Free Software in Schools: Let’s Stop Letting GAFAM Indoctrinate Our Children
I absolutely can’t stand watching kids get their heads stuffed from the youngest possible age so they come out indoctrinated. Politics and religion do plenty of that work, but so does proprietary software, capitalism’s Trojan horse. We hand tablets to preschoolers so they can get spied on nice and quiet, and it only gets worse from there.
The machine runs smooth: students learn on Office, or on other wildly expensive proprietary software, and then they struggle like hell to get out because the habits are baked in. It barely costs Big Tech anything, since they get fat tax write-offs for donating hardware while locking in a captive customer base from kindergarten on. Multiply that by millions of students over several decades and the ROI is literally colossal. So it isn’t charity, it’s a sales strategy, and public school ends up as a free showroom for multinationals that couldn’t care less about the common good.
Always the same bogus argument: I have nothing to hide
You’d naively think everybody gets this, that it’s obvious. But every time I bring it up outside free software circles, somebody hits me with the famous “I have nothing to hide,” like I’m a terrorist or a black hat just because I flat out refuse to put my private life on display online. Except handing your intimate life, your sex life, your work life… to private companies on a silver platter isn’t exactly harmless. And it’s even more unacceptable when it’s kids.
Because it means building a file on them from the youngest possible age, for ad money today and for politics tomorrow. And it’s all the more intolerable now that the AIs owned by billionaires can crunch that stolen data extremely precisely and extremely fast. We’re way past the days of a little cookie slipped quietly into your browser. We now live in the days when Big Tech straight up reads your email and everything you post online.
And with cell phones, your texts, your contacts and even your conversations can get spied on too. Big Brother dreamed it up… Microsoft, Google and Apple built it! And with kids it gets even uglier, because we’re literally building their digital profile before they have any idea what that means. Data collected in childhood will follow them for life, feeding algorithms that will shape their choices, their job prospects and maybe even their access to certain services.
Picture this for a second: a private company owns your kid’s entire digital school record. Grades, interests, friends, learning problems, online searches, health… Now picture that data getting sold off, hacked or used for something nobody saw coming. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening in our schools right now, and we call it normal because it’s free and convenient.
Free software really does prepare you for working life
Despite what people think, free software prepares kids for the future far better than the proprietary stuff does. Networks run on Linux and serious companies run on Linux. So making free software mandatory in school would be great for employment too, because our kids would learn on the tools they’ll actually use at work instead of crippled versions of software they’ll have to buy licenses for the second they leave the school system, for no good reason at all.
Supercomputers run Linux too, most smartphones run Android, which is built on Linux, and even Microsoft uses more and more open source tech inside its own infrastructure. Training our kids on proprietary software alone cuts them off from what technology actually looks like at work and keeps them inside an artificial bubble built by marketing strategy.
Also, learning on free software builds different skills, often deeper ones. Because when you use proprietary software, you’re stuck on the path the vendor laid out, with no way to see what’s going on under the hood or bend the tool to fit your needs. With free software you get the source code, you can figure out how it works, you can change it if you need to and above all you build a critical mind about technology. So you’re not a passive consumer anymore, you’re an active user who understands your own tools.
Ready-to-run educational Linux distros: the technical solution already exists
Projects like Edubuntu already exist and prove it can be done. But we could go way further and build ready-to-run Linux distros designed specifically for education. Picture a distro made for 7 to 9 year olds, with playful colorful interfaces, preselected educational software like GCompris or Tux Paint and a layout thought through for kids meeting a computer for the first time. Another one for middle school with heavier tools like LibreOffice Writer with a built-in grammar checker, science software like Stellarium for astronomy or Avogadro for chemistry and maybe even simplified programming environments like Scratch. And a high school version with professional software like GIMP for graphics, Shotcut for video editing, Audacity for audio and full IDEs for the ones who want to learn to code seriously.
Teachers wouldn’t have to struggle, since they’d install the distro easily and every piece of software they need would already be in there, configured and ready to go. No command line to type, no missing dependencies to hunt down, no complicated gadget… Everything designed for classroom use and working straight out of the first boot. We could even bundle in video tutorials and documentation written for each age group, plus teaching guides for teachers who aren’t computer experts.
Age-based tiers would give a coherent progression across the whole school career, each level building on the one before. A kid who used Tux Paint in elementary school won’t blink at GIMP in high school, because the basic concepts are already there. That kind of continuity is impossible right now with proprietary software that keeps changing its interface and its business model to suit whatever sales strategy their vendors are running.
We could fund small and midsize companies working in open source instead of Big Tech outfits that do nothing good for our digital independence. So we’re also talking about skilled jobs at home, local technical expertise and taking back control of the computer tools our kids use. Instead of paying for licenses that fatten shareholders, why not invest in local companies that create real value and actually pay their taxes? The question stands.
Technically, we’d also be running a large-scale operation. Which is a completely different problem from building a universal OS that has to run on anything. When you build a consumer distro like Linux Mint, you have to make sure it works on thousands of different hardware setups, and that’s a technical nightmare. But for an education distro meant to equip schools, you can standardize the hardware. Which makes development and maintenance enormously simpler. So the Éducation nationale, France’s public school system, could pick one or two reference machines, negotiate bulk pricing with manufacturers and make sure the distro runs perfectly on that specific hardware.
Touchscreen tablets on Linux: a technical challenge we can easily beat
Tablets are trickier, but nowhere near impossible. The main problem with Linux tablets is that manufacturers write their drivers for Android or iOS and almost never for Linux. Which makes hardware integration painful. But the same logic applies as with computers, because we’d still be running a large-scale operation with the Éducation nationale as the customer.
