Learning in The 21st Century PDF

FRANÇOIS TADDEI
LEARNING
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Author photograph : © Monsitj/iStockphoto
© Version française, Calmann-Lévy, 2018
SUMMARY
FRANÇOIS TADDEI
with Emmanuel Davidenkoff
LEARNING
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Translated from French

by Timothy Stone
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To all those who have taught me so much.
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If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people
to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks
and work, but rather teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea...”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle
SUMMARY
Summary
Prologue.......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 13
1. Why will we learn differently

in the 21st century?................................................................................................. 21
2. What i’ve learned............................................................................................ 55
3. New ways of teaching.......................................................................... 79
4. Before you can learn,

you have to unlearn....................................................................................113

5. Learn to ask (yourself)

good questions.........................................................................................................201
6. A how-to guide
for a learning planet.................................................................................281
Conclusion.
Toward a more humane humanity............................291
Annex. CRI activities in 2020 ....................................................................................................297
Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................................311
Notes................................................................................................................................................................327
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Prologue
Where are we going? I couldn’t tell you any more than

the next person can. But my life has been one of asking
questions, drawing parallels, and forming hypotheses.
Contained in the following pages are what I imagine an
expert in comparative evolution would have to say if he or
she were from another planet.
For perhaps the first time in the history of humanity,
there’s growing collective awareness that we’re living
through an evolutionary transition, like any one of the
transitions that occurred dating back to the primordial
soup from which life emerged all the way to when Homo
sapiens first appeared.
And in this way, we’re extraordinarily lucky.
The more of us there are addressing the questions that
this new transition presents, the better we’ll be able to
mobilize our collective intelligence along with the intel-
ligence of machines and other living organisms; the
more likely we’ll be to come up with the right answers to
these questions and construct a brighter future than the
one some are predicting or that certain tech experts are
actually creating.
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Learning in the 21st Century
Who knows? Perhaps humans will in fact be able

to progress at the same rate as technology, and a better
world will emerge in which progress will actually serve
humanity and nature.
That’s my hope, anyway.
May this book, along with all of you, be a part of
making this a reality.
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Introduction
I had just gotten to sleep after a long night of jetlagged

insomnia when I was forced awake by the unmistak-
able, ear-splitting wails of the sirens of New York City
firetrucks. I opened my eyes. The clock showed 9:30
a.m.; that was 3:30 p.m. in France, where I had been the
previous morning, dropping off my son at preschool
before catching a plane to New York.
After landing, I went to stay with my friend and
colleague Stan Leibler. He was the head of a laboratory
at Rockefeller University, where I had been invited to
give a seminar. I had also been thinking about spending
a sabbatical year there, that world-renowned institu-
tion famous for its Nobel Prize winners in biomedical
research.
Stan gave me a tour of the campus, right on the banks
of the East River on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From
the top floor of the tallest building on campus, we took
in–as one must–the fabulous New York City skyline, the
steel geometry of the skyscrapers cutting up the horizon
as we looked to the south of Manhattan Island. After that
we ate dinner, and then Stan showed me to one of the
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single rooms reserved for visitors, who come from all over
the world. I tried in vain to fall asleep until finally, just as
the sun was rising, I began to doze off.
Awoken by the sirens, I tried against all hope to get an
extra half hour or so of sleep while the hubbub down in
the street continued. It kept growing louder. Eventually
the sound had invaded the entire room, and I dragged
myself out of bed to go look for Stan. Passing someone
in the hallway, I heard him mutter that something had
happened at the World Trade Center, but I couldn’t quite
make out what it was. Then I found Stan.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going upstairs.”
Just as we had done the previous evening, we went up
to the top floor of the tallest building and looked to the
south of the island. But the fabled skyline had changed.
My brain refused to comprehend it.
“Unbelievable,” someone said. “One of the towers fell.”
I still didn’t believe it.
“No, no, there’s just a lot of smoke,” I said. “It’s hidden
by all the smoke.”
At those words, the second tower fell. It was September
11th, 2001. The course of history was changing before our
eyes.
There were Israeli researchers with us. They were used
to living in a place under threat of terrorist attack.
“We can’t let terrorists scare us,” they said. “We must
continue our work.”
I recalled my own experiences with terrorism in an
effort to match their resolve, that we can’t shy away the
face of terror. My family is from Corsica and I often visit
there. Nationalist bombings have rung out through the
“blue nights” there for decades. In Paris, 1986 was a
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Introduction
year of attacks; I was 19 and going to college there. In

February of that year, there were attacks on the shopping
arcade beneath the Claridge Hotel, the popular Gibert
Jeune bookstore, and a FNAC-Sports retail store in a
busy shopping district in the center of Paris. In March,
the Point Show shopping arcade on the Champs-Elysées
was attacked. In September, the post office in the Hôtel
de Ville, a police headquarters, the Renault pub on the
Champs-Elysées, a Tati department store, and a super-
market food court in La Défense, the financial district
just outside Paris. In 1995 and 1996, there were attacks
on Paris subway stations Port-Royal, Maison-Blanche, and
Saint-Michel, parts of town I went to almost every day.
Nonetheless, we found it impossible to get back to
work. We went down to give blood, but the waiting line
was three blocks long, and on top of that, they weren’t
accepting blood from Europeans for fear of spreading
mad cow disease. Back at the university, we tried to talk
science, but everything brought us back to what had
happened. A colleague told me about an experiment
on predator-prey relationships, which showed that even
when predators are rendered harmless and don’t attack,
their presence still scares their prey and decreases their
fertility. His conclusion was that fear has the same impact
as real danger. We can’t give in to fear.
While we were trying to focus on other things, my wife
and children back in Paris were worried sick. I had sent
them an e-mail letting them know I was fine, but it had
been blocked and wouldn’t get to them until a week later.
All telephone communication had been cut off. It would
be three days before I could get in touch with them and
reassure my distraught wife, who for some reason had
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been convinced I was out buying shoes at the World

Trade Center the morning of the attack. My son, who was
only 3 years old at the time, was under the impression that
all the buildings in New York were falling, not under-
standing that it was just the same footage being replayed
over and over on television.
It just so happened that the return flight I had booked
for a week later would be one of the first to receive
authorization to take off from New York City after the
airports had been closed. Before takeoff, I bought the
weekend edition of the New York Times. It’s known for
being dense, but that day, it was as thick as a book and
contained hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the attacks.
It was only then, reading those eyewitness accounts
during my return to Paris, that something hit me. I had
been in New York City only a short distance from the
disaster, yet I hadn’t been able to really understand it. I
didn’t have access to television–the broadcast antennas
were on top of the World Trade Center, so the entire city
was without television–and my hosts had done their best
to distract us to keep us from panicking.
I passed yet another sleepless night on the flight, and
it occurred to me suddenly that, there, 30,000 feet above
the Atlantic Ocean, I was no longer a microbiologist who
marveled over the curious behavior of bacteria; rather, I
was a global citizen who had been thrown unwittingly
into the epicenter of history, a history in transition. My
brain swarmed with questions. What kind of world do I
want to see my kids grow up in? What kind of a world
will I leave for them? Will I continue to be a powerless
bystander as I had been throughout that week? Or can I
be a changemaker? If the world was headed off the rails,
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Introduction
what should we do? Migrate to another planet? Face the

inevitable? Try to build a better world? But how do you
work toward a more humane...humanity?
To add to the shock of the attacks, I learned the following
week that terrorists were making use of biological weapons
in letters containing anthrax. As a microbiologist, this
affected me directly. I remembered when I was a child how
my father, who had also been a university professor, once
described his job as an elected official. He said, “There
are problems in the world. I think up solutions, and the
government puts those solutions into action.” I don’t know
why, but until then I had never let go of the idea that
everything would always be under control, that if the world
was in trouble, my dad would take care of it, and I could
keep playing. At the turn of the 21st century, he was going
into retirement, and I had become a father myself. I could
no longer be the child. Now I was the parent. What would
I do for future generations? Would I be content raising my
children to do the best they could, or would I contribute to
building broader ecosystems that would benefit them and
their whole generation?
When the airplane landed at Charles de Gaulle airport
in Paris, the idea of what I would do was beginning to
take shape, although it would further solidify over time. I
wouldn’t be just a scientist, striving for advances in knowl-
edge and improvements in medicine in isolation from the
world in an ivory tower. What mattered was the here and
now and how we prepare for tomorrow’s world. We can’t
stand idly by as our society undergoes major changes that
have global impacts.
Watching the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire with students
and colleagues on the rooftop of the Center for Research
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and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in central Paris, I felt once

again that feeling of incomprehension in the face of
destruction, of shock and horror at our inability to save
what was in this case a symbol of French history. But the
next morning, we saw the cathedral still standing, and
hope was renewed. Of course, the cathedral would never
be the same; it would evolve, but it would still be there
for future generations. This is non-utopian optimism. I
believe that, even though our forests are burning from
the Amazon to Corsica and our planet continues to get
warmer, we can still act. Young people, as they always
have throughout the history of civilization, refuse to stand
by, and young people today are taking action against
the overwhelming challenges posed by climate change.
It’s the responsibility of every parent, scientist, teacher,
politician, etc., to do everything they can to support the
“Greta Thunberg generation,” the first generation of
global youth activism in the name of science. Collectively,
they’re working to overcome today’s and tomorrow’s chal-
lenges. The 21st century’s first generation is showing us
that they’re willing to fight for the future, and it’s our duty
to provide them with the latest developments in science
and innovative education so that, instead of being mere
bystanders in the face of imminent catastrophe, they can
be change makers and authors of a history that’s yet to be
written.
Prior to 2001, I had spent 12 years studying how
bacteria cooperate and exchange information in order to
adapt. On my return to Paris in 2001, I decided I would
focus my energy on fostering cooperation among humans
while keeping in mind in those early days of the digital
revolution that digital would exponentially accelerate,
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Introduction
profoundly and rapidly changing the outlook of my task.

We won’t learn in the 21st century the way we have in
centuries past. Why not? And how will we learn?
These are the questions addressed in the following
pages. First, I’ll take a more in-depth look at them by
fleshing out the reasons why we will learn differently in
the 21st century. Then I’ll take a slight detour, relating
my own experiences to share where I’m coming from
and what I’ve learned at various points throughout my
journey. Then I’ll concentrate on what takes place on the
individual level–our ability to understand ourselves and
the importance of not only learning how to learn but
also learning how to unlearn. This section will take us
through the complex inner workings of the brain, which
plays a dual role of our best friend and worst enemy in the
learning process. After this, I’ll look at how to learn with
others the way living organisms have done since life first
began. Then we will explore the best ways to learn how to
ask if not the right questions, then at least good questions.
Lastly, I will share with you some concrete solutions that
can transform our globe into a learning planet.
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1
Why will we learn differently
in the 21st century?
Aristotle said there were three types of knowledge:

epistêmê, technê, and phronesis.
Epistêmê is knowledge of the world, thus the word epis-
temology, the study of knowledge.
Technê is knowing the practice of a craft in the world,
thus the words technique and technology.
Phronesis is the least well-known of the three. It’s often
translated as prudence, but not the kind that tells us to
be cautious. Rather, it’s the ethics of our actions. In Aris-
totle’s time, the word essentially was used to refer to the
impact our actions had on ourselves and others. Today,
it doesn’t just apply to the here and now but to every-
where and in the future. If we want to tackle the crises
of this century–which are global crises, be they climatic,
environmental, economic, or geopolitical–we must make
phronesis a pillar of knowledge as solid as epistêmê and
technê are. And this we must do as much in our collective
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and political action as in our individual behavior as

responsible global citizens.
It’s a shame that nearly all education systems put science
at the top of their priorities, with engineering next in
importance, while the ethics of our actions are studied only
minimally and at a later stage in education. Worse still is
that in certain fields, medicine for example, it seems that
one’s ability to empathize–a dimension of ethics–dimin-
ishes with each year spent in school.1,i The same phenom-
enon was observed in major business schools: The higher
the level of study, the less students were cooperating. In
engineering programs, what decreases with time spent
in school is the ability to take an ethical look at a given
subject. It’s as though the more knowledge and skills we
gain, the less we take into account the values and ethics of
what we learn and what we do with what we learn.
Today, science and technology no longer simply tell us
what the world is like; rather, they tell us how to live in the
world, and their impact in this regard has been consider-
able. Our blind spot on ethics thus becomes even more
critical in all learning processes, and this is very new.
all living organisms learn
Since the first cell appeared, the complete set of genes of

living organisms–the genome–has evolved tremendously.
1
All footnotes marked by Arabic numerals appear at the end of this book.
They do not provide any additional information, only relevant sources
and references.
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Why will we learn differentlyin the 21st century
But for billions of years, this genome remained unaware

