French entrepreneur and billionaire Xavier Niel is looking for the best programmers for his projects. In France, however, he could not find them in 2013, so he set up a smart school to raise them. He found École 42 in Paris, where are no teachers, and where students are repairing each other’s work.
The free three-year and five-year study programs can be subscribed to by anyone. Just succeed in an online logical test and then go through a monthly retirement competition, which will lead to a new class of 1,000 students. They then “study” in the large halls full of Apple computers in Station F in southeastern Paris, quoted Quartz.
The school already has a number of graduates. Still, during their studies, about 80 percent of the students find jobs, and all of them have one at the end.
“We do not learn anything,” says Nicolas Sadirac, director of École. “Students have to create what they need,” he adds. Every morning, at 08:42, they get a project that they have 48 hours to work on, so they can work on multiple tasks at any given time and they can dispose of their time as they see fit.
School as a game
The whole school works as a game: students get points for good work or for correcting the mistakes of their colleagues, then they can “buy” repairs from their classmates. Disciplinary offenses are punishable, such as manual work.
Initially, École 42 required at the end of studies to master certain skills, and this conventional element of education has already dropped. The main goal of the founder of Niela is to foster a mix of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and initiative in students to succeed in any sector in the future.
Starting a free modern school, Niel also wanted to break the discriminatory conditions in the French labor market, where young people from poorer families who did not study in elite schools do not get the best posts. He has spent 48 million euros ($ 1.3 billion) on the Paris campus.
“If you do not have a clean criminal record, you’re not good at math, you swear, it does not matter,” Niel told Venture Beat. “The only thing that interests us is logical thinking and motivation,” he added.
