No matter what else you may think of Hugo Chávez (probably bad if you get your information from the U.S. mainstream media, probably good if you get it elsewhere), it appears that Chávez and Venezuela understand both education and Linux.

From The Inquirer you can read that the Venezuelan government just bought 1,000,000 laptops from Portugal based on the Intel Classmate PC design. But, the story then gets interesting:

Although the notebooks are similar in both countries, the OS will be different as the Portuguese use a modified version of Microsoft Windows, while the government of Venezuela has opted for a version of Linux.

Let's put that in perspective. The population of Venezuela is less than 10% of the population of the U.S. A good question you might want to ask those Presidential candidates in the U.S. is how they feel about the U.S. government buying about 10,000,000 Linux laptops for use in education?