does openness result in more learning?

The simple and obvious version of the argument is that you can't learn what's kept secret from
you, by definition.  There's more to openness than “not secret” (e.g. openness to
modification), so in principle something could be more open without being less secret, but in
the current case, the free software install is less secret and more learnable.

I could go on and say why I think “more learnable” will in fact translate to being “more
learnt” (as has been the case for me using free software compared to previous proprietary
operating systems), but I suspect that that isn't gowen's objection: I suspect that the
objection is that learning about the software on one's computer is not the most important type
of learning, and that learning about other things (chemistry, say) can benefit more from
having access to software running in most of the world's schools (advantages of scale) than by
being modifiable by the students and teachers using the software.

I can't conclusively argue either way.

Getting back to “the most important type of learning”, I think we can agree that cooperation
and helping oneself and one's friends are very important things to learn, and software one is
forbidden from sharing or improving will be less conducive to that than software that
encourages one to look at and improve (and that needs improving!).

A less important point is that schools even in rich countries are increasing turning towards
free software and Linux/Gnu for education (anyone disagree?), so the network effect argument
will tilt less towards Windows over time.