Don’t panic. Take your towel
by Danilo Broggi
LONGITUDE N.115
Higher education is not only a big financial issue. The digital revolution is debunking many educational dogmas. Open door schools without professors, based on collaborative learning, are already up and running around the world sponsored by many billionaires. Inspired by the famous sci-fi book, their name is 42.
The high cost of education in America is a very important issue increasingly present on the US’s administration agenda. Stacy Cowley a finance reporter focused on consumer issues in a recent article in the New York Times , underlined how heavy student debt is for a non-moneyed student. The typical student who borrows to attend college leaves with an average debt of $37,000. Many struggle to keep up with their payments, and America’s ballooning tab for student loans – now $1.67 trillion – “more than any other type of household debt except for mortgages” – has become a political flash point.
The Student Borrower Protection Center, a no-profit advocacy group reported last March in its “Inequitable Student Aid” that the financing approach known as the income-share agreement recently adopted by some financial companies promising to eliminate the unaffordable student debt by tying repayment to income, is close to failure. In the meantime, the great and noble American universities are investing heavily in their infrastructures: Yale $1.2 billion dollars, Harvard $1.4 billion, according to 2017 data.
Nevertheless, the digital revolution – Jeremy Rifkin’s “third industrial revolution” – is debunking many dogmas related to higher education. In the collaborative era oriented towards peer-to-peer interaction, share capital, participation in open collective domains, access to global networks "the dominant, top-down approach to teaching, the aim of which is to create a competitive and autonomous being, is beginning to give way to a distributed and collaborative educational experience ... In this new perspective, intelligence is not something one inherits or a resource one accumulates but, on the contrary, a shared experience distributed among people ”. According to Rifkin in this perspective “Homo sapiens is giving way to empathic civilization”.
In order to achieve an empathic education, a transformation of learning in an interconnected world, Xavier Neil proposes an interesting initiative, the founder of Iliad ( net worth $9.3 billion), ranking ninth among the richest in France according to Bloomberg. Neil launched its Ecole42 – a school for programmers – in Paris late 2013.
The school has no professors, and is open 24/7, notwithstanding well-defined rules and discipline. The training for ages ranging from 18 to 35, is inspired by new ways to teach which include peer-to-peer pedagogy and project-based learning. The initial investment of €70 million was made by Xavier Niel, of which 20 million allocated for the creation of the current structure in Paris and 50 million to cover all operating costs for the first 10 years. The school has been endorsed by many high-profile people in Silicon Valley including Evan Spiegel the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, Keyvon Beykpour the co-founder and CEO of Periscope, Stewart Butterfield the co-founder and CEO of Slack, Brian Chesky the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Present in 22 other countries in the world, Ecole42 has generated a network of 42 institutes.
The selection (called "Pools") is based on 4 weeks of 15 hours a day of exercises, tests and projects. The school “42” is based on the concept of collaborative learning and its success is striking. Over 5,000 students have already been trained (the training period ranges from 3 to 5 years) in American and French schools, with an occupancy rate of 100%. Since 2013, over 400 startups have been created by the students of Ecole42in Paris.
In Italy, the institution who had the courage to launch such an initiative was the Luiss University in Rome: "With the opening of Ecole42, Luiss brings to Italy a totally disruptive educational model, which will allow its students, agents of change, to learn for free the secrets of the digital world, contribute to the hi-tech transformation taking place in the country and win, with resources and talents trained in the future, the great challenge of innovation” Giovanni Lo Storto, General Manager of the 'University said.
Xavier Neil (now also owner of newspaper Le Monde), is also creating a sort of Ecole42 dedicated to agriculture, to be called "Hectar". It will be the largest agricultural campus in the world, with the aim of training two thousand people every year. Proof that information technology is not the only arena to focus on to give opportunities to young people.
What counts is an effective insertion into the world of work, the opportunity to progress for anyone who wants to get involved.
Along the same lines, Jack Ma from Alibaba, who in December last year, attending an OECD conference, recalled his point of view on school teaching with a formula: "EQ + IQ + LQ". Emotional quotient + intellective quotient + love quotient , because “If you want to be successful, you should have very high EQ (emotional quotient), a way to get on with people, if you don’t want to lose quickly, you should have good IQ (intellective quotient), but if you want to be respected, you should have LQ - the quotient of love”, because “the brain will be replaced by machines, but machines can never replace your heart.”
It is no coincidence that the newly elected President of the United States Biden has placed particular emphasis on the American public education, making it a distinctive feature in his campaign and keeping it among the priorities of his political action. Biden proposes that attendance at historically black public colleges and universities be free for families earning less than $ 125,000 a year; free access to community colleges for all and student debt cancellation of up to $ 10,000. The president dedicated 10% of its $ 1,900 billion "American Rescue Plan" to this policy and appointed Miguel Cardona. Born in 1975 in Connecticut to a Puerto Rican family, a Spanish native speaker who learned English along the scholastic path becoming perfectly bilingual. Headmaster at 28 (the youngest ever appointed in Connecticut), "headmaster of the year" in 2012, Miguel Cardona calls himself "a product of the American public school". Will it be the beginning of a new egalitarianism?
The "42" in the name is a reference to Douglas Adams’ sci-fi book "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" and is the answer that the supercomputer Deep Thought provides after 7.5 million years of processing on the fundamental question about life, the universe and everything.
“Do you know where your towel is? No? Don’t panic.” is the book’s opening, but the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says,is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. ... any man that can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
Don't panic, the hitchhiker (the one who wants to learn) can continue his journey equipped with curiosity, empathy and love for life and people. And don’t forget to find your towel to explore the universe.