As schooling moves online during the pandemic, rural students in Indonesia and other countries struggle to learn on smartphones and shared laptops
Schools are closed in Indonesia because of the pandemic, but for the rural poor who lack internet access and smartphones, online education is particularly difficult. Tweets: @nytimes , @fahimabed , and @motokorich Tweets: @nytimes : “When the school ordered us to study at home I was confused because we don't have a signal at home.” Schools are closed in Indonesia because of the virus, but for rural communities that lack internet access, online education is particularly difficult. https://www.nytimes.com/... Fahim Abed / @fahimabed : On school days, the three teenage students hop on a motorbike and ride to their personal study hall: a spot along a narrow road outside the Indonesian village of Kenalan where they can get a stable cellphone signal. https://www.nytimes.com/... Motoko Rich / @motokorich : Think your kids' digital learning is tough? Consider Indonesia, where “students climb to tops of tall trees a mile from their village. Perched on branches high above ground, they hope for a cell signal strong enough to complete assignments” @RCPaddock https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Indonesia closed its schools, learning moved to smartphones and shared laptops — but in rural villages with no cell signal, students travel to roadside spots just to download assignments. The problem is not unique to Indonesia: China's outbreak exposed the same rural digital divide in education back in March, and India's survey data later showed how many households lack even one smartphone.
What makes this report notable is that it lands mid-pandemic, between those earlier warnings and the responses they provoked — including [[a:960524|students in remote Pakistan organizing to demand better internet from the military-run unit controlling it]], evidence that affected families are turning connectivity failures into political demands.
First-order effects
- Rural Indonesian students without signal or devices are effectively locked out of schooling while campuses stay closed, and teachers must improvise around shared laptops and offline households.
- Households bear the cost directly — buying data, sharing single phones among siblings, or traveling to find coverage just to submit work.
Second-order effects
- Governments and telecom operators face mounting pressure to treat school connectivity as essential infrastructure, as Pakistan's student mobilization shows spreading from complaint to organized demand.
- Education systems serving poor rural areas are pushed toward low-bandwidth and offline-friendly formats because the smartphone-only model demonstrably fails their students, a lesson also visible in India's survey finding most affected homes had no smartphone at all and in US districts still scrambling months in (seven months in, rural American districts were still short of infrastructure).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, education policy worldwide consolidates around closing the rural connectivity gap as a precondition for any future remote-learning capacity, shifting spending toward network buildout and device programs rather than software alone.
- Persistent gaps risk stratifying a generation's outcomes by geography and household income, making the digital divide a durable measure of educational inequality long after schools reopen.
The trend: Pandemic-era remote schooling is converting internet access from a convenience into core education infrastructure, with countries diverging by how fast they close the rural gap.