TITLE:
Equality of Opportunity in Education and the Social School Model
AUTHORS:
Salih Babadagli
KEYWORDS:
Equal Opportunity, Digital Learning, Education Economics, Social School Model, Education Supply, Education Costs
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.12,
December
30,
2024
ABSTRACT: Education forms micro-foundations for the solution of many problems in the world. In this sense, education as a tool for human capital accumulation and individual progress, schooling as a tool for education, and digitalization in the field of education as a facilitating factor are very important issues. However, according to the research conducted, schooling alone is not sufficient for economic development, and technology’s efforts to transform education have brought some problems. In addition to these, education creates a financial burden for both household and government budgets. All these factors constitute an obstacle to equal opportunities in education. In order to solve these problems, our study adopts a supply and demand-oriented approach to the economy by examining the intersection of education, digitalization and the economy. It analyzes how education can be made more accessible by adapting it to digital development (supply), and also how policies that will increase students’ access to these technologies (demand) are implemented. By revealing that the educational supply production mechanisms and physical and human-based educational inputs and the analyses based on these are sources of limitations and inequality in the classical face-to-face learning system; a new supply definition will be made that focuses on “information”, and a new model that eliminates the heterogeneity between communication channels and inequality in access to information in the education process will be developed by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by digitalization. Our article offers theoretical and practical solutions within the framework of the new model brought by the Digital Primitive Economy Model (DPEM) and digitalization, by making the dissemination of information cheap, equal and accessible to everyone, to solve the problems arising from the adaptation of technology in education, to create an egalitarian structure in education and to minimize education costs.