
A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves - mattm
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/a-school-with-no-teachers-where-students-teach-themselves/
======
juliendorra
There is more to it than this idealistic view:

42 is _very_ excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women.
Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much
for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their
website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools,
with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees, and all in all
not thinking twice about it)

Also, there is no entrepreneurial skills in the program (it's supposedly
optional in year 3), no vision of a developer as part of a community (nothing
in the program about going to external events, like FOSDEM for example).

Every student student is supposed to work on the same exact problem (exercise
really) than the others, as far as I can tell in the same order.

All in all, the discourse on creativity and inclusiveness is really not in
sync with how the school is designed.

No teachers doesn't equate peer to peer learning, nor a path to being a great,
creative coder anchored in her/his community.

~~~
nawitus
>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women.

Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding
women.

~~~
alanctgardner2
Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school,
and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They
could _try_ to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female
enrollment.

~~~
yeukhon
You have to count how many women applied and how many were rejected. A fair
policy is to have a balance percentage. For this number of male applicants,
there must be this number of woman accepted.

~~~
gbog
No, the fair policy is to just not count the gender is the ranking.

~~~
yeukhon
Are you saying we don't care how many male/female applicants and just accept
the one we think fit the school?

~~~
gbog
Yes, as long as "fit in the school" do not include any race or gender
requirements.

That's one understanding of equality. Another includes positive action, etc,
but one may argue that by giving more chance to women, black people, etc, at
one step in their lives, is not helping them in fact, because this "positive
action" makes them weaker for the next steps, which will be harder.

I think I remember a book or a movie, where a very good village teacher was
helping farmer kids climb the ladder He did so partly awakening their minds to
the things of culture, but also most importantly being doubly harsh on them.
That's because he knew he was in the best position to teach them to live under
harsh conditions, to defend themselves, to overcome difficulties, etc. This
guy was really giving farmer kids a fair chance to climb the ladder, and the
way is not to just let them in and be kind with them.

I think someone would want to help female student in IT should do the same,
teach them to overcome half-sexist jokes, to live in a male-oriented
environment without losing their feminity, and to be geeker than geeks.

------
mekoka
I see some comments already heavily criticizing this school. A few things to
note before taking those comments at face value.

\- This is the school's website [http://www.42.fr](http://www.42.fr). If you
can't read in french, but want to know more, I'd suggest to use some
translation tool, or lookup other articles that talk about it.

\- I also encourage you to lookup who is behind the project
[http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/](http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-
moyens/)

\- The very first class will be in November 2013. So the program hasn't even
started yet. I don't know how some people can foresee failure this early.

\- on this page, [http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-
programme/](http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/) there's a testimony
(I think) by Bruno Lévêque that roughly translates to _A "project based"
methodology that favors realism, learning by creating real applications useful
in everyday life_. That answers the question _will they be doing only
programming exercises for 15h a day?_

It is unfortunate that this website would only be in french. If there was an
english translation, I sense that some people would be a bit less cavalier
about spewing unsubstantiated information.

~~~
namenotrequired
Thank you.

I also think that, even if some of the criticism is right, for a lot of those
students (and their future employers) this project will still be a lot better
than the alternative of them staying unemployed or working bad jobs while full
of this untapped potential.

~~~
yodsanklai
No, the alternative is to study (for free) in any French university.

~~~
nathanappere
Sure, not the same quality of education for programming though. Since the two
are free, I really see no reason to choose university over 42 now.

~~~
catwell
Not going to explain the French education system _once again_ but...

If you have good grades in High School and enough motivation, you can get into
CPGE: two years to prepare competitive exams for Grandes Écoles, the top
schools in France. CPGE is free.

Then if you are admitted to a public Grande École the fees are under €1000 per
year. You will earn way more with your (mandatory) internships. Oh, and if
you're poor the State will give you grants that are more than enough to pay
for scholarship, rent and food. You will not get these grants if you study at
42.

Actually, if you are _very_ good the very best Grandes Écoles (ENS,
Polytechnique) _pay_ their students to study there.

So to sum things up:

\- The best schools in France were already free.

\- Less competitive education (university) was already free.