of its own evolution.
This is what Henry Plotkin showed so remarkably in
Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledgeii, an
essay published in 1994 that brought together biology,
psychology, and philosophy. He says that Darwin could
have been a zoologist, microbiologist, immunologist,
psychologist, epistemologist, computer scientist–the list
goes on–all due to the simple fact that each of these fields
operates according to evolutionary processes similar to
those Darwin illustrated. They are variation of a gene,
selection for that variation, and retention of the new gene,
which usually then gets propagated in the species. Note
that the retention stage is often a form of learning.
To use an example, our brains are theaters of multiple
random phenomena taking place in our neural circuitry.
When randomly crossing neural connections get stabi-
lized, those connections can be memorized. That’s how
we learn.
And this phenomenon of learning is universal. What’s
true of our neural networks is true of all cells, from
bacteria to multicellular organisms, whether they have
brains or not. For example, a given bacteria knows how
to break down a sugar because a few of its ancestors
happened by chance to find the right genetic combination
that made it possible for them to consume sugar as food
and thus continue to reproduce. According to Plotkin,
these Darwinian processes for acquiring knowledge can
be traced back to the dawn of life. The first self-replicating
systems, which allowed the first forms of life to develop,
must have operated this way. These processes have made
all the great evolutionary transitions possible by providing
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successive forms of life increasingly elaborate ways to

acquire knowledge about their environment.
A very interesting book by Christopher Wills called
The Runaway Brainiii describes how, when an innova-
tion of this kind emerges, an evolutionary arms race
takes place. Predators with a larger brain will have an
advantage over their prey, creating selective pressure so
that, in turn, the brains of prey will develop in order to
survive and reproduce. There are also selective pressures
between sexual mates. In the same way that a peacock’s
tail is used solely for the purposes of seduction, it’s not
unlikely that part of our brain function could be solely
reserved for seducing a mate. Learning how to perform
a courtship ritual or a ceremonial nesting can be neces-
sary for reproduction, which explains the unmatched flair
of so many animal artists in their courtship displays (to
say nothing of humans). Such selective pressures between
mates may have shaped not only our artistic abilities but
our moral values and ability to cooperate as well. This is
what Matt Ridley investigates in his book The Origins of
Virtue.iv Anthropologist Robin Dunbarv has even posited
that morality could be one of the factors behind the emer-
gence of language, as cooperation among members of a
community is better enforced when they can exchange
information about one another’s reputations.
Bees, ants, birds, and marine mammals can commu-
nicate to those around them about where to find food,
how to avoid a predator, a threat, etc. Plenty of organisms
transmit information and therefore knowledge to others.
It’s an ability that’s absolutely crucial for survival, as it
provides a considerable competitive advantage. I’ll come
back to this later.
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Thus the dominance of the human race is due primarily

to our extraordinary ability to exchange information
and cooperate with fellow humans. Language provides
us with the tools to describe an infinite number of situ-
ations, and as Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapi-
ens,vi humans have a much more developed capacity for
cooperation than other species do. If you pit one human
against one chimpanzee, the result could go either way.
But if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees,
the humans are much more likely to win because they
can communicate more effectively and work together
more easily.
It doesn’t matter if learning is done intentionally, say, to
resolve a given problem at a given moment or if it’s done
blindly. As it so happens, many major scientific discoveries
came about completely by chance. What’s special about
humans is that, at least in principle, we know which inno-
vations are important and can then pass these on. Each
time we learn something, we can teach it to someone else,
who can then go deeper into that knowledge and enhance
it further before teaching it to someone else. In many of
the hunter-gatherer tribes we’ve been able to study–and
this was likely true among our ancestors as well–children
are educated by one another, through playing, exploring,
and imitating, and all this without an organized education
system or adults having the least say in what they learn.
Needless to say, they learn a lot through game playing. It
goes to show that, like our ability to laugh, our ability to
learn and teach is unique.
What’s new in the 21st century is that digitalization
lets us go even further by allowing us to create artifi-
cial intelligence, which itself will be able to create new
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knowledge. Or for those who feel “artificial” and “intel-

ligence” can never go together, digitalization allows us
to create machines that on their own can discover new
relationships between data in massive databases that the
human mind is not able to process and analyze.
As I said before, since life appeared on Earth, living
organisms have invented numerous and varied ways to
acquire knowledge. What’s unique about humans is that
we’re not only a living organism but a conscious organism
too, and as far as we know, we’re unlike other animals in
that we are conscious of being conscious and capable of
articulating this thanks to language.
Therefore, we know that we are consciously living
through a new, major evolutionary transformation char-
acterized by the creation of new forms of intelligence. As
far as I know, this is completely unprecedented, at least in
our part of the galaxy.
A second revolution is taking place at the same time,
still thanks to technological advances, this time fostering
progress in genomics. We’re now able to modify the
genomes of other species. Here as well, the fact of modi-
fying the genome isn’t new; it’s that we can do so delib-
erately. All forms of life are constantly evolving by way
of random mutations, but they are never conscious of
the fact that they are evolving. Consciously rearranging
a genome is radically new–all the more so as we can now
envision modifying our own genome, and this would be
a major leap into the unknown. We cannot leave these
developments to epistêmê and technê alone. We must
involve phronesis to try to understand where such a step
would take us as a species.
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transition always creates conflict
These transitions–we could even say upheavals–are not

the first of their kind in history, of course. What have
past transitions taught us? We’ll see that periods of evolu-
tionary transition have almost always engendered conflict
among those involved.vii
It’s thought that life arose from what biologists call
the primordial soup, an environment rich in organic
molecules and energy that brought about the emer-
gence of self-replicating molecules, i.e., molecules that
were able to synthesize identical copies of themselves
through a process called autocatalytic replication. What
were these first molecules that both carried information
and replicated this information? We don’t know. DNA
can be replicated, but not on its own. RNA, however, is
capable of replication and at the same time it is capable
of catalysis, meaning it can accelerate chemical reactions,
including those that transmit information. It’s a better
candidate for the original self-replicating molecule, even
if today we don’t know of any self-replicating molecules
that are completely independent.
In any regard, all it takes is one self-replicating molecule
to set off the process of Darwinian evolution in which
every error in the replication process creates variation and
that variation gets passed along. It’s thus likely that evolu-
tion began even before the first cell ever came into being,
more than 4 billion years ago, shortly after the Earth was
formed.
Still today, researchers are trying to understand the
composition of this primordial soup. They take nitrogen,
carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen and heat them up and
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try to see if any slightly more complex molecules get

created in the process–these hypothetically being the
first building blocks of life. Scientists are also looking in
space, where these molecular groupings appear to form
to synthesize relatively complex molecules such as amino
acids. Panspermia, an old and well-known theory, posits
that life was brought to Earth by comets. The comets
“inseminated” Earth by not only bringing water to it but
also providing it with the elementary building blocks of
life. This is why we are trying to identify all the different
molecules that make up comets. There are still many
mysteries to uncover in this part of our biological history,
and this is only one hypothesis that still doesn’t answer
the question of what took place to bring self-replicating
molecules into being.
The period after this one is a bit better understood. As
soon as the first self-replicating molecules evolved into
cells, the second evolutionary transition began. What’s a
cell? It’s a unit of life surrounded by a membrane, and
it contains within it resources and carries out certain
life processes. Cells produce the molecules they need in
order to replicate. The organisms are selected in order
to be replicated, produce “good” molecules, and expel
toxic ones when it needs to. Here we see the notion of
an internal and an external begin to emerge, almost of a
molecular or cellular “me.”
And at the cellular level, the struggle between the
various “me”s can be violent indeed! Some molecules such
as virus genomes self-replicate very well, while hindering
the replication of other molecules. In a way, these are
selfish molecules, refusing to cooperate. Of course, they
can’t have empathy in the sense of an ability to consider
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another’s point of view, but they can take up too much

space and eliminate other molecules, causing replication
of their host cell to stop. Evolution has therefore favored
cells containing molecules that are able to cooperate in
the replication processes of all other cellular components.
These cells can accomplish things together that they
would not be able to do on their own, such as–and this
is the third evolutionary transition–form groups of cells
and, from there, form multicellular organisms.
Within multicellular organisms, there are germ cells,
which pass on genetic material to progeny (e.g., eggs and
sperm in humans), and there are somatic cells, which
make up the body. Multicellularity has evolved many
different times on Earth, giving rise to animals, plants,
fungi, etc. Their cellular replication mechanisms often
undergo conflicts among multiple cells working together
and “selfish” cells that refuse to get along with the others,
which is what tumors are, for example. Who will survive?
And more critically, who will have more offspring? It’s the
organisms whose cells work together the best. In a way,
these are constructions of cellular societies in which we
can see conflicts between those that get along with one
another and those that don’t.
cooperating and teaching
Within these societies, the next stage of evolution was

the creation of cultures, meaning group behaviors that are
acquired and not innate. Transferring information among
individuals allows them to adapt more quickly. Scientists
can already observe the exchange of genetic information
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at the bacterial level. We see it, for example, when billions

of bacteria cooperate to fight an antibiotic. Tatiana Dimi-
triu,viii whose doctoral dissertation I had the pleasure of
advising in the Frontiers in Life Science doctoral program,
showed that the collective ability of bacteria to cooperate
in order to create common goods evolves simultaneously
with the ability to exchange information. Bacteria coop-
erate to exchange information and exchange information
to cooperate, all without a centralized system coordinated
by a larger organism. Natural selection simply selected
for bacteria that could cooperate, exchange information,
cooperate to exchange information, and exchange infor-
mation to cooperate. This was what allowed them to over-
come the challenges they faced.
Bacteria can cooperate in many ways. Sometimes a
bacterium will emit a signal, a bit like an alarm. If the
bacterium is alone, nothing will happen, but if enough
other bacteria are around, something called quorum
sensing takes place. Then the population of bacteria,
like a population of humans, can decide to change their
behavior once a certain threshold is reached. They essen-
tially wait until they are numerous enough for it to be
worth it to work together. Like us, they cooperate on a
conditional basis.
These cooperation mechanisms are not studied by biol-
ogists alone. Mathematicians and economists who study
what’s called game theoryix also try to find what situations
will prompt human beings to choose cooperation over
selfishness. The perk of working with bacteria is that we
can conduct experiments on them on a massive scale, as
it takes bacteria about 20 minutes to reproduce. If you
put one of them in a culture before you leave your lab at
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night, you’ll have billions to work with when you return

the next morning.
So, these are living organisms together in a society,
and in certain instances, they will change their behavior
based on the behavior of others and choose to cooperate.
We see this in ants, bees, whales, birds (both whales
and birds communicate through song), etc. Diverse
cultures can coexist in the same space; for example, some
groups of chimpanzees break nuts while others use the
long stalks of plants to fish termites deep in their nests.
These behaviors in general are not spontaneous but have
been transmitted and acquired through observation and
imitation. Some even use the word teaching to describe
these forms of transmission, although this teaching is not
done consciously necessarily in all animals. In humans,
the creation of language gave way to the emergence and
development of extremely elaborate cultures.
Since life began, the ability to cooperate was a basis
of evolution and, in most cases, the best way to gain an
evolutionary advantage. Brute force on its own was not
enough.
What is cooperation? In game theory, it’s defined as
an act that represents a loss for oneself and a gain for
another. This definition works the same way in microbi-
ology. From an evolutionary perspective, we don’t often
choose something that doesn’t offer at least a small benefit
for ourselves, even if the benefit is indirect. For example,
when you cooperate with members of your family, you
increase the likelihood that your family’s genes, i.e.,
the genes you carry, will get passed down. The natural
world is replete with examples like this. Ants cooperate
in all aspects of life because only the queen reproduces.
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The others help their sister or their mother reproduce

and thus to pass on their genes under the best possible
conditions. The probability of their genes being passed
on is increased by their behavior. Evolution selected for
altruistic behavior (I help the queen) that also represents
a gain for the individual (I contribute to passing down the
genes that I carry).
When can we use the word teaching with regard to
living organisms? If an animal observes another and
learns something from the other’s behavior, this doesn’t
necessarily constitute teaching. An animal may certainly
learn things from another animal, but the other animal
didn’t teach these things in any intentional way, unless
we can prove that it was acting in a way that represented
a “loss” for itself. For example, it’s teaching if the other
animals repeated or slowed down the demonstration of a
certain technique that it wouldn’t have repeated or slowed
down were it not being observed by the other animal.
Certain ants leave chemical trails when they find food so
that other ants can find their way to the food. We also
observe in certain species that they adopt distinct behav-
iors that are easier to follow when being followed by kin
so the others don’t get lost.
Meerkats are another example of a very cooperative
species. For instance, they make an alarm call when they
detect a predator, which represents an obvious “loss” for
the individual making the call, as in doing so it renders
itself more vulnerable to the predator. Yet this is a gain
for other meerkats nearby who can then quickly go
into hiding. Meerkats are also able to teach their pups
how to eat scorpions, one of the few sources of protein
available to them in their natural habitat of the Namib
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SUMMARY
desert. As we all know, the sting of a scorpion is lethal,

