For more than a decade, digitalisation has carried an air of inevitability. Children inhabit a technological world; schools must prepare them for it. Stock picture
In Ireland, the schoolbooks are free, but the iPad might cost €800.
There, in one peculiar contradiction, sits the reality of our supposedly free secondary education in 2026.
The State now provides schoolbooks to students under the free education scheme.
However, some parents preparing children for the new school year have been presented with bills running to several hundred euro for laptops or tablets, sometimes specified by the school and purchased through a particular supplier.
Barnardos' latest Back to School survey found 57% of secondary-school parents surveyed had been required to buy a digital device, at an average cost of €447.
And the hardware may only be the beginning; insurance, software, ebooks, and technical-support packages can follow.
For one family, €800 is an irritation. For another, it is money borrowed, savings raided, or something else sacrificed.
After years of seemingly inexorable digitalisation, something appears to be changing.
For almost two weeks this summer, RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline became a sounding board for parents questioning not merely the cost of compulsory devices but why their children needed them in the first place.
Ann Marcus-Quinn of the University of Limerick has researched technology in education for years.
She believes Ireland may be approaching a tipping point, driven less by some great governmental reassessment of digital education than by parents simply refusing to absorb another cost.
“I never heard this out of parents before,” she says of conversations this summer. “They are literally stating ‘I'm not going to pay for it.’”
The revolt, if that is what it becomes, may therefore begin not with pedagogy, concentration, or screen time, but with something more prosaic.
If the Liveline discourse is to be believed, parents have had enough. Which might finally force us to ask the question we perhaps should have asked at the beginning: Why does every child need a device?
