PARIS — In a nation of schools that are generally christened with wise acronyms or the names of dead Frenchmen, “42” seems an odd title for an institution of increased understanding. But then, Xavier Niel’s new engineering academy hardly aims to be standard.
Mr. Niel, an affable, longhaired telecommunications executive with a high college diploma and a number of billion euros to his title, has spent the previous decade gleefully disrupting France’s staid corporate establishment. With 42, he implies to do the exact same, in a little but conspicuous way, to increased training in France. Computer programming lessons commence this month.
There will be no lectures or teachers per se, only group tasks and “friendly organizers” wearing T-shirts. No state-sanctioned degree will be awarded, nor must incoming students, ages 18 to 30, be large college graduates. Installed in a refurbished administrative building at the gray edge of Paris, 42 is tuition-free of charge and has sought to entice students from the country’s poorest neighborhoods.
In a nod to the playful function culture of Silicon Valley, which entrepreneurs right here venerate, there are ideas for a slide between the rooftop deck and the cafeteria.
The academy breaks with the usually-rigid strategies and philosophy of the government-run training program, and Mr. Niel stated it will generate graduates who are a lot more modern, much more employable, much more various and more useful to the stagnant French economic system as a result.
But the French revere their colleges method, the Éducation Nationale, and the founding of 42 has been construed by some as an affront to tradition.
Its really title is a provocation: In “The Hitchhiker’s Guidebook to The Galaxy,” the zany sci-fi novel by Douglas Adams that is a preferred of technology-kinds here, the number 42 is proclaimed the “Answer to the Greatest Question of Existence, The Universe, and Every little thing.”
“People say to us, ‘But, why did not you see about operating with the Éducation Nationale?′ ” mentioned Mr. Niel, who has put up 70 million euros, or about $ 94 million, for 42’s 1st decade of operations.
“Well,” he explained in an interview, “do you want this thing to function or not?”
The Ministry of Increased Finding out declined to comment on the new academy. But public officials acknowledge that current institutions fail to train students in skills that are in demand. Critics deride universities as “unemployment factories.” In spite of a national jobless price of virtually 11 %, as a lot of as 60,000 computer coding jobs are imagined to be vacant in France, the government says, for lack of qualified candidates.
The new academy promotes what many French contact the Anglo-Saxon virtues of entrepreneurship and imaginative contemplating, Mr. Niel explained, whereas the standard French method relies heavily on rote finding out.
“In France, there are often outstanding engineers — the Germans recruit them hand in excess of fist, for that matter,” stated Nicolas Baverez, a historian and economist at the Institut Montaigne, a nonpartisan consider tank. But 42 marks “the French educational system’s inability to handle innovation, upward social motion, the emergence of new technologies and sectors,” Mr. Baverez explained.
Typically, French college students find out specific rules for particular circumstances, mentioned Nicolas Sadirac, 42’s director. “The difficulty is that for inventing things,” Mr. Sadirac mentioned, “that’s a catastrophe.”
On a current afternoon, Sébastien Ho-Van, 28, slouched beneath the glow of a broad-screen monitor. He clicked sometimes on a mouse and chewed a thumbnail.
“I’m trying to make a program — fundamentally, it’s truly easy — that calculates an expression,” stated Mr. Ho-Van, who utilised to function as a warehouse handler.
Prospective college students, who are not expected to have any programming background, sit for numerous hours of online logic exams. A single early question, for instance, asked for the missing letter in the following sequence: seven(S), 11(O), 15(Q), twenty(V), thirty(?).
There have been 20,000 candidates this yr.
In France, New Tech Academy Defies Conventional Wisdom
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