know with certainty that whatever specific skills matter, they’ll require digital infrastructure to develop. Reliable connectivity, appropriate devices, the ability to practice without resource anxiety. Not luxuries, but necessities for participation in whatever economy emerges.
Every child deserves the infrastructure to discover their capabilities. Not because of charity, but because we’re currently building educational systems that determine economic trajectories based on parental infrastructure rather than children’s potential. We’re creating multi-generational inequality and calling it meritocracy.
My son and my daughter will both navigate this world from positions of profound advantage. Not because they’re exceptional, but because they inherited access. The question that haunts me is what happens to the children who inherit exclusion instead – who watch opportunities disappear before they understand what opportunities are, who get tracked into disadvantage while adults maintain comfortable fictions about equal access and individual merit.
The divide deepens now. Not in labour markets, but in elementary schools. Not to workers who might adapt, but to children who never had the chance. Every month that passes hardens advantages for some children and disadvantages for others – advantages and disadvantages that will compound across decades, determining economic outcomes that will appear to reflect capability but actually reflect inherited infrastructure.
We can intervene. We can provide the devices and connectivity that enable practice, that allow children to develop the fluency their economic futures will require. We can treat digital infrastructure as what it has become: foundational for childhood development, not luxury for fortunate families.
Or we can maintain that such infrastructure remains individual family responsibility. We can watch the second great divide deepen – not just between those who have and those who don’t, but between children who inherit advantage and children who inherit exclusion. We can congratulate ourselves that the system appeared fair because we never examined how infrastructure inequality determined outcomes before children had any agency in their own trajectories.
My daughter deserves better than inherited advantage determining her future. So do all the other children being sorted right now, before they even begin.
INTERVENTION IN PRACTICE: ERA’S SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM
ERA’s annual scholarship competition recognizes that intervention requires more than devices; it requires engaging the next generation in building the infrastructure that serves everyone. Students across Canada organize e-waste collection events in their communities, learning firsthand how functional technology gets discarded while need persists elsewhere. Winners receive up to $10,000 in scholarships and ensure refurbished devices reach charities serving those without access.
If you’re a student interested in turning infrastructure inequality into action, or if your organization has devices approaching retirement, visit era.ca/scholarship-competition to participate.
The children falling behind today need more than awareness. They need the actual devices that enable practice, that allow experimentation, that make fluency possible. Every collection event represents intervention in the divide this piece describes – the one that deepens in elementary schools, that hardens across childhoods, that determines futures before children even understand what futures are.