Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmarsy | Hacker News Reader

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I like your description of your journey through school but your anecdote is a bit odd:

> As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section

So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class

You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition"

Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online)

Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?

> This French tech school has no teachers [...] Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information

I don't think anyone imagines that human beings can educate themselves into pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, especially in the XXI-th century, without benefiting from actively transmitted knowledge from former generations.

What's disrupted by 42 isn't the concept of mature people helping younger ones acquire knowledge and later expand it; it's the school setup, its organisation around academic authority, its mass production mentality (use exams to filter uniform kids--socially and intellectually--as input, so that you produce normalized batches graduates as output, through a highly scalable and repeatable process). The teacher's knowledge, and his ability to condense it into a synthetic form (here a book), remains as valuable as before, if not more. Teachers currently have to use the Ivy league bureaucracy in order to turn those skills into a livelihood, but that can be changed.

Schools destroy kids' curiosity and self-confidence, although those are the best individual learning drivers. That's not (only) willful sabotage: the problem is, those drivers are well suited for tailor-made education, but they're considered unmanageable to handle batches of hundreds or thousands of kids. What 42 questions is: can't we claim those drivers back, now that Internet has deeply altered how humans can interact? I'm thrilled to see the answers they come up with.

I think the title is obviously clickbait exageration. Epitech does expect its students to be proficient in english. But many are not at the begining and they find resources in french. I'm also glad to share the knowledge i gathered trough english sources with them. I still think that research and academic life are vital but there is clearly some place for improvement. It is good to challenge the monopily in knowledge some want to have. The oportunity to learn should be given to anyone and internet will change the dinamics in the interaction with knowledge which is power even more than the printing press did. Being prepared for this paradigm shift is vital.

The real difference between Epitech and 42 is that Epitech does have a tuition, it is actually rather expensive by French standards.

42 innovated on that, I think it is the only privately-owned school with no tuition. Schools with no tuition (or a very low one that you can pay in one or two months of internship) are not rare in France though, it is actually the norm for the public "Grandes Écoles" and universities.

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