If you select the very best few, you could get them into an empty barn, or have them walk the Appalachian Trail or whatever and the "school" will have great success measured by what the smart motivated students accomplished.
Also, they have no tuition but neither do the public universities in France ("Grandes Écoles"), and the most selective and prestigious schools are public. So while the "no tuition" thing is impressive for a private school and may sound like a dream for Americans, it's not really rare in France considering the choice you have with public schools.
Finally, not really related to the way they teach there, but here's the director (same guy in the picture on the article) spanking a girl in a classroom during off-hours (nsfw). http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-don...
The question to me is
a) how well do they learn things and understand the deeper principals such that their understandings generalize?
B) what do they end up learning/creating? Is it like the mit media lab where they're encouraged to innovate 5-10 years out, or are they building stuff that's existed for a long time like Ray tracing?
C) if everything is team based, do the smarter/type a ppl end up doing all the work or does everyone contribute equally enough to learn?
D) is there any kind of mentorship? The stuff I've learned from my mentors across school was never what was being assigned in class; understanding that there are things that you would never think of as entire fields needs guidance for the not yet educated
Sounds like a cool concept for self starters however.
b) first we are building stuff the way the school wants, basically you have to do a programm that do certains things (like recoding a wolf3d for exemple) and you have to follow the coding norme of the school, you are free to do it the way you want as long as you follow the rules for the project. But there is also free projects, during 6months you can do what you want the way you want as long as it is a real project and not 6months of vacation.
c) not everything is team based, except for rushes and some projects, all projects are individuals, we learn together yes but we don't code all the time together.
d) You don't have one mentor, every student can be your mentor, the concept of the peer learning is exactly what you describe, talking to other students to get help, another approach of the projects, learning new things, etc.