and the reason for this is obvious: Scorpions don’t want
to be eaten. But adult meerkats have perfected a process
for catching a scorpion, dismembering it, and removing
its venom to make it safe to eat. Except early on when
they feed their young on hunted scorpions, adult meer-
kats teach their young the process by slowing it down
and going about it step by step. This is certainly a process
of cooperation and teaching, as the “loss” for the adult
meerkat is considerable: It’s not only risking its life by
walking around with a live scorpion in its mouth, but to
top it off, it doesn’t even eat the scorpion in the end.
Plant species can also change their behavior in order
to protect themselves. In South Africa, acacias have been
shown to collectively defend themselves against antelope
by producing a toxin that makes their leaves indigest-
ible. When antelope begin munching on the leaves of an
acacia, the tree under attack emits ethylene molecules into
the air, which other trees can detect as a signal to beware.
When an acacia receives the signal, it starts producing
toxins in order to protect itself and emit its own ethylene
molecules in turn to warn others.
Are there commonalities among all these different
evolutionary transitions, from the primordial soup to the
cell to changes in cultural behavior? This is something
Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smithx have investi-
gated. Their conclusion was that conflict will arise in the
transition between the two when there’s evolution from
one state to a more complex state. In other words, conflict
is an intrinsic part of evolution, and that’s as true of cells
as it is human organizations. Conflict is, in a way, natural.
And the best way to overcome it is to cooperate.
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SUMMARY
So, why out of all the other species did Homo sapiens
triumph? Because it was the species that was able to
cooperate on the largest scale, as historian Yuval Noah
Harari shows in his best seller Sapiens.xi Bacteria coop-
erate in great numbers (in the billions!), but only for very
simple tasks. Ants cooperate for slightly more complex
tasks, but in fewer numbers. Only Homo sapiens brings
the two features together, cooperating in ever-increasing
numbers to accomplish increasingly complex tasks.
How are we able to do it? Through the strength of
belief. We cooperate on a large scale, Harari says, because
we believe in things that are meaningful only because
a large number of people believe in them–the value of
money or a diploma, for example. We’re prepared to
do things chimpanzees would never do, such as trade a
banana for a sum of money or force ourselves to learn
something in exchange for a piece of paper called a
diploma. This appears to be what sets us apart: this ability
to believe in something whose meaning is contingent on
others believing in it.
Harari shows us that the greatest transitions in human
history were marked by conflicts, just as John Maynard
Smith does, although I’ve met both and learned that
Harari had not read Maynard Smith. By separate paths,
one by history and the other by biology, they both
converged on the importance of cooperation.
the new frontiers of evolution
What will the next phase of evolution look like, when

biology fuses with digital?
34
SUMMARY
Machines do not have consciousness, but they do have

the capacity to know what affects them. A computer
knows when its memory is saturated, for example, or
when its battery is low. Is that what it was programmed
to do? Sure. But we can say the same of bacteria when
they react to the temperature rising: that they were
programmed by evolution to do so. It’s the same thing
that happens when you realize you’re hungry. One of your
genes was programmed by evolution to decipher a mole-
cule as a signal that your blood is low on glucose and that
it’s time to have lunch.
One of the new scientific frontiers of our time is
fusing biology with technology. You likely know of Elon
Musk because of his electric cars (Tesla) or his rockets
that land back on Earth rather than get discarded in
space (SpaceX). What you don’t know perhaps is that
he has invested in a company called Neuralink, which
seeks to drive the development of human enhancement
through technology, perceiving in artificial intelligence
an existential threat to humanity. Specifically, it wanted
to increase the speed of information processing in the
human brain. For now, our ability to interpret informa-
tion is superior to that of machines. But we convey infor-
mation much slower. We are held back by the speed of
oral communication and typing on a keyboard, as well
as by our listeners’ or readers’ ability to understand what
we are conveying. If you were to speak 100 times faster
than normal, no one would likely be able to understand
you.
That’s why Elon Musk, as well as the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which invented the
Internet in 1969, is working on developing technology that
35
SUMMARY
enables direct brain-to-brain connections. The possibilities

of such technology in the medical field would be enor-
mous. Imagine being able to give sight to a blind person
by connecting her brain to light receptors outside the eye.
Yet in military applications, the possibilities would be more
frightening. There are already helmets fitted with electrodes
to help increase focus and reduce stress on the battlefield.
British journalist Brian Viner tested one such device and
was amazed. He experienced such intense concentration,
the likes of which he had never known before, and it even
continued after the experiment. “Shortly after leaving the
laboratory, I parked my car, with consummate ease, in an
impossibly tight spot,” he said.xii
Similar, though more sensational, experiments have been
carried out on rats. In one experiment, two rats had elec-
trodes implanted into the motor cortices of their brains and
successfully communicated brain-to-brain. The experiment
was conducted by Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobi-
ology at Duke University in the US. He and his colleagues
connected the rats’ brains to a common computer, and
together the rats worked on a simple task. Separated
from each other, they were each placed before two levers.
The first rat, the so-called encoder rat, would see a light
appear above one of the levers. If it chose the correct
lever, it received a reward. Its brain activity was recorded
by the computer and then transmitted in a simple pattern
to the second, so-called decoder rat. The decoder rat had
no visual cues, only the signal sent to its brain. Through
rewards as well, the decoder rat learned to decipher which
signal meant for it to choose right or left, and its success
rate was 70 percent. The rats received a bigger reward
when they both chose the correct lever, and researchers
36
SUMMARY
eventually observed that the encoder rat adapted its cere-

bral activity to make it easier to decode. They made faster
decisions in clearer ways.xiii
We can see the advantages of these (r)evolutions from
the points of view of fundamental, biomedical, and mili-
tary research. We can try to imagine the unbelievable
things our collective intelligence would produce if we
could forgo cell-phone keyboards and simply remain
connected brain-to-brain. But having a background in
evolutionary biology and virology (the study of viruses),
I know that viruses are always ahead of security systems.
I’d be worried about the viruses that could spread via
these new brain-to-brain channels. But such is the story
of life. In prehistory, the emergence of cells prompted the
emergence of viruses.
Every time we invent a new way to communicate and
share information, whether it’s among cells or humans,
there arise ways to contaminate those communication
channels and new risks of misleading information. Tech-
nology offers incredible potential for positive coopera-
tion, but potential benefits must be carefully weighed
against potential risks.
transition = conflict
As we see our current transition through, are we

noticing there’s more and more conflict of various kinds?
Very much so. And there’s nothing surprising about that.
That’s how it’s been for billions of years.
We see in our current transition that there are winners
and losers, namely in the job market, as both physically
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SUMMARY
and mentally repetitive tasks continue to be taken over

by machines. That’s why it’s so urgent that we place ethics
at the center of our discussions. Ethics can help us make
this transition beneficial for everyone and not just certain
players, whether human or artificial.
It’s a challenge that touches upon global economic
inequalities. How do we better distribute wealth? It’s
by further developing education and guaranteeing that
it benefits everyone. The more educated that people are,
the better they do in life; and on a national scale, the
more a country educates its population, the better off it
is economically, as we see on the two maps below. They
show not only rising education levels but also the concur-
rent ascendancy of certain countries among those with
the top economies and education systems, namely Japan,
South Korea, and Russia. As such, it is our collective
responsibility to share the fruits of knowledge as widely
as possible.
Furthermore, the current transition is characterized
by its overwhelming scale, which is in contrast to the
Industrial Revolution, a term coined in 1837 by Adolphe
Blanqui referring to all the societal changes that had
taken place in England since the late 18th century.
During the Industrial Revolution, England would trans-
form its agrarian and handicraft society into one driven
by industry and trade. Already in the early 19th century,
competition between humans and machines provoked
violent protests, particularly in the 1810s with the birth
of Luddism, a movement that took its name from a likely
mythical workman named John Ludd. In his name,
textile workers, i.e., weavers, knitters, etc., destroyed
power looms that they felt threatened to put them out of
38
SUMMARY
work. Indeed, their professions effectively disappeared

within a few decades.
sequential to exponential
Similar worries are felt today. The most in-demand jobs

now didn’t really exist 10 to 20 years ago, and we all sense
that this trend will continue, if not accelerate, as artificial
intelligence makes spectacular progress in very little time.
A few months before the AlphaGo computer program
beat the world’s best Go player, Chinese 19-year-old Ke
Jie, experts were saying it would take 10 years for artificial
intelligence to beat a human at the game. It was presumed
that the game was too complicated and that algorithms
couldn’t yet outwit a human brain. In a way that’s both
funny and a little scary, the AlphaGo program, devel-
oped by Google subsidiary DeepMind, won after making
moves we could not understand.xiv
Why did people think it would take artificial intelligence
longer to catch up with us? Because artificial intelligence
has an exponential rate of growth, and we’re not used to
thinking in such terms, if not incapable of it altogether.
The legend of Sissa is an oft-told fable for illustrating
mind-boggling exponential growth. Sissa was the Indian
sage who invented chess as a way to keep King Belkib
from getting bored. Out of gratitude, the king asked Sissa
how he could repay him. Sissa took the chessboard, put
a grain of rice on the first square and two on the second,
and asked the king to complete the 62 remaining squares,
doubling the amount of the preceding square each time.
Belkib agreed to it, unable to foresee the outcome.
39
SUMMARY
For those who have studied math, the total number of

grains on the chess board is 264-1, as:
1 + 2 + 22 + ... + 263 = 264-1
That’s more than 18 billion billions of grain, or, if each
grain is 0.04 g, 720,000 million tons of rice, more than
1,000 years of global production.xv
technology wins in the long term
The legend demonstrates how difficult it is for us to

grasp exponentials. At first it doesn’t seem to increase
by much, but before long it starts skyrocketing. Another
well-known example, one directly related to the digital
transition, is Moore’s law. This is a term often misused in
common parlance; it’s supposed to refer to the prediction
made by engineer Gordon Moore in 1965 that the power
of microprocessors would double every 18 months.
It was Bill Gates who said we overestimate technolog-
ical progress in the short and medium terms and underes-
timate it in the long term. We overestimate it in the short
and medium terms for several reasons, some of which
have to do with the speed of adoption and maturation of
a given technology, while others are due to the defenses
that societies put in place to resist technological progress.
Societies build these defenses for obvious reasons, as no
government wants to create masses of unemployed people
overnight. But in the long term, technology always won.
That’s what history has taught us.
Where are we in the exponential increase of these
transformations? Well, it took 8,000 years to go from
the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution,
40
SUMMARY
100 years for the Industrial Revolution to produce the

electric light bulb; 90 years after that, we sent someone
to the Moon; 22 years after that, the Internet was created;
and 9 years after, that the human genome was decoded.
In the 20th century, education helped ease the threat
that technology posed. Since the end of the 19th century,
the mean years of schooling in advanced countries has
risen about one year every decade. When my grandfather
got his high school diploma a century ago, 1 percent of his
generation had a high school diploma. Today, that number
is 80 percent, and about 1 percent of people per gener-
ation get a PhD. The mean level of education has gone
up substantially, yet all the while, the number of avail-
able places in elite universities around the world has not
adjusted proportionally. In my grandfather’s time, it was
much easier for someone with a high school diploma to
get into these elite institutions than it is today. This kind
of meritocratic competition is putting a terrible strain
on the education system and on learners and their fami-
lies. The system is more concerned about where to place
students than it is with providing high-quality education
distributed equally across socioeconomic classes and
geographic regions.
Yet the education system was nonetheless able to with-
stand the changes brought about by the Industrial Revo-
lution and the challenges of the 20th century. In the past,
new jobs were largely in manual labor and resembled
the previous jobs they were replacing. One didn’t have
to pursue continuing education throughout one’s life. If
I was good enough with my hands to repair a wagon, I
could learn to repair an engine easily enough.
41
SUMMARY
rethinking the foundations

of the education system
Today’s cars are so full of electronic components and

computer systems that getting them repaired requires
knowledge and skills that certified mechanics don’t neces-
sarily have. In the future, when machines will program
themselves, who’s to say they won’t replace humans in
these lines of work? If machines are better at the job
and can reorient and retrain themselves faster, it’s not
just a question of rethinking how we get trained or even
training for longer. We have to rethink the foundations of
the education system.
The purpose of the education system is changing.
The Industrial Revolution generated all kinds of changes:
cultural, technological, social, etc., but unlike today it did
not coincide with biological changes, a stage that’s now
only in its infancy. Gene therapy seeks to treat disease by
delivering DNA and RNA into our somatic cells, which
make up our bodies. We’re not yet at a stage where we can
engineer the human germline, i.e., edit someone’s genome
such that the change gets passed on to progeny. We are
now able to, technically speaking; it is not too complicated
for leading laboratories, even if there still remain some
challenges. Regardless, what this means is that ethical
considerations are more important than ever. The ethical
training required for those experimenting with these new
techniques is nowhere near where it should be considering
the potential repercussions for the entire species, and we
have to ban unethical experiments.
As of right now, our school curricula and educa-
tion systems have not fully taken into consideration the
42
SUMMARY
impact artificial intelligence will have on the ways we live,

