Conference Program

In recent years, the concept of educational poverty, understood as the condition in which individuals and social groups lack the cognitive and cultural resources to critically interpret social reality, has entered sociological and pedagogical debate as a key to interpreting contemporary inequalities. From this perspective, educational poverty does not only concern school education, but also affects participation in community life and the exercise of citizenship. The issue takes particular relevance in the current context, characterized by the growing centrality of digital platforms, social media, and algorithmic systems in the production and circulation of information.

Participation in the public sphere requires increasingly complex interpretative skills: navigating heterogeneous sources, assessing the reliability of information, recognizing persuasive discursive strategies, and understanding the logic of digital platforms are fundamental dimensions of civic competence. In this context, the lack of adequate cognitive tools can translate into difficulty understanding complex political content, greater exposure to disinformation and, more generally, reduced opportunities for participation in public debate.

This is the context for the reflection proposed in this contribution. The paper starts from the hypothesis that digital educational poverty can be interpreted as a specific form of civic inequality in contemporary societies and aims to discuss how the unequal distribution of the skills needed to understand and interpret digital information ecosystems affects opportunities for participation in the public sphere and political debate. The aim is therefore to relate three closely connected dimensions: educational inequalities, the transformation of digital information environments, and the cognitive conditions of democratic participation.

The available empirical evidence shows that these skills are distributed in a highly unequal manner. Surveys conducted by the OECD emphasize that socioeconomic background is one of the main factors associated with levels of proficiency in reading, numeracy, and problem solving. The results of the PISA and PIAAC surveys show that students and adults from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are more frequently placed at the lower levels of the competency scales (OECD, 2019; OECD, 2023). The unequal distribution of cognitive skills affects academic achievement and the ability to access interpretative resources necessary to understand how contemporary information environments work.

These findings can be interpreted in light of a well-established tradition of sociological studies that have analyzed the role of cultural capital in the reproduction of educational inequalities. Studies by Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) have shown how the unequal distribution of cultural resources contributes to structuring opportunities for learning and social participation. In contexts characterized by the growing centrality of digital technologies, these dynamics intertwine with new forms of inequality linked to the skills needed to inhabit the digital environment. As Van Dijk (2020) observes, the contemporary digital divide concerns less material access to technologies and increasingly differences in skills and ways of using digital resources.

Starting from these theoretical considerations, the paper discusses how digital educational poverty can contribute to producing socially stratified forms of political participation. The literature on democratic citizenship has shown how education level and cognitive skills significantly influence civic engagement and the ability to navigate complex political positions.