[EUROCARE]

The point here is data privacy. Freemail means you explicitly hand over your (meta)data as a payment. Students are not going to go for Protonmail, they're going to use their already existing Gmail.

You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...

[zelphirkalt]

They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example.

Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.

[EUROCARE]

Email inboxes are one of the many services schools buy, it's not about any promotion and of course Google doesn't promote them, this is a service they provide for money, not some barter. This is like saying they promote a catering provider, furniture manufacturer or paper factory by buying from them... It's not like people aren't capable of using other email providers after using Gmail - email looks just the same regardless of the company (usually works worse though), and people have their own email too, their school inbox is usually not their first nor last contact with it.

Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.