work, consume, cohabitate, interpret laws, and–sorry to
keep coming back to this, but it’s an obsession–maintain
ethical standards.
Meanwhile, the people driving advances in artificial
intelligence seem to be giving us an idea of what’s at stake.
Google has talked about its “big red button,” the switch
that they reserve the right to use at any time should they
feel the need to turn off any AI that begins to perform
operations they don’t understand. They’re particularly
trying to prevent cases of machines reprogramming
themselves autonomously or requiring so much energy for
their operability that their energy needs would come in
conflict with our own.
ethics and the future of intelligence
To put it simply, scientists know that, even if they’re still

a long way off, Terminator-like scenarios are no longer
something merely out of science fiction. There was a sign
of hope when Google created an AI advisory council,
essentially a private ethics board, meaning no one outside
Google could know the decisions it made. Then Google
disbanded its advisory council.
The issue is so serious that even the United Nations (UN)
has addressed it. It’s considering moving to implant UN
representatives on the ethics boards of major tech compa-
nies and within the partnership deals these companies
create among themselves when AI is on the table. How
can we guarantee that technological advances truly benefit
everyone and not just some, if not the machines them-
43
SUMMARY
selves? Can we program ethical standards into robots? If

so, can we be sure the robots won’t one day discard them
or come up with their own ethical standards?
The technological developments currently underway
are so complex that only a few people in the world under-
stand them. Be that as it may, we still have time to prepare
for them. For now robots continue to do what we program
them to do. Artificial intelligence remains dependent on
the human intelligence that programmed it. But for how
much longer?
The latest developments in genetics raise questions
that are equally bewildering. We learned in June 2016
that American scientists had been meeting secretly
at Harvard University as part of what they called the
Human Genome Project-Write (HGP-Write). The project
had one question in mind: Might it be interesting from a
scientific standpoint to synthesize the human genome?xvi
They were no longer interested in reading the sequence
of the 3.3 billion base pairs–the immense chain of the
letters A, T, C, and G that make up the alphabet of the
genetic heritage of each and every one of us–but rather
in writing it, synthesizing it, and producing its expression
in cells. To be clear, HGP-Write was not trying to create
a human being. Rather it was interested in “growing
transplantable human organs; engineering immunity
to viruses in cell lines via genome-wide recoding, engi-
neering cancer resistance into new therapeutic cell lines;
and accelerating high-productivity, cost-efficient vaccine
and pharmaceutical development by using human cells
and organoids.”xvii Concern was of course raised over the
secrecy of HGP-Write’s first meetings as well as over the
fact that, as some in the scientific community have said,
44
SUMMARY
an ethical debate should precede such a project rather

than take place alongside it. After all, some people may
be tempted to edit the human genome simply to improve
certain traits, namely our intelligence, as a means to “stay
in the race.”
In that same month, June 2016, a study was published
about robots that could not only produce other robots
autonomouslyxviii but do so in a way that combined the
genomes of two parent robots. There were two parent
genomes and these two genomes randomly combined,
just like in animal sexual reproduction, to create offspring
that didn’t have the same features as their parents. This
way, they could evolve according to laws similar to those
that govern human and animal evolution.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about virtual robots.
The sexuality of algorithms has existed for decades. I’m
talking about physical robots that reproduce using a 3-D
printer. Here again, the scientific intrigue of this study
is clear: We can envision designing robots that adapt to
complex environments. But no one could predict how
these robots would evolve.
Developments of this kind are the fruit of four tradi-
tionally isolated fields now coming together under one
field known as NBIC. N stands for nanotechnology, or
extremely small technologies (one nanometer is one-bil-
lionth of a meter, i.e., the width of a strand of hair divided
10,000 times). B stands for biotechnology, i.e., analyzing
our genomes, redesigning them, and synthesizing them.
I stands for information technology, which is both a tool
for increasing understanding in the other fields as well as
a science in its own right. C stands for cognitive science,
or everything that goes on in our brains.
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SUMMARY
viruses are always one step ahead
Their next frontier is in developing brain-machine inter-

faces, or in other words, connecting our brains directly to
computers.
I remain firmly convinced that if our brains are
directly connected via electrodes, in no time at all there
will be people using these channels to manipulate us.
Just as biological viruses can enter the brain and alter
its behavior, new forms of viruses that spread through
this network could do likewise. Just look at the forms of
manipulation that have spread on Twitter and Facebook
since the dawn of social media, namely “fake news,” or
false news stories meant to change how we see and think
about the world. We can also look at how Hitler, Musso-
lini, and Stalin were able to create revisionist histories
and manipulate the masses wielding nothing more than
rudimentary analog technology. Terrorists as well recruit
young people by operating on their cognitive biases
and using social media as a manipulation tool. If in the
future our brains are directly interconnected, how will
we know if a given idea came to us out of the blue or if it
got planted in our brain by some transgressor looking to
manipulate us? With social media we can use our criti-
cal-thinking capacities to challenge manipulative forces,
but this won’t be the case if our brains themselves are
online. There would be no disconnecting.
As a biologist, I can assure you that viruses are almost
always a step ahead of our defense systems. This is true
of both living and technological defense systems. You
need only read the newspaper for weekly examples of the
latter. Networks thought to be essentially impenetrable
46
SUMMARY
are broken into by hackers who steal the protected data

and share it.
What was true in the past will not be true in the future.
Failing to understand this would be a tragedy on the
magnitude of the evolutionary transition that lies ahead.
Being aware of its potential risks can help us avoid such
tragedies. We’re more aware of this new transition than
our species has ever been during previous transitions,
and these were nonetheless major, such as generating oral
speech and writing, etc., saying nothing of the transitions
that took place before conscious beings existed, i.e., the
appearance of life on Earth, the evolution of neurons, and
the formation of our brains. These transitions may seem
far in the past, yet so too did Sissa’s reward seem modest
to King Belkib. What’s unique to exponentials is their
explosive progression. Take for example the film Gattaca,
which depicts a world in which eugenics shapes everyone’s
destiny from the moment they’re born. When it came out
in 1997, it was purely science fiction. Today, we’re capable
from a technical standpoint of all the genetic manipula-
tion we see in the movie.
I would know. I’ve seen it firsthand. When I started
getting interested in biological research in the early
1990s, scientists were still having trouble trying to
understand any number of things that today are
common knowledge, such as what factors make us more
susceptible to certain cancers or the evolution of antibi-
otic resistance, and we had only just started to produce
genetically modified organisms (GMOs). When I first
heard about the convergence of NBIC, I didn’t really
believe it, as the sciences were still highly partitioned
back then. Yet only a few years after hearing about it,
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SUMMARY
researchers started coming to my lab from backgrounds

in nanotechnology and computer science, and together
we did biology. Let’s look again at the decoding of the
genome. In 2013, the Holy Grail for scientists, even those
in Silicon Valley, was to be able to sequence a genome
for $1,000. The very first sequencing of the genome must
have cost somewhere in the billions, but today it costs
$300, with that number continuing to plummet faster
than the rate of Moore’s law. It’s hard for us to know
what kind of impacts certain technological advances will
have because they undergo exponential rates of change
while we’re accustomed to linear change.
This is something discussed by director of engineering
at Google and Silicon Valley guru Ray Kurzweil. He
predicts that computers, namely quantum computers,
will continue to make such substantial progress that by
2045 (quite a precise time frame), computers will have
attained a power of calculation superior to our own as
individuals and will later trump our collective powers
as a species. He refers to this moment of surpassing
human intelligence as the “singularity,”xix and he and a
few other Silicon Valley heavyweights have cofounded
Singularity University, a school for instructing entrepre-
neurs and academicians in exponential thinking. Their
message smacks of the end of days prophesying that flies
in the face of Cartesian rationalism, and the fact that it’s
a private school incorporates a business component that
runs counter to the principles of the public good and
disinterested knowledge. Nonetheless, they’re at least
clear about the urgent need to understand the major
technological transformations currently underway.
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SUMMARY
Personally, I think we’re in need of a Plurality University

rather than a Singularity University–plurality in the sense
of multiple perspectives on technological advances and
the increasing number of spaces in which we’ll need to
discuss epistêmê, technê, and phronesis. Plurality Univer-
sity would create courses, programs, and tools that truly
benefit everyone and would be a breeding ground for
transparent and democratic debate on issues that involve
all disciplines. Today interdisciplinary debate is rare
because the various fields of knowledge taught in univer-
sities are very partitioned, and many are reticent about
breaking down these barriers. But make no mistake,
it will require contributions from everyone in order to
prepare for the world to come, one in which computers
will surpass us in so many ways, in which people will be
tempted to “download” their brains onto computers in
order to live forever. That world is on the horizon.
It goes back to our fantasy of becoming God, or
Homo Deus, to use the title of another of Yuval Noah
Harari’s books.xx What is the god of the Abrahamic reli-
gions? What are the gods of antiquity? First omniscient,
then immortal. Thanks to technology, we’re zeroing in
on omniscience. Once technology allows us to become
immortal, humans will be fully omnipotent.
After creating gods, some people want to become God.
to reread and to unite
It’s no coincidence that the digital revolution is occur-

ring at the same time as a rise in religious fervor. Etymo-
logically, the word religion has two potential origins in
49
SUMMARY
Latin, both the word religere, meaning “to unite,” and

relegere, meaning “to read over again,” as in “to discern.”
Today, science has replaced religion in terms of a legiti-
mate understanding of our world. We have gone from the
story of Genesis to a story based on scientific hypotheses,
in which the Big Bang took place more than 13 billion
years ago, the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and
life began shortly after that. As for our human ancestors,
they appeared some 2.8 million years ago, and Homo
sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago.xxi
Science also replaces religion with regard to what
unites us. Science has shown us that the genetic heritage
we share is remarkably intermixed and similar. We have
more traits in common than we do differences, and this is
also true of our evolutionary cousins, the great apes. Situ-
ating ourselves and reflecting on our place in this history
can help us understand its importance. Understanding
that all living beings on Earth have a common ancestor
can make us see that we all belong to the same family and
we should thus preserve biodiversity the same way i we
want to protect our extended families.
Something that helps me take a step back and under-
stand our common history and destiny comes from Carl
Sagan. In 1990, he had NASA’s Voyager 1 probe take a
now-famous photograph of the Earth. It’s called Pale Blue
Dot, and he had this to say of the photograph:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home.
That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who
ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy
and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideolo-
gies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,
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SUMMARY
every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of

civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple
in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor
and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt poli-
tician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint
and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a
mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals
and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could
become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants
of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguish-
able inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent
their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one
another, how fervent their hatreds.
“Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the
delusion that we have some privileged position in the
Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our
planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic
dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no
hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from
ourselves.
“The earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.
There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which
our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like
it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our
stand.
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and
character-building experience. There is perhaps no better
demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this
distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
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SUMMARY
responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and

to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home
we’ve ever known.”xxii
is there a planet of ideas?
When I think of human destiny on the cosmic level,

