Google's takeover the world of education

The kind of distopya we are living sure is crazy. If George Orwell was told about it back in his days, he wouldn't belive it. There is, and there has been, a lot of talk about free software. But reality now is a lot more sinister.

I have a son aged 11, and, for next year, all students will be required to buy a Chromebook for their studies. This doesn't mean they will get rid of books: Books will still be the main tool they will use. But Chromebooks will be an extra tool to teach some conecepts. Because, you know, we live in a world where technology is pervasive, and kids will need to get used to it. Because this technology is here to stay. Or at least, this is the main reason the school gives us (reality is that nowadays kids know more about computers than the teacher, or at least my other son, which is 7 years old, and knows more about Windows than her teacher).

So well, the day I was told about this, I thought: It's fine, my son already has a laptop (a second hand Lenovo X230 which runs like a charm, is fast) and he knows how to use it.

But the school won't allow any laptop: It must be a Chromebook.

In fact, it cannot be *any* Chromebook: It must be an exact model they will provide, and which costs three times the price I paid for the X230. The thing is that those laptops will only be used to run a web browser.

The main arguments for this school to be so rigid in their requirements are mainly two:

The teacher doesn't have a clue about computers: So if there's a problem and every computer is different, it will be a chaos.

They use google classroom, so a Chromebook is a perfect fit for it.

The fun part is that a lot of schools around the world are in the same situation, forcing parents to buy fucking Chromebooks to run an stupid web browser.

In conclusion: Remember in the '90s, when Microsoft had a monopoly? That monopoly was a joke compared to the situation nowadays: Google made a master move: They came up with Classroom, giving accounts for free to all schools. The Covid pandemic was like a gift for them: A *huge* amount of schools are now running Google products, which are well known spying our kinds (and us, of course), to sell more ads than ever before. As a bonus, all they will be taught regarding computers involves Google products ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was my son could be educated in a school were Internet-connected computers were not allowed.