"Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software" is stallman's statement of the educational case for software freedom. It argues that schools have a special obligation to use and teach free software — not merely because free software is cheaper, but because education's core mission (to prepare students for life in a free society) requires teaching with tools that students can study, modify, and own.
The essay's central argument is about the relationship between tools and values. Schools that teach students to use proprietary software are teaching dependency: they are preparing students to be consumers of software whose workings they cannot examine and whose providers they cannot hold accountable. This is in conflict with education's goal of developing critical, autonomous thinkers. Schools that use free software, by contrast, teach students that software is understandable, modifiable, and sharable — consistent with the same values they teach in other domains.
The essay is also explicit about the corrosive practice of proprietary software vendors donating software to schools. stallman characterizes this as a form of predatory marketing: students who learn a proprietary product in school are more likely to purchase it after graduation, and are more likely to recommend it to their employers. The "gift" of proprietary software to schools is an investment in lock-in, not charity. Free software donations, by contrast, are genuinely gifts — the recipient acquires something transferable.
stallman makes a practical concession: if a school cannot afford to replace a proprietary tool for which there is no adequate free alternative, practical necessity may require its use. But the default should be free software, the exception should be justified, and the school should not present proprietary software to students as the normal state of the world. He complements this educational argument with institutional policy recommendations in measures-governments-free-software, which addresses how governments more broadly can promote software freedom through policy.
The essay engages with the broader context of software freedom and institutional power in the gplv3-and-later-career-2006-present era. Microsoft's dominance in educational computing — and later Google's dominance through Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education — represents precisely the scenario stallman warns against: institutions becoming dependent on and advocates for a particular proprietary platform. The free-software-foundation has maintained this position consistently, including in debates about Google and Apple in education. The essay is representative of stallman's applied ethics: the four-freedoms framework applied to a specific institutional context.