LibreOffice for Education: Regaining Digital Sovereignty
Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty to US Big Tech in the process. Teachers use cloud-based editors to assign homework. School administrators manage documents in proprietary formats. This ecosystem runs smoothly and seemingly without friction, but almost no one questions the cost of this normalisation.
Unfortunately, the cost is quite high.
An invisible resume
Schools don’t just teach maths and history; they also teach mental processes, such as how to do research, think critically and interact with tools and institutions. Software is part of this invisible curriculum. A student who has spent years using Microsoft Word or Google Docs as the archetype of “word processing” or “collaboration” respectively has not developed neutral, transferable skills, but has become a future customer.
This is not a conspiracy, but rather the way markets work. Microsoft and Google both offer heavily discounted or even free licences to educational institutions, knowing that brand loyalty formed in childhood tends to persist into adulthood and the working world. The licence discount is, in commercial terms, the cost of acquiring a new customer, which schools effectively pay on behalf of the seller.
LibreOffice offers an alternative to this approach, teaching students to develop a different type of relationship with their tools.
Privacy and data security
LibreOffice is a free office suite for Windows, macOS and Linux, managed by the non-profit organisation The Document Foundation and developed by a global community of contributors. It offers programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawings and mathematical formulas — in other words, all the functions required in a school environment.
Unlike Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, LibreOffice does not require a subscription or an internet connection. It also does not require the creation of accounts for minors or send data to remote servers. It installs and works locally, so data stays where the user puts it.
For schools operating in areas with poor connectivity — a more widespread reality than one might think — this is not a minor issue, but the difference between a functioning lesson and a frozen loading screen.
For schools concerned about student privacy, the difference is even more significant. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace collect behavioural and usage data, and the terms of service governing the management, storage and use of this data are opaque, complex and subject to change.
LibreOffice does not collect any data, either user or operational, as no account is required to use it and there is no default telemetry. Therefore, there is no data to lose in the event of a malfunction or system breach.
The lesson of open standards
LibreOffice is based on the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard file format that no company owns or controls. Documents created in ODF today will be readable by any ODF-compatible software, even in 20 or 50 years’ time. This is not because the vendor has decided to maintain backward compatibility, but because the standard is public, documented and independent of any commercial interests.
This is extremely important for schools, which are public services funded by citizens and accountable to communities, not private businesses. The documents they produce, such as curricula, assessments, student records and administrative correspondence, belong to the public sphere to a certain extent. Locking these documents into a proprietary format controlled by a single US company creates a form of digital dependency that is incompatible with the commitment of educational institutions to autonomy and critical thinking.
Teaching students to create and share documents in an open format shows them that technology can be responsible and transparent, and that the tools they use do not have to be ‘black boxes’ owned by a company.
The potential lesson of Linux
LibreOffice is the default office suite in most Linux distributions. A school that adopts LibreOffice is a school that has opened the door to using Linux on its personal computers. This is important for budgetary reasons — Linux significantly extends the useful life of older PCs — but also from an educational perspective.
This is demonstrated by the experience of Italian schools in the province of Bolzano, Italy, which use the Linux distribution FUSS (Free Upgrade for a Digitally Sustainable School). On 20 April 2026, it will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a public event where I will talk about the topics covered in this article.
Linux powers the internet, large research centres such as CERN, the world’s top 50 supercomputers, most smartphones and a large proportion of corporate infrastructure with which students will work when they leave school or university.
Students who have grown up using only Windows or Chromebooks have no practical knowledge of how operating systems work, how software is installed and managed, or how IT infrastructure is structured. However, a student who has used a Linux-based system, even in a school setting, will have at least a basic understanding of the fundamentals of modern computing.
This is not an ideological commitment to open source. It is about training graduates who understand the technological world they are entering and the digital tools they will use throughout their lives.
The pitfalls of proprietary software
A student who uses proprietary software throughout their education may unknowingly absorb a series of misconceptions and misinformation:
- That documents reside in the cloud or on someone else’s server as if this were normal and natural.
- Collaboration means sharing access within a supplier’s system.
- That software is a subscription service which is paid for monthly and whose features or price may change at any time.
- That the interface of a tool is defined by what a company has decided to build and not by what users need.
- Lock-in of proprietary formats is an integral part of the system because that’s just how things are.
All of this information is biased and teaches dependency. It serves the long-term commercial interests of suppliers rather than the long-term autonomy of students.
In contrast, LibreOffice lessons teach that software can be free as in freedom, not just free as in price; that file formats can be public standards; that the user community, rather than profit, can be the basis for software development; and that the tools we use can be transparent, modifiable and independent of a single company’s commercial strategies.
An analysis of the counterarguments
Students must learn the tools they will use in the workplace. In theory, this argument has some merit, but in reality, it is inconsistent because the conceptual skills developed with Microsoft 365 — document structuring, formatting, use of styles and spreadsheet formula management — can be transferred to LibreOffice and vice versa. According to the logic of this argument, skills learned on a platform that later changes its interface or mode of delivery from desktop to cloud are not transferable. Microsoft has modified its products several times over the last ten years. The enduring lesson is to learn the concepts, not the menus.
Google Docs facilitates collaboration. This is true within the Google ecosystem. LibreOffice, together with Nextcloud or a similar solution, offers comparable collaboration features without exposing data. However, the problem in this case is the lack of expertise in schools to configure it, which highlights the need for better IT support in education rather than permanent structural dependence on Google.
LibreOffice is more difficult to use. For users who have never used either, the learning curves are comparable, and the perception that Microsoft Office is “easier” largely stems from prior exposure, which itself stems from schools having already made the choice we are questioning.
A concrete proposal
The transition, of course, must not be abrupt or absolute, since this could trigger resistance to change, especially among parents, who in most cases have been victims of the pitfalls of proprietary software.
Schools could start with a few small steps:
- Adopt ODF as the standard format for all documents, regardless of the software used to create them. This would break the format lock-in without requiring an immediate change in software.
- Introduce LibreOffice alongside proprietary tools, allowing all students to work with both and understand the differences in approach between proprietary software and FOSS.
- Migrate administrative workflows to LibreOffice to reduce licensing costs and create institutional familiarity before introducing it in classrooms.
- Collaborating with local FOSS communities for technical support and training would be a form of civic engagement that would benefit both schools and businesses in the area.
None of these small steps represents a radical choice. Many school systems in Europe have adopted these measures, either fully or partially, and experience shows that the transition can be managed and that the benefits are real.
Conclusion
The dominance of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in schools is not the result of these tools being proven to be superior for educational purposes. Rather, it is the result of effective commercial strategies, network effects and institutional inertia. Schools have largely accepted this situation without considering the long-term costs in terms of student data, public budgets, digital sovereignty and the type of digital citizens that schools and universities should be educating.
LibreOffice offers an alternative approach based on open standards, public accountability and independence from commercial platforms. While not perfect, it is a tool that schools can truly own and control.
This is worth much more than a discounted or seemingly free subscription.
