|
Given Niel's [nee-ell] outstanding track record, in terms of turning upside-down old markets paralyzed by established fat cats; given how firmly education belongs to this category; and given how badly it needs to be reinvented, this experiment is really intriguing. For a bit of cultural context, higher education in France works quite differently from the US: it's mostly tax-funded; what we call cheap education is a couple hundreds € a year, full medical insurance included; a very expensive school would be €4-6€ a year. The best schools are cheap (a few select ones even offer a modest salary to their students). The worse ones, "universités", are cheap as well. Expensive schools are in the middle, for kids of wealthy parents who do OK at school, but aren't good enough to pass the best schools' very selective entry competitions. Of course, these institutions being run by academics and civil servants, they aren't exactly reactive nor modernist; I've recently read a prominent school official explaining that Wikipedia wasn't trustworthy because it was user-editable, as opposed to journalists' papers... They offer a very solid mathematical and scientific background, but usually not much in terms of immediately employable skills. I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing: school ought to teach you what you won't learn by yourself, the rest you'll pick up at your first employment, in exchange for a junior salary. But I've got the impression that schools filter mathematically-gifted student more than they train them. Niel seems to concur, and to believe that maths/science gifts don't correlate well with actual development skills. Even if it's not true, there certainly are potentially skilled developers who do poorly at maths and science, and this talent pool is totally unexploited today, so he's right to try and valorise it. |