You’d just walk into a manufacturer and say: “Build us a tablet that fits a touch-based Linux perfectly, tuned for education, and we’ll order, say, a million units to start.” Who turns down a giant hardware order from a government agency? Especially when we’re talking about huge orders spread over years, with the fleet renewed on a regular cycle. A contract like that would make any manufacturer drool, and we’d finally have tablets that are free, secure and respectful of our kids’ privacy.
The manufacturer would have every reason to write solid Linux drivers for its hardware, since that’s the price of landing the contract. We should even make it a condition that those drivers ship open source, so they last and so the community can improve them. Projects like the PineTab or the Librem show it’s technically doable, but sadly they don’t have the leverage a massive order would give them.
Picture tablets built for school, with a touch interface made for kids, educational apps preinstalled, central management so teachers can push out exercises or pull back finished work and above all zero data collection by private companies. We could even build in advanced features like letting students edit the code of the educational apps, which turns the tablet into a tool for learning to code.
Local parent action toward 100% free software
So, to make the world better, we’re going to launch a petition… No, I’m fucking with you, that’s useless! Completely useless! Since when do politicians listen to the people when it means standing up to multinational lobbies? Big Tech has armies of lawyers and lobbyists working full time on the decision makers. So our cute little online petition will end up in a drawer with the thousands of others we’ve already sent.
So every one of us who cares about this has to act locally, at our own level. Simply because local is where you actually have an impact. If you’re a parent, put it on the table at school meetings and don’t let the first reactions discourage you. Prep your case, bring concrete examples and show that solutions exist. Print little flyers and hand them out at pickup time to get the word to the other parents who have probably never thought about it.
Because if a thousand of us start doing it, we’ll be 10,000 fast, then 100,000. That’s how real change happens. Not through grand statements of intent handed down from above. Through thousands of small local actions that slowly build irresistible pressure. Once enough schools have parents asking the question, principals will have to look into it. Then the district inspectors, and finally the ministry.
Don’t underestimate what your own action does. Stay fired up, the free software community is behind you and ready to back you. So organize info nights in your neighborhood, invite people from free software groups to come explain what’s at stake and show off demos of education distros. You can also offer to run a free software workshop at your kids’ school during an open house or a school fair. Set up a few computers with an education distro and let the kids and the parents try it. You’ll see plenty of them stunned to find out that there are alternatives that cost nothing and work great. Fear of change usually comes from not knowing, and one simple demo can knock down a lot of prejudice. It beats staying abstract, anyway.
Teachers are crucial to this shift
If you’re a teacher or you work in education, talk to your colleagues and put free alternatives on the table for the digital tools used in class. Try Edubuntu or other education distros in your school. Even on one or two machines to start. Show it’s possible, show it works and say out loud that our students deserve better than getting molded from childhood into captive customers for multinationals. Your role is essential because you’re on the front line, and your hands-on experience will convince people far better than any theory.
Teachers have enormous power in this fight because nobody can question their standing to talk about teaching and teaching tools. Because when a parent says “we should be using free software,” people can tell him he doesn’t know the constraints of teaching. But when a teacher says it after testing the tools and signing off on them, that’s a lot harder to brush off. Teachers can also pool teaching resources with colleagues, write guides tailored to their subject and slowly build a knowledge base that makes adoption easier for everybody else.
So document what you did and share it on teacher forums or specialized sites. Explain what worked, the trouble you ran into and how you got past it. Those write-ups are gold for the people still hesitating, and they show that moving to free software isn’t a leap into the dark, it’s a road other people already walked.
You can also offer free software training during your school’s in-service days. Plenty of teachers would be interested but have no idea where to start. A group intro clears away a lot of that. Show them they don’t need to be computer experts to use LibreOffice or LibreWolf, and that these tools are often simpler and more stable than the proprietary versions.
The remarkable work of free software groups, and how little support they get
Meanwhile, plenty of free software nonprofits do terrific work on the ground. And we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for it 🙂 The problem is these groups are short on people and short on money. They still fight every day to train, raise awareness and walk schools through the switch.
Groups like Framasoft do extraordinary work with duct tape and string. They run install parties, talks and workshops in schools, they build teaching resources and they lobby institutions. But against Big Tech’s marketing firepower, it’s David versus Goliath. Microsoft can hand out free licenses to every school and send well-trained sales reps into every district, while free software groups run on volunteers giving up their evenings after a full day of work.
These groups need public funding to go professional, hire full-time staff who could support schools over the long haul and build quality resources. But funny enough, the state would rather pay for licenses than fully back local players passing on values of mutual aid and sharing.
Acting now to change our kids’ future
So, this piece is just an observation and a rough sketch of solutions, because we can’t afford to wait for somebody else to handle this serious problem for us. If you want things to move, please spread the word about free software at your kids’ school, even if you think it’ll barely register. Join a free software group or start one with a few friends if there isn’t one near you, because the movement needs local relays everywhere.
Are you already a free software activist? Keep fighting, because we need you. Now more than ever, because sovereignty, privacy and emancipation through technology have never mattered more. Our kids are growing up in a world soaked in digital tech, and it’s on us to hand them the tools and the knowledge to be its masters instead of its slaves.
So, are we doing this? Because while we hesitate our kids keep getting filed away, their data keeps feeding the profits of multinationals with zero scruples about exploiting them, and every day we build their dependence on proprietary tools a little higher. Sure, time is working against us, but the solution is right there if we finally decide to act together. So let’s take the time to talk about it, here or on Mastodon. Doesn’t matter where. What matters is getting fired up enough to actually move things.
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