École 42: the teacherless free school

It is becoming increasingly evident that having an educational system based on the industrial era, where students sit and listen to a teacher and memorize knowledge, is obsolete.

Can you imagine a school without teachers? École 42 is a tuition-free programming school in Paris, founded in 2013, with a mission to train the world's best programmers. To achieve this, they have a revolutionary educational model where education is based on challenging students. By researching on the internet and collaboratively solving problems, they learn without the need for teachers, textbooks, or specific subjects. They apply Aristotle's principle, "We learn by doing."

"Teaching memorization nowadays is useless, dangerous, and makes you foolish, especially in the field of Information Technology (IT). In this area, everything changes very quickly. When a teacher teaches something, it is already outdated. Thinking that students should memorize is harmful because the IT industry constantly evolves. Therefore, we need to educate students with creative skills who can learn on their own to find solutions. We view programming as an art," says Nicolas Sadirac, director and co-founder of 42. Nicolas speaks about programming and art with authority since the school houses an urban art collection worthy of a museum, featuring works by artists like Banksy.

Alexis Merelo, a Mexican student selected from among 70,000 applicants, shares, "I heard about this strange programming school, applied, and was given memory and logic challenges online that seemed like a game. After being accepted, I was invited to a one-month challenge called 'La Piscine,' where they can challenge you to program an algorithm that solves Sudokus, something I never thought I could achieve since I didn't know how to program, but I did it in community. In this school, they teach you to walk and then challenge you to fly, which drives us to learn a lot."

This peer-to-peer educational method is yielding such interesting results in its students that it seems impossible to achieve without teachers. "In the first month at 42, I learned more than throughout the entire systems engineering career," says French student Leo Lapillonne. This educational method has even surprised Silicon Valley personalities like Evan Spiegel (Snapchat), Kayvon Beykpour (Periscope), David Marcus (VP of Facebook), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), among others. They advocated for establishing a campus in San Francisco with the aim of providing free education to 10,000 students over the next 10 years.

The big question about a free school is, how is it financed? This school will be funded for the first 10 years by French billionaire Xavier Niel, interested in nurturing talent in Information Technology with creative skills and problem-solving abilities, something that the current educational system is not providing to the market. Their business model seems to be the connection between talent and companies from various sectors that increasingly demand IT skills. Xavier Niel has also founded "Station F" in Paris, the world's largest startup hub, betting on Paris as a European innovation center, being a highly cosmopolitan and artistic city, factors that favor innovation.

We have all experienced going to school only to forget most of what we learned months later. In an era like ours, where software is eating the world, a school like 42, which is training the world's best programmers and serving as a reference for education in the 21st century, could be the breeding ground for the next Mark Zuckerberg. Therefore, it is crucial for Mexico to take notice of these new educational models and try them out to prepare our youth for future industries.