[kkfx]

The issue isn't the laptops, but the proprietary software and the fact that teachers don't know how to use even a desktop on average, so they're even less capable of teaching it.

IF you teach how to use a FLOSS desktop, you're providing what's actually needed in the modern world; if you do Big Tech a favor by using their services in schools, you get a collapse in cognitive ability, which is exactly what happened. People just need to understand this and actually have the will to understand it.

[spaqin]

If not for my job, I would never have a need to type a single line in a Linux terminal. I don't know what does that have to do with modern world.

[kkfx]

That's because you haven't seen IT in action outside of your job yet, I'm talking about its true potential. It's not about the terminal or Emacs (the 2D shell), it's about the paradigm.

If you teach free software, you're teaching people how to know, not just how to follow the tracks someone else laid down. You're teaching them how to tell if a news is fake or not, how to use a feed reader to follow various sources instead of relying on whatever aggregator is popular at the moment, and how to communicate from their own home without depending on third parties, and so on. You're creating a population that understands the meaning of digital ownership/property and knows how to manage it, so they aren't slaves to the tech giants and instead have a hunger for knowledge. In other words, you're putting the gnoseological tools of the present into the hands of the masses.

With the GAFAM model, which is basically just mainframes made worse and expanded, you're creating dependency instead. You're creating slaves, not citizens; people who just comment under articles provided by some PR hack, who don't know how to start a thread on their own topic or write their own piece, people who don't have a domain name as their home address IRL, and so on. People who own nothing and, as such, not Citizens, but subjects of the few who do own everything.