It seems to me that if you are teaching students 3d modeling you would want to:
- Save money and hopefully get free content to go with it
- introduce them to the excitement of the 3d world via a program that has a short learning curve
- Make they are using a program that is completely compatible with poser content
4. Hopefully get them interested enough about it that they would want to continue with it in the future
Well, I'm gonna put another plug in for Daz Studio because it meets all those things. Students would be far more likely to put what you teach them into use if they could get their own software for free. You would also want to limit the access they have to adult content and Daz has a higher restriction on that stuff. You'd have to take that into consideration in the public school environment.