Editorial: Leave no student behind in the drive for digital education

August 11 , 2020

Japan’s push into online education is accelerating, a need driven home by the ongoing pandemic. The government recently released a comprehensive schooling initiative centered on information and communication technologies (ICT), allocating a sizeable budget to put at least one PC or tablet in the hands of every student in Japan and fully networking them by the classroom for online classes. Families with school-age kids will also be able to rent out mobile routers to do schoolwork at home.

But the push for online education preceded the pandemic, in part to redress Japan’s so-called “information literacy” gap with the rest of the world. According to the OECD’s Program for International School Assessment (PISA) conducted in 2018 among 15-year-olds worldwide, Japanese kids fell behind their peers in their ability to search the Net for information and determine the veracity of that information.

Another element to the cyber-education initiative aims to support children who are either physically challenged or refuse to attend classes (often due to bullying at school) as well as dependents of foreign nationals working in Japan.

Granted, the challenges—from security issues to added work for Japan’s already overburdened teachers—are formidable, but the underlying premise remains: to provide all children with an equal opportunity in education and to leave no one behind.