この記事は３年前にアメリカの友人から紹介されたものです。日本語で簡単に説明します：Xavier Niel という１人の男性が、７８億もの私財をつぎ込んで、フランスにプログラミングの学校を作ったのです。彼はプログラミングの学位を持っているわけでもなく、自分で独学で勉強して、この学校を開きました。学費はタダで、寮もタダ、でも先生はいません。生徒たちはひたすら自分で調べて勉強して技術を身につけて、分からなかったら、近くにいる誰かに聞く。そういう場所を作ったんです。４０％の人は大学どころか高校も出ていない人たちが集まりましたが、そこを出ていく頃には、幾多の道を自分の意思で選べるようになっているといいます。大きな企業からの誘いもあれば、自分で起業する選択肢もある。この学校を作った人は、かなり破天荒で、危なっかしい商売にも色々手を出していた人ではあるのですが、人を見た目で判断しない、今までのことは忘れるべきだという信念、その人に何ができるかは見た目や過去の功績では判断できないーという彼の主張にはハッとされられます。彼曰くフランスの（最悪な）スタンダードな教育システムでは、人々は轢かれたレールの上を走るだけの、つまらない、なんの新しいアイデアも思い浮かばない人間になると言っています。なるほどどこでも似たようなものなのかもしれません苦笑。興味を持たれた方は下の記事を読んでみてください。極端な話ではありますが、どんな人にも可能性があると信じさせる記事に元気をもらえます。ex)ビオラの先生になるのが夢だったのに、訳あって大学を途中退学してしまった青年が、一念発起してこの学校に行って、今やプログラマーとして引く手数多だとか・・・。ロマンがありますね。ちなみにこの学校、今は２５の国を跨いで４２校になりました。東京にもあります：）
２０１８ Fortune Magagineより
Back in October 2016, James Aylor was scraping by, delivering pizza in Kansas City, having dropped out of college, abandoning his dream of teaching viola. “The voice in my head said, ‘You have no career. No future,’ ” he says.
Then a friend mentioned he had heard about a new, tuition-free coding school 1,800 miles away in Fremont, Calif. Named 42, it required no computer skills or even a high school diploma, and dorm rooms were free. “I said, ‘Yeah, whatever, ha ha, free,’ ” recalls Aylor, now 30. Still, he decided he had “absolutely nothing to lose.” He sold his car and bought a plane ticket west.
When I meet Aylor a little more than two years later, he is in northern Paris, strolling through the lobby of the original 42 school, of which Fremont is an offshoot. The radical educational experiment is geared to solving the tech industry’s chronic shortage of skilled programmers. With his pizza gig a distant memory, Aylor says he is now juggling potential jobs, weighing whether to join a company when he graduates this summer or launch a startup. “There are so many possibilities,” he says.
Back in 2013, I visited 42 for Fortune as its first batch of students was moving in—literally: Many had arrived in Paris with no money, rolling out sleeping bags in 42’s factory-style campus. Takeout cartons and beer bottles littered the rooms. Standing amid the tumult, 42’s founder, billionaire telecom exec Xavier Niel—one of the richest people in France—was thrilled. “We’ll have some impact,” he told me then.
Niel’s brazen idea drew from his own experience. With no college degree, he taught himself coding and created programs (including a sex-chat app he sold for about $50 million) on France’s pre-Internet Minitel service. He went on to found the publicly traded group Iliad, parent of the low-cost telecom company Free, and in 2017 opened the giant tech incubator Station F in eastern Paris. Niel, now 51, says he was increasingly convinced that France’s traditional education (“the worst!” he says) boxed kids into preordained tracks, leaving them bored and uninspired; he felt the effects in his own companies.
The 42 school, which Niel built with $78 million of his own money, tries to shatter those conventions. It has no fees, teachers, or classrooms. Students work their own hours. If they need help, they ask each other or figure it out themselves. In keeping with the rebel spirit, the school’s name refers to the counterculture classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which says “the answer to everything” is 42; the first building had a pirate’s flag outside. About 1,800 students are admitted each year between the two campuses, chosen from about 3,000 who are accepted into 42’s grueling monthlong boot camp called Piscine, French for “swimming pool.” Those 3,000 are picked from the initial 40,000 people who take 42’s online logic test every year.
The pirate’s flag has gone, and there are only a few sleeping bags in the corridors. The walls display an impressive art collection, and President Emmanuel Macron, a cheerleader for the French tech industry, is a frequent visitor. Yet 42 still has the feel of a messy startup, with dozens of people at monitors and a stack of skateboards in the lobby.
Xavier Niel
Xavier Niel (born 25 August 1967) is a French billionaire businessman, active in the telecommunications and technology industry, and best known as founder and majority shareholder of the French Internet service provider and mobile operator Iliad trading under the Free brand (France’s second-largest ISP, and third mobile operator).[3] He is also co-owner of the newspaper Le Monde,[4] and co-owner of the rights of the song “My Way“[5] and owner of Monaco Telecom, Salt Mobile SA and Eir.[6] He is chairman and chief strategy officer for Iliad,[7] but also a board member of KKR and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.[8][9]
As of August 2021, his net worth is estimated at US$10.5 billion.[10] From Wikipedia
But how much impact has 42 had, nearly six years in?
Niel is convinced that 42 has proved his point: that programmers need only two things to succeed—a grasp of logic and driving ambition. “You don’t need to know anything to be able to code. You don’t need to be good at math,” he says, sitting atop Iliad’s headquarters, with a sweeping view of Paris. “You can take anyone in the street, and”— he snaps his fingers—“they can become the best coder in the world.” About 40% of the students have not graduated from high school. “The idea was you don’t choose people by seeing if they can do something,” Niel says. “You completely forget what they did before.”
Indeed, 42 boasts impressive success stories.
Jasmine Anteunis, 26, joined 42’s first intake after quitting fine-arts school at 21. Two years later, she created an artificial intelligence chatbot, Recast.AI, with two fellow 42 students. They sold last year to software giant SAP. Are you rich? I ask. “Ah, yes,” she says, blushing. One of Anteunis’s classmates, Balthazar Gronon, 25, left Paris in February for San Francisco, where he launched a blockchain company called Ashlar—in a sharp break from his original plan to be an economist, he says. And Niel says even old-style French companies like banks and fashion houses are now recruiting 42 students.
But in California, 42 has struggled for credibility since opening in 2016. It fills only about one-third of its capacity of 3,000 students. (To attract a greater number, the school now offers more frequent Piscine boot camps.) Niel, famous in France as a visionary entrepreneur, is unknown in the U.S. And ironically, a major hurdle for 42 appears to be that it is free—despite Americans being crippled by student debt. Says Niel, “When you are tuition-free, people think it is a fraud.”
A version of this article appears in the April 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Is 42 the Answer?”