I sometimes ask myself how other forms of life could
evolve differently than we did. An interesting way to exer-
cise the imagination and get outside our normal patterns
of thinking is to imagine a planet of ideas, where ideas
spread, develop, and coevolve in unexpected ways with
conscious beings who are unlike us.
We can imagine a futuristic kind of Persian Letters–
the famous book by Montesquieu, who offers us a
frank description of the reality of his time by observing
18th-century France from the perspective of a traveler
from faraway Persia. It’s a style of mental exercise that
anyone can do, and the results are always illuminating,
both for the young and the not so young. Through the
eyes of a foreigner, we can analyze how our education
systems are organized, among other aspects of our soci-
eties. High schoolers from the Science Ac’ (a program
we’ll talk more about later) took part in such an exercise
and wound up writing theatrical scenes and a musical
about the history of ideas on our planet seen from a
different perspective.
It would be interesting to create a kind of “citizen
science of potential futures” based on young people
conducting this exercise. They can try to imagine new
utopias in which, like Thomas More before them, we
52
SUMMARY
come up with new forms of organization to help us collec-

tively shape the future.
It’s of course very difficult to predict the future. If we
look at how the future came to be in the past, we can
glean from this exercise a few lessons that may shed light
on how the future will shape up. The world to come is
likely already here in part, only spread too far and wide
for us to notice, with only a few gems dwelling here and
there, whether they’re ideas in people’s imaginations or
initiatives that most of us haven’t heard about yet. We’ll
need to figure out how to unearth these gems, gather
them together, and adapt them to new environments so
they can flourish.
These citizen scientists of the future will not have been
the first to ponder other worlds and question our own.
Humans have always needed to unite and legitimate their
history, whether it’s through creation myths or scientific
data. As knowledge about our history has progressed,
epistêmê has called into question the narratives that reli-
gions have offered and in some cases imposed, and with
this it discredited the ethical foundations (phronesis)
underlying the moral precepts prescribed by these reli-
gions. While the creation myth is no longer credible, can
ethical laws found in religion still be legitimate?
No doubt you’ve seen firsthand when knowledge and
rationality in our age of reason have been rather dubious.
American psychology professor Jonathan Haidtxxiii has
studied the diverse range of moral thinking in humans
and its origins in evolution. He has found that while
we are moral beings, we nonetheless can’t seem to bear
it when others practice a different morality than our
own. This can be explained by the work of two other
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SUMMARY
researchers, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, who found

that what spurred the evolution of human reason wasn’t
an interest in reason itself but rather a need to advocate
for our own beliefs, whether personal or collective.xxiv
In summary, whether it involves God or not, we need
religion in the etymological sense, i.e., knowledge that
unites us and allows us to legitimate our history, both
individual and collective. This is one of the predominant
ideas that Harari develops in Sapiens.xxv Our species can
cooperate better than any other, and thanks to our highly
developed capacity for language, we can cooperate on
things that are meaningful only because a large enough
number of people believe in them too, e.g., businesses,
nationhood, institutions, diplomas, religion, and money.
These things are endowed with meaning through narra-
tives, which a large number of people can believe in. This
is likely why some people are so attached to versions of
history seen as part of a “national narrative.” For example,
in France many insist that, whether you’ve newly arrived
or your ancestors were born here, in order to be French
you must feel that you share ancestry with pre-Roman
Gauls. And this is despite the fact that Gaulish history
was completely rewritten in the latter 19th century for the
sole purpose of arousing national sentiment and in a way
that completely disregarded historical sources.
How can we (re)establish a balance between epistêmê,
technê, and phronesis, with a particular emphasis on
phronesis?
Before answering that question, I’d like to take a
moment to introduce myself a little more in order to share
with you where I’m coming from.
SUMMARY
2
What I’ve learned
The ideas in this book are drawn from the experience

of its author, which is the case for all books, whether
the author is candid about this or not. I’m writing this
as a former child and student, as a current parent and
researcher. All four are intimately related, to the point
that I feel there has been a common thread running
through each chapter of my story. It’s a story marked by
pivotal moments that I feel the need to share with you,
so crucial has their influence been in determining the
course of my life and in strengthening the beliefs that
underpin this book. At the time I was experiencing them,
I didn’t know that together these moments would inspire
me to undertake what I now strive to do, of which this
book provides a partial account. Throughout my life, I
have learned through research and experience, fostered
dialogue across barriers, explored ways to recompose
existing forms–whether it involves our understanding of
bacteria, designing university courses, defining research
objectives, etc.–and sought the freedom to think and
55
SUMMARY
act in systems that aren’t bogged down by dogma, be it

administrative, historical, political, or religious.
From my experience, I have drawn a number of lessons
that have stuck with me throughout my life. To illustrate
the ideas in this book, please allow me to share them with
you now along with how I learned them.
from primary school through university,

following codes of conduct is as
valuable as work ethic and intelligence
I was always a good student, but never top of the class.

I spent four years at a secondary school in an area that
would be designated a Priority Education Zone, part of a
public program for allocating greater resources to schools
in underprivileged areas. The school was eventually closed
for safety concerns. It was in a district south of Avignon,
France, called Monclar. My family moved there when I was
8 years old. Getting shaken down for money or beaten up
were common occurrences, and I was targeted in particular
because I was enrolled a year ahead. I started at the school
at age 10, and some of the other kids in my class were 14.
Despite all this, I came away with two positives. First of
all, that was where I formed my closest friendships; second
is that the teachers there were excellent. On top of that, I
came to understand kids and adolescents from underpriv-
ileged areas, and this has stayed with me throughout my
life. I experienced how sad it is to see students rejected by
the system, not because they were less capable than other
students but because they didn’t adopt the code of conduct
that the school upheld.
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SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
I then went to Mistral High School, also in the beau-

tiful city of Avignon where popes once lived, because my
parents kept to school-district boundaries. Among my
battle scars from there was a behavior grade of zero in
math for incessant talking during class. Factored into my
overall average, it almost kept me from being eligible for
preparatory courses for trying to get into a good science
program at the university level. In the end, I figured
out what boundaries not to cross and managed to jump
through the hoops of the system, which rewards those
who submit to it over those who demonstrate a proclivity
for invention or thought-provoking discussion.
Some of my classmates in high school, just like those in
secondary school, did not develop this particular social
skill, and they paid for it. That left a lasting impression
on me.
there’s nothing more serious than play
Playing chess was really the only intellectual activity

I pursued seriously from age 8 to 16. I managed to win
the regional championship for my age group every year.
A friend of my parents named Jacques Montaignac intro-
duced me to the game. He was a former France Junior
Champion. Very quickly, chess became my primary source
of intellectual stimulation, so much so that I soon started
getting invited to chess clubs for adults. I even took part
in adult competitions, which was a crucible for my devel-
oping the skill to stay focused on my objectives and not let
my opponents distract me. One woman I played against
kept blowing her cigarette smoke in my face during the
57
SUMMARY
match. I called the arbiter over to make her stop, and that
caused her to lose her composure. She wound up losing
the match. In another competition when I was 16, I had
to play against my French teacher, Mr. Savolle. We played
to a draw! The atmosphere of the match was incredible,
especially with my classmates wanting to know who
would win.
I didn’t discover until around the age of 15 the symbolic
weight of that game, as much with regard to war strategy
as psychoanalysis: killing the king father, the importance
of the queen mother, all that. I was also playing during an
era when the big international matches made front-page
news, with the likes of such colorful characters as Bobby
Fischer, who later went mad. Perhaps you’ve perhaps seen
his story on the big screen in the movie Pawn Sacrifice.i
humans can dominate machines
Chess also provided me with precious opportunity that

would be hugely important for me: It introduced me to
the computer. I’ll remind the younger readers that at that
time, in the mid-1970s, personal computing was only in
its infancy. My grandmother bought a computer, and it
had on it one and only one chess software program, Chess
Challenger, and I was able to beat it. What a privilege
to have lived at a time when a human could outplay a
software program! Unlike my father who, the university
professor that he was, had a very methodical approach to
chess–he read books about chess, filled pages with notes
on various kinds of opening sequences–I had a more
intuitive approach.
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SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
I had internalized the notion that a computer won’t

necessarily win every time, and so, in 1997 when
Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s chess
computer Deep Blue, I reflected perhaps longer than
most on the implications of his loss.
After my final year in high school, I was accepted to a
prestigious and very challenging program for prep classes
at the Louis-le-Grand college. That would unfortunately
put an end to my chess adventures. I had seen very high-
level players try to go professional, and I knew that the
path was narrow and that I didn’t want to have to work
giving chess lessons to make money. On the bright side, I
had finally found a subject in school that exhilarated me
as much as chess: science.
But there was another game that taught me a lot because
it was a team, as opposed to chess. I played handball in
gym class, but I really found a love for it with friends. One
day, we were down by the gymnasium at the end of my
street in Avignon and peeked inside. A women’s team was
playing, and we got to talking with the coach, who agreed
to coach us if we wanted, so long as we got a dozen boys
together to make a team. We did just that, and I remain
close to these people. When I was 15, I was playing well
enough to be recruited to join a sports-study program
in Marseilles, but I didn’t like the idea of having to live
away from my family. When I was 16, I suffered two
back-to-back fractures in my right thumb and had to stop
playing. I couldn’t even write. I had to rely on notes taken
by a kind soul who was willing to share with me, but I
discovered then that there are other ways to learn than
just copying down what’s on the board. A Danish friend
who was with us in that final year of school explained to
59
SUMMARY
me that in Denmark, students don’t have to copy what

the teacher writes on the board or text from their books.
Instead, they’re simply given opportunities to apply what
they learn in class and discuss it.
overly competitive environments don’t

necessarily produce better results
When I moved to Paris at age 17, I lived in the dormito-

ries at Louis-le-Grand. Like many other students preparing
for the exams to get into the grandes écoles, France’s most
prestigious universities, I had to put everything else on
hold. More than 30 years later, I still remember getting the
result of my first math test: a crushing 4 out of 20. I walked
down the stately rue Soufflot to the Luxembourg gardens
at the bottom of the hill, laid down in the grass, and spent
an hour wondering what to do with my life. Was I ready
to sacrifice so much for this? To become a willing partic-
ipant in this humiliating system that gave such demoral-
izing grades to students generation after generation, and
this despite their level in high school? In the end I decided
there was nothing more important I could be doing with
my time, and I walked back up the hill and got back to
studying. Yet I still refused to put real pressure on myself.
It would take a friend’s knocking some sense into me
four months from the exams for that to happen. My math
teacher had tried during my first year, saying, “If you don’t
get down to some serious work right now, what’s the point
of even being here?”
I was willing to listen to my friend because major shifts
were happening in my personal life.
60
SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
My mother had fallen very ill two years beforehand, and

my father was getting ready to undergo major surgery. I was
18 and suddenly pictured myself having to take care of my
three little sisters Antonia, Angela, and Julia, ages 16, 14,
and 8, should things ever take a turn for the worse. That’s
what motivated me to want to get into a school that offered
students a stipend. If the worst were ever to happen, I
would need to start making money immediately.
a grateful planet honors its collective

intelligence
Over the course of those years, the Panthéon formed

part of the background of my life. I often pondered
the famous inscription above the portico: Aux grandes
hommes la patrie reconnaissante (“A grateful nation
honors its great men”). My first moments in Paris were
spent visiting that triumphant landmark of French history.
In it you learn about the French Revolutionary era, which
sought to pantheonize the nation’s most accomplished
citizens within a “secular temple.” Of course, you ques-
tion the strikingly small number of women buried there,
which is by definition a lack of recognition for women’s
contributions to French history. It seems to me that if we
had to do it over again and build a modern Panthéon, we
should expand the scope of the inscription. “A grateful
planet honors its collective intelligence,” it should say,
underlining both that most major breakthroughs come
from collaborations between women and men and that
the real challenges of our time are to be considered on a
global scale.
61
SUMMARY
i am incapable of submitting to dogmatic

authority
To get into the Ecole Polytechnique, a military academy

and France’s most selective engineering schools, I had
to take a portion of exam that has since been done away
with, a kind of preliminary oral exam for applicants who
did well on the written exam but not well enough to pass
directly to the main oral exam. I went in, introduced
myself, and held out my ID for the proctor to take. He
didn’t move. Looking me square in the eye, he said, “Sir,
you’re taking an oral exam for the Ecole Polytechnique.
Don’t look so laid-back.” I didn’t understand. He repeated
it one more time, this time louder. It then occurred to me
he must have been talking about the fact that I had my
left hand in my pants pocket. Just like in chess, I tried to
keep my nerve and tucked my left hand squarely under
my right arm for the whole hour of the exam, and I did
my best to solve the equations he gave me. Once again,
even at the highest levels of academia–if we believe in
such a hierarchy–candidates are selected in part based on
how well they submit to authority and respect codes of
conduct, not solely on their abilities. In my case, it was
solving math problems.
Based on that episode, I should have been more wary for
what was to come. I would graduate from that esteemed
military academy with 45 days of confinement to quarters
to my name, the record in my class.
Just like in preparatory classes, I often felt I didn’t
belong there. Classes started on the Plateau de Milles-
vaches in central France, and right away there were prob-
lems. I was reticent about having to stand at attention all
62
SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
the time. I then spent four months at the artillery school

in Draguignan, in the Provence region, and there too I
ran into trouble with authority. Once, I even got called in
to the colonel’s office for refusing to buy the badge of the
school insignia.
I’ll never forget the conversation we had. We just
couldn’t see eye to eye.
“Colonel, it’s clearly written in the rule book that
purchasing the school badge is optional,” I said.
“Everyone buys it. It’s not good not to have it,” he
replied.
“Perhaps. But it’s nonetheless optional, and I don’t see
the point of spending money for one,” I said.
“You can afford it! You have a stipend!” he said.
“Yes, but it’s the principle of the thing. This way,
students who perhaps can’t afford one won’t have to
follow the tradition,” I replied.
“That’s the word: tradition! It’s tradition. And tradition
is important in the army,” he said.
“But this is tradition is... optional.”
I wasn’t put in confinement that day, but that little
quarrel earned me a reputation.
The point of the system of rank is to get us to bend to
authority, and I had to admit after a months at school
that it was rather effective. Most of my classmates made
up their minds to climb the ranks, and some of them are
still doing so! The ones who seemed at first the unruliest
became the staunchest advocates for military hierarchy
once they became officers.
What I learned above all from that year of military
service, and in my time at Ecole Polytechnique in general,
was that I have a major problem with dogmatic authority.
63
SUMMARY
When we first got to Polytechnique, we had to take a

