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According to the Reading Foundation, increasing digitization when dealing with authorities, ordering restaurants or shopping puts people who are inadequately trained in key educational skills at a disadvantage.
Halfway through the “National Decade for Literacy and Basic Education” scheduled for 2026, the foundation in Mainz warned “that inequality and different access opportunities in the population are worsening”.
With the support of the Federal Ministry of Education, the foundation commissioned a representative survey by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy.
The results showed "that education and reading-remote groups of the population are disadvantaged with increasing digitization because they are faced with demands that they are in fact unable to meet."
Based on data from the 2018 LEO Basic Education Study by the University of Hamburg, the number of people affected in Germany is estimated at 6.2 million.
Around 40 percent of those surveyed with a simple education see digitization and its impact on everyday life more with fears than with hopes - in the group classified as highly educated, this is only 28 percent.
This also fits the result that 31 percent of those surveyed with a simple education find it difficult or very difficult to obtain the information they need about the corona pandemic.
Only 15 percent of the more highly educated state this.
The Reading Foundation cites the abundance, length and complexity of information that is almost exclusively digitally available as the main problems.
According to the information, the group of respondents with a simple education includes people who have attended elementary or secondary school with or without a qualification.
This also included people who left secondary school or a comparable school without a secondary school leaving certificate or without secondary school leaving certificate.
"The dynamism of the changes promoted by digitization has increased and accelerated due to the corona."
Simone Ehmig, head of the Institute for Reading and Media Research at the Reading Foundation
"The combination of living conditions and the limited opportunity to find out about current rules also increases the risk of infection for this population group," explained the head of the Institute for Reading and Media Research at the Reading Foundation, Simone Ehmig.
"The dynamism of the changes promoted by digitization has increased and accelerated due to the corona."
At the end of last year, the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy surveyed 1,022 people aged 16 and over.
According to this, around one in four with a high school diploma supported their own children more often than usual with the increasingly digital lessons in the months before the survey.
In the case of people with or without a secondary school diploma, only four percent said this.
A large part of the higher educated population groups work in the home office and can look after the children in homeschooling, said Ehmig.
"People with a simple education have to work on site and in a team more often and are dependent on public transport."
wit / dpa