My parents’ 50th anniversary was a few weeks ago, so the entire family decided to celebrate this weekend at the farm in rural northern Florida.  My nieces and nephews who live in this area are the most wonderful children that anyone could expect to have.  Living in the country has taught them that hard work is a way of life.  They appreciate how the wind blowing through a palm tree sounds like water flowing over a waterfall.  They know the names of the plants around them.  And the birds, too.

My three nieces and two nephews travel 28 miles each way to a “nearby” public school.  From what I hear from them and their parents, their teachers and administrators are top notch.  The work that they could not wait to show me was very high quality.  It required the students to be creative and to think critically about what they were doing.  I was very pleased that they were getting a high quality education.

But as I spent more time with them, I started to notice that something was lacking.  These children were bright and beautiful, but not really being exposed to some very critical components of the 21st century skills set that would allow them to venture beyond the farm.  Our society has deemed that these children are too far from urban areas to provide adequate internet (they still have dial-up or DSL) or even provide more than patchy cell phone service. This gap is not just affecting my nieces and nephews, but rural children all across the nation.  This generation of children will find it very difficult to compete in a global economy without access to technology and acquisition of those 21st century skills such as technology and media literacy and the ability to communicate using social media.

In January, President Obama challenged Congress to address the technological needs of rural America (CNET, 2015, January 13).  Much like the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) of 1935, this initiative tries to overcome the obstacles of getting high speed internet and cell phone service to rural America.  This time homes are not being left in the dark, it’s the children of rural America that are being left in the dark.  We can’t afford to wait for a dysfunctional government to realize the crisis already happening across our nation.

Courtesy of Vicki Feliz-Smith

I live in the city, so having high speed internet and quality cell phone service is something that I take for granted.  It took a visit to the farm to realize how an entire generation of children is being denied skills to survive and thrive in the 21st century.