No Teachers, No Tuition: How France's École 42 Handed the Classroom Back to Peers

1. A School With "Nothing"

École 42 is a coding school, founded in Paris in 2013 with funding from the French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel, and now with dozens of campuses worldwide. It's famous not for what it has, but for the fact that it has almost nothing:

No teachers, no professors, no lectures; no tuition, not a cent; no fixed timetable, no textbooks; not even an academic threshold — it doesn't look at your high-school diploma or what you studied before. The one gate to entry is a brutal test called "la piscine" (the swimming pool): applicants are thrown straight into weeks of intense, continuous coding boot camp, left to thrash in the water — and those who can swim it, stay.

After you've stayed, what you face is still just a big building, rows of computers, and a crowd of peers all solving problems too. No one comes to teach you. So how do you learn?

2. How It Actually Runs

The answer is peers teaching peers + projects as levels + mutual review.

The school designs learning as a chain of projects ("levels") from easy to hard. You're handed a task with no explanation; you have to look up the documentation yourself, try and fail yourself, hit the wall yourself. Can't get through? Turn and ask the peer beside you. Today he helps you; tomorrow you help him. The whole studio is open day and night, and at any hour someone is solving, arguing, explaining to someone else.

More crucial is the review mechanism: when you finish a project, you don't hand it to a "teacher" for a grade — it's reviewed by peers (peer-to-peer evaluation). A peer sits down, has you explain how you did it and why, asks questions on the spot, picks at the flaws. To pass another's review, you have to truly understand; to review another, you also have to truly understand. Teaching and learning, here, are one and the same thing.

This sounds radical, but it's exactly what Dewey described in *Democracy and Education*: real learning happens in doing things together and solving real problems together, not in one-way instruction. Knowledge isn't water flowing from the lectern to the seats; it's something that grows on its own when a group of people collaborate around a real question.

3. What It Breaks

What it breaks is the most central, least questioned role in education — the teacher. We assume learning must have an authority standing at the front, holding the answers, responsible for transmitting and judging. Remove that role, and many people's first reaction is: can that even be called a school?

In *Instead of Education*, John Holt drew a sharp distinction: most "teaching" is in fact interference — doing for the learner the exploration he ought to do himself. He held that people learn by nature, and the way to truly help a person is to give him real things to do, usable resources, and peers willing to lend a hand — and then get out of the way. École 42 is almost Holt's sentence made into a school: don't teach; just give projects, resources, peers.

It also breaks the "tuition threshold" and the "credential threshold." Charging nothing and ignoring diplomas means it doesn't believe "whether you can learn" depends on your past labels. It believes only one thing: give you the right environment, and you'll learn on your own.

4. What This Means for a Child Who Hates School

Among children who hate school, a good many actually hate authority and being judged. It isn't that he can't learn; he can't bear the relationship of being graded, corrected, and pronounced "not good enough" from on high by one person. In the traditional classroom, the teacher is both the source of knowledge and the judge, and this double power is, for a child already curled up in fear of being wrong, a constant pressure.

École 42 takes that pressure off. Here no one stands above you, only peers who, like you, are hitting walls, getting stuck, asking for help. When the one judging you is an equal companion, a mistake stops being a disgrace and becomes a thing everyone is going through. Only a child no longer afraid of being shamed dares to try, to ask, to expose what he doesn't know — and that is exactly where learning begins.

It gives a child who hates school one more thing: the feeling of being needed. Here you aren't only the one being taught; you teach others too. When a child long judged "poor" is sincerely thanked, for the first time, for helping a peer solve a problem, his view of himself loosens. Holt said people learn by nature; let us add a line — people, by nature, also want to be needed.

Take away the teacher, give back the peers, swap "being judged" for "solving problems together." This isn't letting go; it's another kind of trust: trusting that when a group of people gather and busy themselves over a real question, learning will happen on its own. And this is exactly what we want to relight for the children whose light was snuffed out by the lectern.