slew of psychological tests. I later learned the purpose
of these tests. Because the school system inflicts such
heavy psychological damage on students, from prepara-
tory classes to the academy, suicide rates were rather high,
so students were monitored very closely. Being curious
by nature, I asked the psychologists what my test results
were. Compared to my classmates, I had an average profile
in most criteria, although slightly more literary than most.
Then again, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed
man is king. The only thing that really set me apart
from others was how I questioned authority. Perhaps I
had understood intuitively something French philoso-
pher Michel Serres once said: True authority is whatever
causes us to grow. I realize that I never rebelled against
my parents as a teenager because they never really gave
me orders. They always took the time to reason things out
with me, and in that way they provided me with both love
and freedom.
This book comes from a similar place of questioning
authority, for in my time as an educator, I have endeav-
ored to establish teaching methods that help both free
individual potential and create collectives that can be
sources of growth.
we should learn to ask the right

questions rather than mechanically
memorize answers
Fortunately, despite its being a military school, Poly-

technique was capable of being open-minded. First off, it
64
SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
forced us to take breaks from math and physics, as indeed

some students got sick with studying for exams. We were
forced to study other subjects, and not only were we able
to venture outside the so-called hard sciences, i.e., math
and physics, but the teachers in the other subjects were
outstanding. I studied history with Marc Ferro, psychology
with Elisabeth Badinter, and demography with Hervé Le
Bras. I got to study Hitchcock’s art of suspense in English
class. And little by little, I would make my way toward what
would become my forte: biology.
I heard in my first year that the French Ministry of
Defense, under which Polytechnique is technically
placed, was looking to start a biomedical program. I got
accepted to it, and for one month, I and some 20 of my
classmates went around to different military hospitals in
Paris. We spent our mornings in hospital wards and our
afternoons in research laboratories. I wasn’t even 20 years
old, and I was discovering the major focuses in research
at the time, things that today are common knowledge
but were completely new in the 1980s. For example,
we looked at the prion, which was an acronym that had
been coined five years earlier for a pathogen causing an
unheard-of epizootic disease referred to in the main-
stream as mad cow. We also looked at AIDS at a time
when the retrovirus that caused it had only just been
identified. Magnetic resistance imaging, or MRI, was
extremely expensive back then and not as ubiquitous as
today; in 1983 my mother had to go to New York to get
an MRI scan, as the technology didn’t yet exist in France.
It all fascinated me. The researchers who hosted us
in their labs made themselves available to us and were
enthusiastic. We bombarded them with questions, and
65
SUMMARY
when they didn’t know something, they had the guts to

say as much. They would essentially say, “We don’t have
the answer to that question, but we need young people
like you to help us so that one day sooner or later we can
find the answer.” Although the academy subjected us
to heavy doses of math and physics, I knew that I was
a far cry from being able to do high-level foundational
research in these areas, and here these researchers were
welcoming us with open arms and pushing us to get
involved in biomedical research, to which we had only
just been introduced.
By going down that path, I had to stop thinking like
an engineer and learn how to think like a researcher. An
engineer looks for the right answer; a researcher looks for
the right question. An engineer laments when an exper-
iment goes wrong; a researcher loves it, so long as the
problem encountered is new, signaling new possibilities
at hand, new fields of knowledge to be investigated.
Unfortunately, learning to ask (oneself) questions is not
a sought-after trait in the French education system. I’ll
share two short anecdotes that illustrate my point.
My son went to the same kindergarten that I did. Like a
salmon, I returned to where I grew up to become a father.
He ran into the same problem that I did there that got me
held back a year: He wasn’t demonstrating good enough
motor skills in handling scissors in arts and crafts to
begin writing lessons. When I was a kid, the teachers got
my mother so worked up about it, she felt the need to sign
me up for extra arts and crafts classes so I could get used
to handling pens and paintbrushes.
Thirty years later, I relived the same scenario, this time
in the role of the parent. I tried to downplay the impor-
66
SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
tance of the issue. After all, my career hadn’t suffered

because of kindergarten arts and crafts. “You didn’t
struggle during your later schooling?” the teacher asked
me. I didn’t dare impart to her the knowledge that there’s
no scissor-cutting portion to the exam to get into engi-
neering school. I saw once again how quickly we get stig-
matized when we deviate from the norm.
When my son was 6, I attended the first parent-teacher
conference of the year, a few days after school started.
His teacher said to me, “He’s a nice boy, but he asks ques-
tions.” As a researcher, I’m inclined to think that’s an
asset, perhaps the most important asset. I didn’t like that
she said the word “but.” My son isn’t as nice as the other
boys because he asks questions? I tried to understand.
“Are the questions off topic?” I asked.
“No, no. They’re questions about the lessons,” she said.
“And he asks them to his friends? He’s a distraction in
class?” I asked.
“No, he asks them to me,” she said.
“OK. So, what’s the problem?” I asked.
“Well... he asks questions,” she responded.
At the time, I gave the teacher the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe he goes too far with his questioning. Maybe
the teacher is sick of being interrupted by him. I gently
suggested to my son to keep his questions to himself and
bring them to me at the end of the day. I tried to convince
myself he was nonetheless fulfilled there and enjoying the
school he was in, but that little episode, along with a few
others, helped me realize the absurdity of any system that
finds asking questions to be a problem. Asking questions is
the answer!
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SUMMARY
On their own, however, these stories aren’t enough to

condemn the whole system.
Of course it’s important to learn how to write legibly,
and despite low marks I’ve received because of it, it has
never improved. Similarly, a teacher has every right to
want to get through certain sections of a lesson without
being constantly interrupted. But in the long run all these
little things start to add up. Contrary to what we’re told
in school, both as students and as parents, there isn’t a
single path to knowledge, and plenty of educated adults
seem undertaught and totally ignorant of how complex
learning is.
This wasn’t a problem back when the world evolved
slowly, but as the world now changes at lightning speed,
the old way is no longer going to cut it, especially as access
to education and information has increased so signifi-
cantly. I doubt that anyone, French or otherwise, still
believes that an education-based meritocracy is the best
way to run a country and that the educated elite should
be given responsibility to make informed decisions on
their own. I can’t imagine that in the past anyone apart
from the educated elite believed in such an illusion.
This is not a new idea. Socrates was its first and perhaps
best advocate. And the way he defied authority through
asking questions did not do him any favors. Already in
Antiquity, authority and asking questions did not mix.
We see as much in Genesis, when in the Garden of
Eden, the first thing God forbade Adam and Eve was
to eat the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. Our conven-
tional wisdom also reinforces our aversion to questioning:
“Curiosity killed the cat,” we tell our kids.
68
SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
we all need caring mentors
After graduating from Polytechnique, I got into the

French National School of Rural Engineering. Through
the program I wound up going to some 40 different
research laboratories, not including the ones I had
already been to when I was at Polytechnique. The repu-
tation of Polytechnique opened every door to me. Rightly
or wrongly, heads of labs figured a Polytechnique-trained
engineer could adapt to any discipline. I went to talk
with historians, economists, hydrologists, geneticists,
etc., and at the end of each meeting, I would ask, “Apart
from your lab, what other labs do you recommend I go
see?” I kept hearing the same thing: “You have to go
see Miroslav Radman.” I heeded their advice and met
Radman, whom I would call Miro, as did everyone. He
would become my mentor.
In 2011, 20 years after meeting him, I described him
in an interview with French daily Le Monde as a “myth-
ical, quantum being who has a certain probability of
being in a given location, but never where you expect
him to be.”ii The article was an overview of his career,
describing him as someone “on the hunt for the secrets
of DNA, uncovering the mysteries of evolution.” His
discoveries in DNA repair systems are in every biology
textbook. He’s particularly well known for his work on
SOS response, which is how cells repair DNA damage to
then undergo mutation. He also did notable work stud-
ying the mismatch repair system, which repairs errors
in DNA copies in organisms ranging from bacteria to
humans.iii
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SUMMARY
scientific truths are only temporary
Before beginning my doctoral dissertation with Miro, I

got a master’s degree in cellular and molecular genetics at
Paris-Sud University. The program style there was totally
different from anywhere else I knew. It didn’t matter that
I had never studied genetics. I was told there would be
no classes in the traditional sense; instead, students did
three internships in three different settings. There was
also a lot of analyzing articles, which was an exercise I
had become familiar with at Polytechnique and was one
of the few things we did in which my penchant for crit-
ical thinking was encouraged. Every time I do it, I like
it a little more. It’s an exercise in sniffing out guesswork
and logical errors based on what’s known in a given field.
Along with sports, it’s an activity that helped me excel
not only at Polytechnique but in biology in general and
in analyzing political economy. When you do it, you see
firsthand that science isn’t simply a matter of summa-
rizing what everyone knows. Rather, scientific truths are
only temporary, especially in the experimental sciences.
You tinker, make mistakes, and start over. You investi-
gate and you’re constantly reformulating your questions.
My love for this aspect of research continues to grow to
this day.
barriers between disciplines are made to

be broken down
My first research project dealt with AIDS. At the outset,

what struck me most was the hermetic seal between key
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SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
players who were taking up the issue. When I attended

my first international conference on AIDS, I started up
a conversation with some South American activists, as
thanks to some training I had done in Latin America the
previous summers, my Portuguese and Spanish were in
good enough working condition. And I was the only scien-
tist who talked to them! I understood that if I wanted to
save lives, I had three options: creating a biotech start-up
where I would be dependent on shareholders who would
make all the decisions, doing public-sector research
where I would be at the mercy of regular budget cuts,
or getting into activism and passing out condoms in Rio
and elsewhere. From then on, I have been unrelenting
in every field I’ve worked in to try to create ways to cut
across these barriers.
As a researcher, I am so grateful to have discovered
interdisciplinarity.
I changed my research topic four times in four years,
which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Be that as
it may, however, I managed to write a dissertation
of reasonable quality, no more and no less. But in the
process, I uncovered several other directions for research
that piqued my interest considerably. I pursued them,
and two years later, in 1997, I got published in major
international reviews, namely Nature and Science. This
doesn’t happen to everyone, and it hasn’t happened for
me since. Yet I didn’t come to my findings on my own.
I had formed an interdisciplinary network that brought
together experts on antibiotic resistance, bacterial viru-
lence, evolution, medicine, bacteria in the food chain,
genetics and phylogenetics–and the list would grow.
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mistakes are not (always) bad
During the course of our research, we looked at how

bacteria evolve, or in more concrete terms, how they
become more harmful and more resistant to antibiotics.
We showed that their speed of the evolution itself fluctu-
ates, especially in periods of stress such as when bacteria
are exposed to antibiotics. Widespread use of antibiotics
makes it more likely for bacteria to become resistant to
treatment, and the traits that generate greater resistance
will be selected for such that efficacy of antibiotics will
decline the more we prescribe them. Bacteria are more
adaptive than your doctor tells you, which is why you
shouldn’t take too many antibiotics. At play here is what’s
called second-order selection. First-order selection selects
for resistance to antibiotics, whereas second-order selec-
tion selects for “evolvability,” i.e., an organism’s ability to
evolve. Second-order selection selects for increased speed
at which resistances emerge, spurring the evolution of
resistant bacteria.
So, how do bacteria go about ensuring their survival and
finding new resistance mechanisms? Through mistakes in
their reproduction. If they reproduce in exact replicas,
antibiotics can wipe them out. In order to survive, they
must change. In order to change, they must disactivate
the molecular mechanisms for high-fidelity DNA replica-
tion–the mismatch repair mechanisms Miro had discov-
ered in his research. In humans, mutations caused by
these molecular mechanisms are at play in hereditary
predisposition to certain cancers.
In short, bacteria need to make mistakes in order to
evolve. In order to evolve more quickly, they need to make
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What i’ve learned
more mistakes. It’s a bit like when you play the lottery: You
raise your chances of winning the more tickets you buy.
“it takes a village to raise a child”
I wound up winning a few awards for this research.

