Schools should only use free software
Dear Fellow members, Distinguished guests,
Good morning.
The title of my speech today is schools should only use free software. This may sound astonishing to you. But please look around, we have children today, we have parents today. Do we have teachers today? Do we have students today?
Great. I hope my speech gives you something to think.
I have already introduced free software and why software should be free. Let’s review a little bit.
Free software is the software you can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve. Free software is a matter of freedom, not price.
As I talked last time. All computer users deserve free software. We deserve to be able to study the software we use and improve it. All computer users ought to insist on free software: it gives us the freedom to control our own computers, and gives us the freedom to cooperate with each other, and to live an upright life.
These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone, and there are other reasons that specifically apply to schools.
We expect schools to teach students basic facts and useful skills, but that is only part of their job. The most fundamental task of schools is to teach good citizenship, including the habit of helping others. In the area of computing, this means teaching people to share software.
Let’s think about two examples in classroom.
Example 1: A nonfree (proprietary) software classroom
In this classroom, a student raises her hand and asks “How does this work?” Because the code is hidden, the teacher can only say “I do not know, and there is no practical way of finding out. Its workings are kept secret.” The curious student may try to figure it out for herself. She may contact the company and ask, and if she would be lucky enough to speak to the right person, she would be shown a snippet or two (at best). Perhaps she would be told that if she works hard to learn coding, she could one day work for the company, but she isn’t allowed to learn right now by exploring it on her own. And how is she expected to learn coding? Does she learn by reading the short didactic snippets? The paradigm she would live in would send the message “You are just a user. Leave the real work to the experts, allow them to decide for you, and don’t ask too many questions.”
Example 2: A free software classroom
In this classroom, a student who raises her hand and asks “How does this work?” can be directed to the answer. She can read, study, and even modify the source code. She need not live in the paradigm of “I’m just a user. Others make the code, and I just use it.” Instead, she can be a hacker. She can get her hands dirty with the code. She can break it. She can fix it. She can make it her own. She can even make copies and redistribute them for her friends to use and remix. All in all, she will live in a paradigm that says “I may use the software, and I may contribute. I can learn, understand, control what it does, and I can teach others.”
It is easy to see the fundmental difference between the two classrooms. A classroom that requires only free software helps enable creativity, confidence, and ownership to bloom because it lets students explore all the possibilities. Parents and caregivers should insist on free software in the classroom. There may be times where using nonfree software to participate in a class seems inevitable, in which case we should, at the very least, clearly state our concerns, and take it as an opportunity to inform others of the implications of free software in education. When we take the additional step to refuse to use nonfree software, then we protect our own freedom while making our concerns all the more understood.
Dear friends, let’s work together to create a future where free software is the first standard for education.
The world has changed drastically in the past few months due to the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Education, in particular, has been impacted: college students have been sent home, day cares have been closed (leaving parents to juggle their work responsibilities with childcare), and public schools have closed their campuses and continued their educational services online.
The shift has been abrupt, so policy makers have not had much time to review the potential risks (or benefits) of software options. Many administrators and teachers are basing their tech decisions solely on pervasive marketing campaigns, bringing about Zoom’s surge in popularity. More importantly, decision makers have failed to see the long-term implications of such a decision on students’ freedom and privacy.
We must reverse the trend of forsaking young people’s freedom, which has been accelerating as corporations try to capitalize on the need to establish new remote education practices. Free software not only protects the freedoms of your child or grandchild by allowing people to study the source code for any malicious functionalities, it also communicates important values like autonomy, sharing, social responsibility, and collaboration.
If you have a relationship with a school —if you are a student, a teacher, an employee, an administrator, a donor, or a parent— it’s your responsibility to campaign for the school to migrate to free software. If a private request doesn’t achieve the goal, raise the issue publicly in those communities; that is the way to make more people aware of the issue and find allies for the campaign.
Thank you.