Something like 42 in the US would make a lot of sense. 42 in France fills a
niche, but not much more.

------
yeukhon
I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or
not there are mentors available for office hours.

You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a
lot more if there are professionals to help you.

Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at
my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work...

I do like the idea, and I think traditional curriculum should adopt part of
this. I advocate my department to do "student seminar" as elective, but the
department always refuses by saying "your employers don't see the value and
have no way to justify your ability by taking this elective."

I like professors to give students more freedom to build things and show to
class their progress.

~~~
craighooghiem
I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not
necessary to have them at the school itself.

As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a
day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's
possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said,
15 hours is a long time.

~~~
yeukhon
Maybe. For general programming questions like how to loop two things at the
same time or combining two lists into a dict, yeah. For particular open source
project if you are lucky yeah you can get help from IRC (or fall back down to
reading source code). But infrastructure, scaling, security, these are very
specialized areas. You can get a general idea from stackoverflow or security
exchange but implementation wise SO is not a good place to find inspiration.

In the past when I had to deal with puppet/chef I constantly had problems that
the mailing list just couldn't help and the only way I could get help was to
bring someone in and had them debug in real time with me.

------
yodsanklai
I'm very skeptical about this. The idea is that computer science isn't
properly taught in French old fashioned universities and "grandes ecoles". As
a result, some students fail while they would succeed with a more pragmatic,
project-based education.

It sounds like a good idea. After all, we all know stories of bright people or
great hackers that felt academic education wasn't for them and followed a
different, successful path. And after all, Xavier Niel should know, being a
such a successful entrepreneur.

Well, I think he's wrong for several reasons.

1 - even though he says otherwise, conventionally CS is already taught largely
with programming projects.

2 - this field has became so complex that IMHO it's increasingly difficult to
escape some theoretical knowledge. And actually, 42 curriculum has plenty of
it. It's not clear how it's gonna be taught, and I can't see how a student
that failed to learn let say Automata theory, linear algebra and Fourier
transforms at university would succeed just because he's now supposed to learn
by himself.

3 - I think teaching with projects still requires a lot of preparation and
supervision from the teachers, and last time I checked, 42 didn't have that
kind of resources. For instance, you can't just ask 800 students to write a
shell (and learn UNIX and C in the process) by leaving them on their own for a
month. Of course, some will do it, but most won't. I doubt they manage to find
800 john carmack.

~~~
nathanappere
Epitech Alumni here (42 is basically the same thing but free).

1\. Studied in CSULB / UCB, you really don't do enough of them. More theory
than practise when you should probably seek theory when you're confronted to a
problem that needs it.

2\. You really don't need to know about automata theory, linear algebra or
whatever to be a good developer. Brings me back to what I said in 1.

3\. Actually the paper doesn't depicts the reality clearly: you have a lot of
teacher assistant always available to help you, it's just that they are not
allowed to gives you the answer, only to help you search in the right
direction. When you encounter something tricky where finding documentation on
the internet becomes an issue then you can talk about it with them. The system
works quite well in Epitech. I have been a C & C++ assistant there and the
level amongst the assistants is really good, and you could never hire the same
number of qualified teachers (if you could find them). Having people that
worked on the same project themselves quite recently (like 1 or 2 years ago)
makes it that you will always find someone who knows what he is talking about.

To teach CS this is really the best system I have seen so far, and it teach
you to never get stuck, never trust blindly what someone says, and always go
find the answers by yourself.

~~~
yodsanklai
2\. It all depends the kind of projects you want to work on. In

Programming projects are great for some things, but not so much for others.
The problem when learning CS with projects is that you face two difficulties
at once. One is the "technology" side: syntax, bugs, programming environment
and so on. The other are the concepts you're trying to learn. For instance, I
wouldn't want to learn 3D graphics and C++ at the same time.

