Today's children are adept at using Google, Instagram or playing online games. But they lack the competences to be relevant players in the digital transformation.

Review of the column “A future for our children?” by professor Ricard Martínez M., director of the Privacy and Digital Transformation Chair Microsoft-Universitat de València, published in the April edition of Tecnología y Sentido Común (pp. 38-40).

It’s one thing to be an intensive gamer, in other words, use expertly Information and Communications Technology (ICT), but for recreational purposes only. It’s another to have the advanced digital competences demanded by the digital transformation in which we are heading as a society. 

This is an extremely important issue. Experts say that training children in these skills makes them less vulnerable, for example, to manipulation by fake news or digital media addiction

In particular, our schoolchildren require training in the development of skills in computational thinking, creative thinking, scientific knowledge and also in humanistic values with a strong ethical component.

All of the above is a legal obligation. Indeed, the Organic Law 3/2018 on Personal Data Protection and guarantees of digital rights provides, in section XV, a series of strategies that educational institutions must adopt to ensure digital training for our children. However, no progress seems to have been made in this regard - although the 2019 government crisis, the pandemic and now the effects of the war in Ukraine must be considered.

Digital transformation means a change in the way we understand society. In other words, the lack of skills to interact with a machine-interface or to approach a job from a computational point of view, augurs a precarisation of work. The focus, then, must be on digital transformation and a school education that prepares our children for an ever closer future.