A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves
blogs.kqed.org
blogs.kqed.org
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.
Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.
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.
So the other kind of fair policy (which is kind of like affirmative action) is to ensure X number of a particular group of applicants must be accepted.
An entity in Australia called DSTO started thrusting women into management positions back in the early 90s - so they could say they had 50% (or as close to 50%) of women in management roles. I had the misfortune of working with a few of the bad ones.
The ones that were capable (ie. competent) were great to work with, but there were some that were REALLY, REALLY bad. People laughed (or cringed) when the bad ones did their job - and it was obvious they were inept. It was so bad that I would consider these few women to be the worst I have -ever- seen (in 20+ years of a working career).
After a period of time, these women cracked and left because they could not cope with the situation. If anything, I blame the management for putting the wrong people in these roles and emphasising their inability. If anything, it may have backfired and created a perception that women just can't do the job (which is far from the truth). I remember them being away frequently on training, so there was no apparent lack of support that I could see.
Unfortunately, that's what you get when you play numbers games. You should NEVER, EVER promote anyone because of their race, religion, colour or gender... Nor should you discriminate against someone for those reasons.
A better way to do it is to maintain the same admission standards for everybody, but actively seek out more applications from women. It'll indirectly raise the number of women who get admitted, without distorting things in the way that you describe.
Not necessarily and it could certainly lead to distortion due to simple error in evaluation.
If you encourage applicants from an underserved pool, do you believe the average quality of these new applicants from the pool will be equivalent to the average quality prior to the new programs?
No. I will just say no on the implied statement that schools and companies must drag any women, black, Asian, Hispanic and Latino person they got to create political correct photos for their websites. No.
I approve when school/companies/conferences do sincere outreach because they want to engage a wider audience. That does not mean that they must do so, or for ever be branded as "excluding".
> with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees.
The bonding games is serious, but a) sources? b) frat-house culture is a US concept, while first week hazing rituals in university has nothing to do with "houses" c) almost every university school in EU used to do it, and has resulted in it being commonly outlawed in recent 10 years. Not sure what French law says on the matter.
Requiring the same exercise order is the proper way to compare students.
Entrepreneurial skills is an option in real developers life, as it is in this school, and rightly so.
- This is the school's website 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/
- 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/ 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.
They actually cover a lot: C, Java, Functional Programming, Kernel Programming, Iphone/Android Development, etc.
French version: http://www.42.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/programme-42.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) Mentors should be available at 2 in the morning. Not that they have to (most of the time) it's just that you mostly interact with teaching assistants that still are in school working on their projects too, so they usually pull the same kind of hours than you.
2) You have really tight deadlines and a huge amount of project so it's not unusual to have to work 15 hours. But the whole thing is just about learning to manage crazy constraints, you deal with it the way you want. If you choose to work 15hours a day an manage to be efficient then great, but it's more about learning to be organize / be efficient.
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.
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.
No, but all of those things (like the Fourier transform you skipped mentioning) can be used to turn difficult problems into simple ones, making you an even better developer.
It has always seemed quite useless to me to try to learn as much theory as you can before starting to actually do significant projects. You should learn by doing those project, and when it appears that you need theory to make it better, then you learn it.
I think there is a huge parallel with the lean model for CS teaching, programming yourself should always be the starting point.
I agree with this, but I also advocate occasionally exploring random theory that's unrelated to your current projects, expanding your mental toolbox. Sometimes you don't know you have a problem until you've already heard of the solution.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
Although it is free, which is interesting for people with low resources.
Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?
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.
French unions have no say in the curriculum of a private school (and it would make absolutely no sense, lot of fantams about french unions there I think!).
Private school can teach pretty much what they want. If they want they diploma recognised by the government then they must comply to some policies of the ministry of education, but it is up to them.
They have this idea of creating "hardcore devs", because supposedly they are better and if you can code hardcore you can code anything. (An idea that obviously lead to entire categories of failures, because not two systems are alike, and developing necessitate many skills, including communicating, writing, leading)
Note that this is what I gather in part by talking to a pre-selected student that didn't make the final line (nor she wanted too); and in part by reading the 3 year program of the school, the interviews.
If you're only doing to do crud apps the the typical RoR project, you're going to be a lot better off with an algorithms background vs codecademy student 25013.
I think a practical approach to theory done right has immense potential though.
There's really nothing more than that, we don't even know if by the end of the month there will be practical projects.
Rewritting a shell / ircd / httpd seems like a really good place to start to learn about the unix system / network / versioning systems / working in a team / learning how to find answer to things you know very few about. That's part of the program.
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 :)
http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget...
A move that I'd like to see but that this particular project only tips its hat to.
Alternative education programs like this don't have to be capable of replacing traditional education to be a success.
This article had a catchy headline, but what is described is not much different from how most of my classes were in college. They've just removed the couple hours of lecture and instead just give out the problem sets. There is no democracy in choosing the problems you are solving, or any encouragement to explore things that interest you.
(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 :/)