Back then I was 35 years old and a young father to my son
Bosco, age 4, and his sister Sophia, age 2. I mention this
because, as I stated, I’m also writing this book as a parent.
Had I not had kids and been at their side throughout their
education, I wouldn’t have started reflecting on my own
education. Their mother Angèle, my wife, is Chinese and
studied interculturality and Asian languages to become
a Chinese teacher. She has introduced me to many new
ideas, needless to say.
Our children are very lucky to grow up in two cultures.
Their cultural diversity begets many questions: What
should take priority? Why are attitudes so different
from one country to another, one culture to another,
or one family to another? Our family trips to Asia have
given them opportunities to discover the similarities and
differences between how children are raised in Asia and
Europe and how schools, universities, and families func-
tion. It made me reflect on my own schooling and realize
the importance of culture and family. How lucky was I
to have loving parents, and sisters who helped me grow
even though they were younger than me? I was also lucky
to have so many caring cousins, aunts, uncles, and grand-
parents. They have taught me so much, and I continue
to learn from those who are still with us today. Grieving
losses of family members are of course devastatingly sad
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SUMMARY
moments, but these are also occasions to look inward and

be in communion with yourself.
My Corsican family and Angèle’s Chinese family are
two big tribes where our children can play with their
cousins and learn from their experiences, both their
successes and failures. It’s just like when I was growing
up. Uncles and aunts can be mentors who help them
overcome difficulties and discover new ways of seeing
the world and working. The African proverb “It takes a
village to raise a child” captures so well the contributions
of every family member. Now that with the Internet the
whole globe is one big village, we can all teach and learn
from one another online.
Since we can learn so much in every setting, including
the professional setting, why don’t we place more value
on it? How can we make formal and informal education
complement each other? Informal education encompasses
everything we learn in our free time, at work, with family,
and at school. What role should these places have in our
world as change takes place more and more rapidly?
These are the questions I’ve asked myself over the years
as I watch my children get educated. This book offers a
few answers to these questions.
there is a need for ethics everywhere
In the late 1990s the Chairman of Inserm (the French

National Institute of Health and Medical Research)
named me to its ethics committee. At first I turned
it down. I felt that my bacteria did not present ethical
challenges of the kind that would make me a worthwhile
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What i’ve learned
contributor to the committee. I wasn’t cloning sheep like

the team of Scottish scientists who created Dolly in 1996.
I had no position on those questions, or at least my posi-
tions didn’t seem to me to be sufficiently informed or
developed. The chairman insisted, saying, “It’s because
you don’t see the role your bacteria play that I want you
to be a part of this. The more you resist, the more I’ll
insist.” I gave in and proceeded to submerge myself in
the literature on ethics. It wasn’t long before my stomach
was doing turns. The entire biomedical field was rife
with serious ethical risks, including microbiology, which
could be harnessed to make deadly biological weapons.
Until then I had thought of scientific research as a kind
of game, a natural continuation of my childhood and
teenage fascination with chess. I enjoyed both of these
activities because they stimulated pleasure zones in my
brain to the point of being highly addictive. I realized
then that scientific research was not a game. It could
influence the world for the better, but it can just as easily
influence it for the worse.
I wouldn’t figure all this out that day. Like all scientists,
and I hope like all global citizens, I have thought a good
deal about the ethical ambiguities of the atom, which
can both cure diseases and destroy our species. This
was one of the reasons why I, unlike many of my class-
mates at Polytechnique, had never wanted to go into the
field of physics lest I make a discovery that “improves”
nuclear-weapons capabilities. As far as I was concerned,
biology had nothing to do with killing. It was all about
life and improving health. I hadn’t thought about, or
hadn’t wanted to think about, biological weapons.
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SUMMARY
ugly ducklings need a duck pond
Without my being aware of it, all these experiences

would take me from being a “simple” researcher to being
a social entrepreneur and starting the CRI (Centre de
recherche interdisciplinaire, or the Center for Research
and Interdisciplinarity). In the autumn of 2018, the CRI
moved into a superb, 7,000-square-meter location in the
heart of the historic Marais district in Paris, where we
welcome any and all people looking to reinvent how we
learn, teach, research, and mobilize collective intelligence.
Our building, which we’ve nicknamed the crossroads of
research interests, is where projects can get off the ground
and continue developing as they go. Among the hundreds
of students and researchers who have joined us since we
started, many of them have one thing in common: They
think outside the box. To some, they can even be consid-
ered “ugly ducklings.”
Hans Christian Andersen’s taleiv is universal because we
all aspire to be different, even if only briefly, but pressure
to conform doesn’t always allow us to develop our indi-
viduality. The story shows very well how, even though the
situation may be only temporary, the solitude and some-
times rejection that go along with developing our individ-
uality are nonetheless painful experiences when we don’t
have at least one companion who understands what we
want to be or what we want to do. There’s a TED Talk
you can watch online titled “How to Start a Movement”v
that underlines how important that first show of support
is for innovators who are isolated in order for their ideas
to become recognized as legitimate. It opens the gates for
others to join.
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SUMMARY
What i’ve learned
French writer Daniel Pennac was a terrible student

and was held back repeatedly in school. Later in life, he
became a professor and renowned writer. He has said that
Andersen’s tale affected him more profoundly than any
other in his childhood because he suffered so much in soli-
tude. In his autobiography,vi he shares the story of one of
his teachers who was able to understand him when others
didn’t, helped him overcome his hardships, and encour-
aged him to write. Writing for him was an invitation to use
his ripe imagination, which was the reason he said he never
did his homework, to create material for writing stories.
Like many professors who are able to draw from their
own past hardships, Pennac put himself in the place of his
struggling students when he became a teacher and could
try to help find the missing piece of the puzzle, the way his
teacher had done for him. In an interview,vii he shared his
enthusiasm for group projects and the importance of curi-
osity for overcoming isolation and fear of failure in order to
enjoy learning and understanding.
Like Pennac, many young people feel isolated within
education systems that don’t allow them to be different,
and because of this, they get discouraged and in their work
they don’t develop the full potential of their intelligence. In
order for them to spread their wings, just like in Andersen’s
tale, to become swans, novelists, people capable of inventing
other worlds, or simply themselves, we need more spaces for
people who want to try new things. The CRI aspires to be
one of these spaces, and it’s also as a cofounder and director
of the CRI that I am writing this book. The founding of the
CRI is illustrative of the point I mean to make in this book
and conveys the overarching principles that define what it
means to learn in the 21st century.
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SUMMARY
3
New ways of teaching
The story of my involvement in innovative methods

of teaching begins with an improvised teaching experi-
ence I had. Miroslav Radman, my doctoral-dissertation
adviser, always had a million things to do. One night,
he asked me to fill in for him at a three-hour lesson he
had promised to give students at the Institut Pasteur the
next morning. With so little time to prepare, there was
no way I could plan a traditional lecture. So I decided
to do what I like most and what I believe I do best: I
took the lesson topic and analyzed it from a bunch of
different perspectives.
I enjoyed it immensely. Some of the students did as
well. They were even asking to do a multidimensional
reflection on the lesson! But other students didn’t like my
lesson at all, and for a long time I received very mixed
evaluations of my proficiencies as a teacher. Not all
students are used to taking the road less traveled. Thank-
fully, among those who liked my teaching style were
members of the management at the Institut Pasteur, and
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SUMMARY
they kept inviting me back. Soon students were asking to

join my lab, and my lab team was growing rapidly.
I also taught at the ESPCI Paris, the science and engi-
neering institute where the Curies–Marie, Pierre, their
daughter Irene, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie,
all Nobel Prize winners–studied and worked. When I
taught there, the director was Pierre-Gilles de Gennes,
the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991. I had
gone to hear him speak at the Sorbonne shortly after he
won the prize. He criticized the French propensity for
doing too much theoretical work and not enough exper-
imentation and the American propensity for doing the
opposite. Good research must balance the two, he said.
Message received.
At the same time, students from the department of
mathematics at the ENS (another grande école in Paris)
had wanted the administration to create a biology course.
At first I was asked to be minimally involved, then later
was asked to teach it. I discovered that students of the
grande-école caliber can pick up biology very quickly. I
used the same method that I had enjoyed at Polytech-
nique and later with Miroslav Radman, encouraging
them to visit as many laboratories as possible. Just like at
Institut Pasteur and at the ESPCI, students soon wanted
to join my lab, and before long I had no more positions
left to fill. I tried to convince them that there were
dozens of other labs that would be just as interesting for
them to be in, and their response was that while I was
right about that, they worried that they would get bored
in a traditional lab setting. They figured they would be
asked to carry out menial tasks devoid of the interdisci-
plinary approach that I had introduced them to and that
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SUMMARY
they had incorporated into their daily lives, practicing

discussion in the university cafeteria and on the Web.
This was back when the Internet was really taking off. I
set up a meeting with the Chairman of the Inserm at the
time, Christian Bréchot, and told him that I was encoun-
tering a whole generation of young people who learned
via the Web and wanted to break down barriers between
disciplines and combine them. This was an approach
that helped them grasp themes and ideas that were too
complex to be sufficiently addressed in monodisciplinary
approaches. Like Miroslav Radman a few years prior, he
didn’t need a lot of time to think it over. “Keep trying
new things,” he said. “You have my support.”
So Ariel Linder, who was then a postdoc in the lab,
and I were able to find a handful of students who were
interested together with a few other researchers who had
experience breaking down disciplinary barriers.
A few of us got together once a year for an “inter-
disciplinary spring school,”i a chance for us to meet
and exchange for a few days over spring break on a
little island called Île Berder off the coast of Brittany.
Communing at the island’s only hotel, we discussed in
total freedom, far from the madding crowd. I had two
key takeaways from those experiences. First was that I
wasn’t the only ugly duckling who wanted to break down
barriers between disciplines. Second was that I wasn’t the
only person there who had received prizes and honors
for his interdisciplinary work. It showed that you can
be rewarded for being disobedient after all, or at least
for being curious and escaping traditional curricula! I
concluded that while interdisciplinarity wasn’t an abso-
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SUMMARY
lute guarantee of success every time, it was certainly a

way of exploring knowledge that was worth the trouble.
To satisfy the students who had gotten hooked on inter-
disciplinary discussions, we organized our first work-
shop in Paris. It was in the small room adjoined to our
lab where the coffee machine was kept. The agenda was
not very academic; we stated that we wanted simply to
do things differently, such as discuss topics that weren’t
being taught because they were too-recently published to
be on the radars of most programs.
A little community of students and researchers started
meeting regularly. Because we had chosen at the outset
to speak English, we had international students and
researchers joining our group as well. But by the end of
the first year of meeting, the students were disappointed
because they found our discussions so much more
enriching than what they did in their traditional, confined
disciplines. “Why don’t you create a degree program?”
they asked. I went to see mathematician Gabriel Ruget,
then director of the ENS. He suggested trying to start
a master’s program. “Write up a proposal,” he told me.
That’s just what we did.ii We named the program “Inter-
disciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences.”
Despite our interdisciplinary aim, we had to become
affiliated with a specific department. That’s how univer-
sities work. Yet that was impossible for us, as we didn’t
function via the traditional channels. Nonetheless, in
each department Gabriel Ruget was able to find at least
one researcher to take part in the program and at least
one student interested in enrolling. Despite skepticism
on the part of some, he sent our proposal to the Ministry
of Higher Education and Research to get our master’s
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SUMMARY
program authorized. And we got lucky. The person in

charge of reviewing our proposal was open-minded.
She acknowledged that, while the program was unlike
anything then in existence, if she were a college student
she could only dream of enrolling in a program like ours.
Jackpot! Now we could issue diplomas. We were an offi-
cial program.
not taking risks can be risky
We then started longing for a permanent location for

our interdisciplinary discussions, a place where students
and researchers could come to learn from one another.
The CRI was in its embryonic stage, although neither I
nor my cofounding partner, Ariel Lindner, knew it at the
time!
We were eventually given a decent locale at the Cochin
site of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris Descartes Univer-
sity. Until then, we had been based out of go-between
spaces: the coffee break room attached to our lab, the
cafeteria at the ENS (between meal services from 3 p.m.
to 5 p.m.), and even a room adjoined to the morgue of
Necker Hospital in Paris. In our new location, we had
some 100 square meters at our disposal. A major, global
symposium was going to be taking place at the French
Institute for Higher Scientific Studies (IHES, which
hosts some of the best mathematicians in the world), and
Ariel and I had the idea of inviting participants to our
new location for discussion sessions in the days preceding
it. Just before they arrived, Ariel had the brilliant idea
of printing Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire on a
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SUMMARY
sheet of printer paper and taping it to our door. And so

the CRI was born, albeit informally, but our little group
had an identity and even the start of some international
notoriety with the eminent researchers we hosted.
This introduction to the world turned out to be crucial
for us: First of all because it was an immense pleasure to
share the space with great scientists and see them interact
so enthusiastically with our students, and second of
all because it helped us dispel the notion that we were
somehow illegitimate, which is what always happens
when you try to do something that’s never been done
before. When the biggest names in science from all over
the world write a letter of recommendation in support of
you, it quiets some of your critics.
Word about us started to spread. Within the few months
following the CRI’s opening, dozens of researchers and
students came to see what we were up to. At the French
National Assembly, there was a conference on the future
of higher education and research, and there I bumped
into Paul Friedel, then director of research and strategy
at Orange Labs, the R&D division of France’s biggest
telecom company, Orange. He had just come from the
US, where he had been visiting the famous Bell Labs.
Bell Labs understood all the way back in the 1920s how
important it was to bring together researchers from
different disciplines in order to drive knowledge forward.
The list of innovations coming out of Bell Labs is enough
to make you dizzy: the first color fax transmission in
1924, the first long-distance television transmission in
1927, the artificial larynx in 1929, along with numerous
advances in telephone communications; later on they
invented the transistor, the laser, and solar cells and made
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SUMMARY
a host of discoveries in foundational research that would

