The story that Xavier Niel (school founder) is trying to tell is that there are many bright students that didn't fit in the traditional/oldish education system, but they could reach their full potential in this new school.
I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there.
Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving?
> The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.
Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.
Your comment made me realize that for instance at ENS (one of the French topmost Grande École) we had professors but the courses were focusing on theory, and for example there is no courses on a programming languages (there is a compiler / programming language course, but it is focused on the theoretical aspects of things, what I mean is that there is no C or C++ or Python course, you are just supposed to pick it up yourself if you need it).
Meanwhile, we also had projects that we had to figure out by ourselves. For instance in the first semester of the first year, there is a course that explains theoretical stuffs that are supposed to have a relation with hardware (like 2-adic numbers [1]). The project for this course consists in programming a watch that displays time. But we have to program the watch in an assembly language that we have designed ourselves. And that asm has to execute on a processor that we have designed ourselves. And we have to write the processor code in a hardware/netlist language that we have to design ourselves. And we have to write ourselves the interpreter we will use for that netlist language.
That was what we were told to do, with no additional instructions. Some students learned C by themselves for that, some other C++, some other OCaml… And all of them learned or reinvented how to design memories, or a CPU (for instance, me and a friend decided to invent a single-instruction processor, just for the fun, we got it working but it was rather slow compared to other who decided for instance to learn how to implement a simplified MIPS).
All this to say that there is absolutely no incompatibility between having professors and teaching (partly) by projects.
>Your comment made me realize that for instance at ENS (one of the French topmost Grande École) we had professors but the courses were focusing on theory, and for example there is no courses on a programming languages (there is a compiler / programming language course, but it is focused on the theoretical aspects of things, what I mean is that there is no C or C++ or Python course, you are just supposed to pick it up yourself if you need it).
The ENS is a special case, as it does not wish to form engineers, but researchers.
I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there.
Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving?
> The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.
Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.