Are poor people more likely than rich people to use smartphones for literacy and education? My wife comes from a poor household in a developing country and the kids there are mostly playing games on them.
Intuitively, kids are kids, and kids like to play.
That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before.
Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify.
For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide).
Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago).
Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc.
The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift.
If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)
