0 The Digital Divide in Education in the Knowledge Society Almudena Moreno Mínguez Universidad de Valladolid, Spain Enrique Crespo Ballesteros Universidad de Valladolid, Spain INTRODUCTION Information and communication technology (ICT) is playing a central role in the development of modern economies and societies. Every young person will need to use ICT in many different ways in their adult lives, in order to participate fully in a modern society. This has profound implications for education, both because ICT can facilitate new forms of learning and because it has become important for young people to master ICT in preparation for adult life. But is ICT living up to its potential in schools and in the lives of young people? partly by the unequal access to the professional and technical knowledge that are acquired in the education system and in the family environment. In the industrial society, the high education exclu- sion--the fact of not entering the University--often located below their expectations or punished (in terms of the labour market access) to those that didn't have good qualifications. That is to say, the equality of op- portunities was analyzed depending on the factors that explained the scholastic failure such as the social class where people come from, the gender or the ethnos (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1980; Bowles & Gintis, 1983). The new society of information and knowledge is char-