Our work

Free Software in Education

We actively promote the use of Free Software in schools and universities as it encourages schooling of understanding over product training and upholds the scientific principle.

Already during its first general assembly, FSFE identified education as one of the most important areas for activity so young people and students would have the chance of getting in touch with knowledge instead of mere product schooling. Therefore the FSFE started a Free Software in Education working group to focus on these efforts. Today, it acts as a hub and works on monitoring the European situation. We participate in Free Software events and assist other initiatives in making the change possible.

Amongst other arguments for Free Software, here are four of the key benefits for education:

• Sharing: Using free software allows schools to teach children to share and cooperate.
• Learning to program: The possibility/freedom to tinker motivates children to learn more.
• Easy to administer: Free Software is stable, secure and reliable. It offers unrestricted access to the source code, thus allowing to modify or adapt it to the schools' needs.
• Licences: With Free Software, teachers can give a copy to each student. There is no risk to mislead any child to use an illegal copy.