Re: country studies / school system overview

> Please share insights from your country.

Italy. Personal view, I'm not a teacher but a low-level programmer.
 
> How is the school system organised? Is it very hierachical so that
> the only way of sucess is to get in contact with the minister? Or
> could the headmasters decide about ICT quite freely?

Something in the middle. The education ministry has always been very
microsoft-oriented, wether it was a left-wing or right-wing era.  Every
government signs an agreement with microsoft as one of the first steps,
as it makes very good public relations.

However, schools are quite independent, so there are a number of
teachers that know better, but it's definitely a minority. All text
books (primary and secondary schools) are about microsoft office.  Hi
don't now about high schools, but I doubt it's different.

This year however I got a pleasant experience: the book my son uses
(first year secondary school) include OOo for windows in the CD and
each chapter talks briefly about OOo, suggesting to read a document in
the CD itselft that exlains the differences related to the specific
chapter.

Despite that, the teacher told me he'll be conenctrating on "the ECDL
using office" -- like everyone else down here. I won't express my
opiniono on the ECDL, as it's a hot topic and I wholehearedly disagree
with some other FS supporters...

> Which level of administration is probably the most interesting for
> us to approach?

The ministry. But it would be wasted time. National associations are
already trying to, with non-trivial efforts but no result at all.
Recently a new agreement with microsoft has been signed, and the
official reply to someone complaining has been "they are helping with
tech devolpment of schools at no monetary costs, it would have been
foolish to refuse". The agreement is the usual hand waving about
discounts on licenses and gratis access to web services and knowledge
bases.

> Do you know teachers who are trying to implement Free Software at their 
> schools? Are there larger, interconnected groups?

Yes. There are a number of teachers, at all levels (from primary
onwards), and some support networks al regional level, mainly related
to high school.

We have a mailing list where both techical and political topics are
discussed.  There's very good people in there and many teachers (don't
know the number, currently). It's low-traffic, which is good IMHO
as teachers are not scared away.

Soe LUGs/GLUGs also organize activities and meetings for teachers.  I
heard about good experiences, but it's still person-to-person word
passing. 

> Please feel free to also add questions or broaden the scope of your reply.

I think the main issue is cultural. People do not even realize that
computers must be controlled, as they have always been trained to be
controlled by computers.

Computers that try to outsmart the user are making a very very bad
effect on society.  This is what proprietary companies has always been
doing, and the same disease is affecting free software these days.  I
refer to firefox that spell-corrects everything you type until you
learn how to disable it (nobody will take the effort: people is used
to be subjugated by this misfeature and continue to do so); I refer to
crappy defaults for tab-completion in the shell and similar stuff.

Once upon a time we had the "principle of least surprise", and it was
good to have.

While I undestand we must have the same misfeatures people is used to
have on windows if we want to bring them to gnu/linux, I'm also
convinced that by replicating that we are not making any cultural
progress, and we relegate ourselves to be a second-tier choice.

[I have very strong opinions on these topics, but they are only
personal opinions as I am not representing any association, luckily.
I'm also aware my point of view on the subject matter is doped by
my age and my peculiar environment -- I use bits and bytes, no megs
or gigs]

/alessandro