----- Original Message ----- From: "Gerhard Poul" gpoul@gnu.org To: "WDS" wdesmet@yucom.be Cc: "Lionel Elie Mamane" lionel@mamane.lu; discussion@fsfeurope.org Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 8:37 AM Subject: Re: FSFE projects [was: T-shirts]
Invite some teachers and _discuss_ the use of free software
Good idea, but most teachers are (as far as I know) educated at a
federal
level. And usually support for school ICT projects (at least here in Belgium) is very dependent on corporate sponsoring. IMHO, we should try
to
lobby the countries and not influence the teachers, who represent the
blind
mass.
I don't know how it is in other countries but I don't think that someone can force the teachers to use windows. - If a school switches a computer lab to linux, so what? If they use linux instead of windows for wordprocessing or editing source, who cares?
As I said, I don't know how this is handled in other countries.
Yes, the government doesn't control which system they run, but they do control the promotion of it. As is said in a later post. Further on, they control the way teachers are educated. If you, as a teacher, had spent 6 months of night school to learn windows (not very likely, but there are strange people out there), then I guess you would habe a *big* problem with suddenly switching to free software. Maybe that's a more accurate description of my initial point.
chrs, WDS