Actually, my main grief with 42 is that it is presented as something
revolutionary, which it isn't. And very little information is given on the
website. There's is some sketch of a curriculum that is clearly out of reach
for ordinary students. It's unclear how the teaching is going to be organized,
or even who the staff is.

~~~
nathanappere
Well I don't know many schools where you only do projects, classes are
absolutely optional, you organise your time exactly the way you want, you
don't need any kind of diploma to enter. The only mandatory part is being
present for the project defense.

Never saw this kind of teaching in any US university / school, so it's not
that far fetched to call it "revolutionary".

It certainly is in France, especiall (Epitech has been doing that for 10 years
but you had to pay something like 40k which for us is a lot for education, and
also you need a high school diploma, which is mandatory if you want the
bachelor/master diploma delivered by the school to be officialy recognised by
the government.)

------
DanBC
I thought (from the headlines) that this was going to be like Summerhill
School.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School))

> _It is run as a democratic community; the running of the school is conducted
> in the school meetings, which anyone, staff or pupil, may attend, and at
> which everyone has an equal vote. These meetings serve as both a legislative
> and judicial body. Members of the community are free to do as they please,
> so long as their actions do not cause any harm to others, according to Neill
> 's principle "Freedom, not Licence." This extends to the freedom for pupils
> to choose which lessons, if any, they attend._

~~~
gbog
The great essayist Simon Leys said one day that education task was to prepare
pupils to be the best citizen in a democracy, but that democracy is not part
of the tools used to achieve education.

I think these differing views coke from different understanding of democracy.
On one side democracy is reduced to "decide together", and is applied to
school management, experimentally. The real democracy is on the other side.

------
Artemis2
It is a shitty school, launched by one of the biggest IT groups in France
(Illiad, which owns mainly Online - hosting provider and Free - ISP/mobile
carrier). Students are under stress during their whole scholarship. I think
one attending this could work for Illiad at most (and maybe elsewhere, by
using their experience).

Although it is free, which is interesting for people with low resources.

~~~
conradk
Since this is the first year, I don't see how you could know if we are gonna
be under stress. But I'd like to understand, if you have more information on
that. I've spent a month in the school 42 in July. The stress we had was a
good stress IMO. The one that pushes you to work instead of spending 3 hours a
day on YouTube. We just had to be able to say "I won't have the time to
finish, so I'll try making the least worse". Once we understood that, it was
intensive, but fun.

------
LAMike
15 hours a day? On fake problems?

Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work
on projects for 15 hours a day?

~~~
DanBC
I'm guessing French unions don't want unpaid students doing real work because
they want the real work to be done by employed people.

~~~
juliendorra
This has nothing to do with unions and all to do with the archaic views on
education and developers of the founders.

Note that I teach in a French web school where students _do_ work on real
projects from real clients, for free, in year 2 and 3. In another web school
where I teach at 'master level', year 5, the project are real paid projects
for real clients.

It's totally possible, and I must say, it's even the rising ideology that you
have to make students work on "real projects" (with wildly varying definition
of what that means); so yes, it's a little bit crazy to see young students
working 3 years 15 hours a day on arbitrary exercises, and calling it a school
that will produce wildly creative professionals.

------
sieva
This is really the type of innovation that education needs. Providing
solutions for a broken system is very much like putting lipstick on a
pig...without the proper infrastructure that can provide the support and
challenges that students need, no amounts of interaction, collaboration or
analytics will make significant changes (with emphasis on significant).

Although there is a good chance this isn't a "perfect" solution, it's a huge
step in the right direction, and I'd like to see more government funding going
towards trying new approaches vs funding something that hasn't worked well in
a 100 years.

Upvote and a high five to all entrepreneurs working in this field :)

------
kevgnulldev
While I have reservations about this particular instantiation, discussion does
seem to notions, at least vaguely (superficially?), to ideas that do have
merit and are being successfully implemented in some US medical schools...
(Emphasis on vague/superficial)... At the risk of enlarging the conversation
beyond its intended scope, I'm thinking along lines of pedagogy that address
some of these ideas:

[http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget...](http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf)

A move that I'd like to see but that this particular project only tips its hat
to.

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j2d3
This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their
unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the
primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.

~~~
zarify
Except this isn't really 'school', it's more of a technical college. Students
are going to learn a specific skill.

(I could be getting confused by how you folks in the US still call what we
call university 'school' in which case disregard my comment :/)

~~~
platz
Agree, the scope here is extremely limited

