École sans instructeurs 

It’s straight out of a nerd’s dream: a school crammed with top-of-the-line computers, not a single teacher or textbook, no school hours, and no fees. Just hours and hours of gaming and access to other bright minds. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory would definitely approve of École 42. The name itself is a nerd’s delight, referring to Douglas Adams’ classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to life, the universe, and everything, was 42. Funded by French billionaire Xavier Niel and run by computer scientist, entrepreneur, ethical hacker, and educator Nicolas Sadirac, 42 as it is commonly known, is an experiment in pedagogy. Admission is notoriously difficult, with some reports claiming that it’s easier to get admission to an Ivy League school. (They put École 42’s acceptance rate at 1% and Harvard’s at 6%.) In earlier interviews, Sadirac has said the idea of 42 is for students to learn, not just solve a problem, and so there’s no formal classroom environment. Instead, there’s a progressively tougher series of tasks that students will need to undertake, much like a game with increasingly complex levels. This gamification of education is a Sadirac hallmark, endorsed by the likes of Brian Chesky, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Spiegel. Sadirac explains the genesis of the project.

How it all began

It was all part of a vision that we shared that coding is like the new education. Anyone with the right aptitude can do it. People need only the very basic formal education to pick up coding. Niel was worried that France is not creating enough of this talent.

We have spent around $57 million for the Paris campus and $46 million for the Silicon Valley campus, and the rest of the schools are with local partners who have made substantial material investment in them.

What happens at school...

We want the students to think for themselves, to use their own imagination to come up with solutions. We select students based on a series of tasks that are set before them to check their aptitude. The testing period is one month. All the people who are selected can study for between three years and five years for free. At the moment, this is not a residential school. Students usually come in for 8-10 hours. They decide how long they want to stay in the school. Every day, they get a series of digital tasks related to coding and as they complete, or fail to they are given 48 hours to complete each task.

Bright prospects

Till now there has been no student who did not get a job after they left 42. Almost everyone is hired even before they leave the school. On leaving school, everyone has a job. The demand for creative coders far outstrips supply.

Looking ahead

In the Paris school, we have created a space for people to see the kind of projects that our students are working on. It is like an everchanging museum of cutting-edge technological experimentation in progress.

We are working to build a global network of 40 partner institutions to build this kind of school in every part of the world. We cannot reveal more at the moment.

( The article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of the magazine. )