have applications in all kinds of different fields. “The way
you describe your program,” Friedel said to me, “sounds
like what I saw at Bell. Can I come see it? We can maybe
talk some things over.” He came by, and we talked. We
wound up creating a research chair, which is a program
in which a researcher gets funding to be the chairholder
at a university to both teach and drive research in a given
field. Ours was called the Orange Research Chair at Paris
Descartes University, and it focused on interdisciplinary
research in mathematics, biology, and technology.
Then I went around to all the departments at the ENS to
recruit students to be the first to enroll in our brand-new
master’s program. I tried to make them understand how
important interdisciplinarity would be for research in
the 21st century and that if they kept themselves isolated
in their partitioned disciplines, they risked getting left
behind. I acknowledged that they would be taking
a risk by being part of a program that had never been
tried before but that remaining within the old-fashioned
framework was also taking a risk–the risk of not letting
their curiosity grow in unexpected directions. Livio Ribo-
li-Sasco, one of the students I spoke to, summed up my
argument perfectly when he said, “So, you’re telling us
that we’re taking a risk by not taking risks.”
The master’s program was launched, and it went so well
that students wanted to continue on our path and do a
doctoral dissertation. But back then it was extremely diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to find funding and an institutional
framework in France for interdisciplinary dissertations.
That was a shortfall in the French system that directly
benefited American universities, which every year would
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SUMMARY
pluck from us a few more of our most promising early-ca-

reer researchers, who often would never return to France
after getting their doctorate. Our little bubble wasn’t
enough. We needed to expand our community and anchor
that community in a doctoral program. For research insti-
tutions, if you don’t have a doctoral program, you don’t
exist. The awards I was receiving back then opened some
doors for me: the Inserm Research Prize in 2002, the
Liliane Bettencourt Prize For Life Sciences in 2003, and
the European Young Investigator Award in 2005, among
others. The European Young Investigator Award, created
by the European Heads of Research Councils, was back
then given out only to 25 young researchers throughout
Europe in all research domains. Along with the funding
they provide, prizes like these establish you in the scien-
tific community. I was still an ugly duckling, but an ugly
duckling who was gaining legitimacy.
In 2005, I had to share how I was spending the money
I had won from the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life
Sciences, and I mentioned to Armand de Boissière, then
the new secretary general of the Bettencourt Schueller
Foundation, the difficulty we were having starting a
doctoral program. The obstacles and pushback I was
getting were essentially the same as what we experienced
starting the master’s program. More than anything, we
kept hearing, “It’s never been done before,” which for me
was the best argument for supporting our project and the
reason why I’m still motivated by it. Meanwhile, in the
US, there were more and more interdisciplinary programs
cropping up every year, namely the Stanford d.school
opened the previous year by David Kelley and MIT’s
Media Lab,iii which mixes and matches different areas
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SUMMARY
of tech research and is also where physics and computer

science researcher Neil Gershenfeld started his famous
class How to Make (Almost) Anything. That class led to
the creation of the first fab lab, the Center for Bits and
Atoms.iv “Fab lab” is short for “fabrication laboratory,”
and it’s a workshop that’s equipped with computer-guided
tools that can turn data into things. These programs were
attracting young people from all disciplines, including
art, architecture, and design.
taking talent to the top
The Bettencourt Schueller foundation asked us to make

a budget in the spring of 2006. When we presented it to
them, they told us, “This is a very innovative project, but if
we really want to take talent to the top, which is what we
love to do, you’ll need to design an organization that’s built
to last. And we’re ready and able to work with you to come
up with the best path forward for your ambitious project.”
Their unprecedented financial backing, expert advice,
and the positive working relationship we’ve enjoyed
together was a huge game changer. Thanks to the founda-
tion, we received authorization to start a doctoral program.
As I’ll be describing in the following pages, the founda-
tion has been an extraordinary partner through every
stage of the CRI’s development. Shortly after it would
fund the interdisciplinary undergraduate and master’s
degree programs we had started at Paris Descartes and
Paris Diderot universities. We could offer thorough inter-
disciplinary training from high school graduation to the
PhD level. A few years into our collaboration, the founda-
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SUMMARY
tion had the idea of building a research center that would

be unique in the world. It soon began visiting other
innovative centers all over the world and taking stock of
what they offered. Meanwhile, we received visits from
such forward-thinking notables as Helga Nowotny, the
first female president of the European Research Council;
Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy
of Sciences in the US; Robert Tjian, then president of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US; and David
Botstein, then director of Princeton University’s genomics
institute.
Our reputation would grow abroad even more quickly
thanks to our students themselves. A handful of them got
together on their own to put together a team in order to
participate in MIT’s premier International Genetically
Engineered Machine Competition, or iGEM. The compe-
tition can be described as playing with biological LEGOs.
Teams come from all over the world, and in the summer
before the competition, they receive a kit of standard
biological parts called BioBricks. The teams then come
up with the best way to use these parts and have them
operate in living cells to create genetically engineered
systems.
In the first year the CRI’s Paris Bettencourt team
participated, under Ariel’s excellent coaching, it won the
competition’s Foundational Research prize. We organized
a small reception to congratulate the students, and the
presidents of Paris Descartes and Paris Diderot universi-
ties came. The fearless young people these students were,
they told the university presidents that, while a cocktail
hour was nice and all, what they really would have liked
was a degree for the work they did. We got the message,
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SUMMARY
and we incorporated the iGEM program into the first

year of the master’s degree, which earned students an
M1 degree, the first part of the master’s. A little later, we
finished setting up our undergraduate degree, the first in
France in which students are taught through research.
Again, this was possible thanks to the help of the Betten-
court Schueller Foundation and the governing bodies of
Paris Descartes University. Thus our degree offering was
complete.
Soon after, we started developing programs for youths,
particularly for those from underprivileged backgrounds.
When in 2005 I was invited to the World Science Forum
in Budapest to receive the European Young Investigator
Award, I followed online the riots that were shaking
several low-income urban areas throughout France in
the wake of the deaths of two teenagers, Bouna Traoré
and Zyed Benna, who had a deadly run-in with police
in the Paris region. Rarely had the contrast between the
“winners” and “losers” of globalization seemed more
apparent to me. My personal experience ties me as much
to the first group as to the second. I have never forgotten
my adolescence in Monclar, which wasn’t in the news that
year but which had been affected by rioting in 2003.
a cooperative, evolving ecosystem
Is it possible to build bridges between these two so seem-

ingly different worlds? At the forum I debated this ques-
tion across the aisles of the auditorium with Gaëll Mainguy,
then president of the World Association of Young Scien-
tists (WAYS), and the great Hungarian biochemist Péter
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SUMMARY
Csermely, who had launched an initiative 10 years prior

that gave 10,000 Hungarian high schoolers opportunities
to conduct scientific research. Péter talked to us about
some of the problems specific to Hungary, starting with
the educational segregation of Roma children. As it so
happens, the issue has since worsened. The Council of
Europe even felt the need to issue a statement affirming
that school segregation had become increasingly wide-
spread over the course of the past few years.v
The following summer we invited Péter Csermely
and two of his high schoolers, one of which was Roma,
to visit the ENS. We wanted to set up a program in
France similar to Péter’s in Hungary. The Association
Paris Montagne was thus founded thanks to the work of
dozens of students and researchers, and Paris Montagne
started the Science Ac’, a program seeking to open the
doors of laboratories and (hopefully) the whole world of
research to high schoolers, particularly those from low-in-
come backgrounds. The president of the association was
Livio Riboli-Sasco, another ugly duckling whose doctoral
dissertation no one wanted to supervise because it was
too out of the ordinary. He would eventually find a place
to pursue it at our brand-new graduate school, the CRI.
We were becoming a cooperative, evolving ecosystem
covering a lot of ground. In a vertical sense, we had
programs available to students from secondary school to
the PhD level (and soon we would get involved in kinder-
gartens and primary schools), and in a horizontal sense we
took in researchers from across all fields, although most
were in the sciences. And all this was thanks to the bacteria
I had been observing for 15 years, who didn’t need minis-
ters or centralized governments in order to get organized.
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SUMMARY
fairy godmothers
The Romans had a god of opportune moments: Portunus.

Portunus is the god of keys, doors, ports, encounters.
When he opened a door for you, you had to use time to the
fullest. In this way he’s similar to the Greek god Kairos.
Kairos’ single lock of hair hung in front of his face, and you
had to seize it when he was coming toward you, otherwise
once he passed by it would be too late.
I’m an agnostic, but I think that if there had been gods
looking over our shoulders during that period, it would
have been the gods of opportunity. In our changing
world, there are so many opportune moments that arise,
and students know better than anyone else how to seize
them. We constructed a place where they could maximize
opportunities, and they did this with some pretty amazing
results, starting projects for which the CRI is still known
to this day and which continue to inspire students to want
to join us. Indeed, the students have been the engine of
our exponential growth.
We’ve also been fortunate to have had a few fairy
godmothers along the way, most importantly the Betten-
court Schueller Foundation, with its motto “taking talent
to the top.” Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the daughter of
its founders, supervises the foundation, and Olivier Brault
now runs it together with Armand de Boissière. Without
the foundation, the CRI could never have become what
it is today. Until 2003, I had never heard of the founda-
tion and didn’t know anything about the family’s history,
but that year I got a call from the eminent microbiol-
ogist Pascale Cossart delivering a message that wouldn’t
give me much time to think. When I got the call, I had
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just gotten back to France from the US and was horribly

jetlagged. In my stupor I could barely make out what he
was saying: “François, are you free tomorrow? You and
your colleague Ivan Matic are going to receive the Liliane
Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences.”
The next day we received the prize and a large grant.
The prize has been awarded since 1997 to researchers
under the age of 45 who have begun promising initia-
tives in the field of science. Why is the foundation inter-
ested in the sciences? We heard at the ceremony the
story of the foundation’s legacy, of Eugène Schueller,
born in 1881, the son of a modest baker. He had come to
Paris in the late 19th century and was fortunate enough
to be able to study chemistry and conduct research in a
nascent cosmetics industry. He developed the first hair-
color formula that wouldn’t get washed out in the rain.
That was in 1907. Two years later, he founded the Société
française de teintures inoffensives pour cheveux (“The
Safe Hair-Coloring Company of France”), which would
later become L’Oréal. Schueller’s work would produce
a considerable fortune for his family, and it was in his
honor that his daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, wanted to
use the family fortune to create grants to bolster young
scientists.
Former French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer was a
member of the foundation’s board of directors. When
they later decided to go ahead with funding the CRI, he
shared with the family his thoughts that neither the public
nor the private sectors would be able to get something like
the CRI off the ground, and he congratulated their efforts
to help young people go exploring off the beaten path. I
share his point of view. It’s uncommon in France, but my
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multiple stays in the US have accustomed me over time to

the idea of research being funded by philanthropy.
The CRI’s journey may have begun in a coffee-break
room with a handful of pioneering souls, but our evolving,
innovative project has seen exponential growth, doubling
in size on average every 18 months since its inception.
We’ve consistently changed our structural framework to
meet the expectations of the ever-increasing number of
students. And their ages and disciplinary backgrounds
continue to diversify more and more. I am beyond grateful
to our teams, which have been able to offer students the
freedom they need, and I congratulate them for persisting
through the challenges that come with the CRI’s constant
evolution. It’s never easy to make the everyday function
properly when you’re always thinking about the future,
but we’ve been able to do it only because everyone has
been on board from day one.
social entrepreneurs are heralding

the world to come
It was through the Science Ac’ that I met Arnaud

Mourot, codirector of the European branch of the inter-
national organization Ashoka. Ashoka was founded in
1981 by American Bill Drayton.vi He worked for the US
Environmental Protection Agency during Jimmy Cart-
er’s presidency and the global consulting firm McKinsey
& Company, and he has also taught at both Harvard
and Stanford. Many credit him with popularizing the
term “social entrepreneur,” a term that Ashoka defines
as an individual “with innovative solutions to society’s
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most pressing social, cultural, and environmental chal-

lenges.” After 35 years, Ashoka’s network includes nearly
4,000 social entrepreneurs in 93 countries. On Asho-
ka’s website, I read that the inspiration for the name
comes from the Sanskrit word Ashoka, meaning “the
active absence of sorrow,” and from the Indian Emperor
Ashoka, who was one of the earliest great social entre-
preneurs. “After unifying India in the 3rd century BC,
Emperor Ashoka renounced violence and became one
of history’s most tolerant, global-minded, and creative
leaders, pioneering innovations in economic development
and social welfare.”vii
Ashoka is also based in France, and codirector Arnaud
Mourot came to visit the CRI. I shared with him our young
history. He quickly came to a conclusion, saying, “You’re
a social entrepreneur.” Later he would ask me to become
a part of the Ashoka Fellowship and partner with their
global network, which seeks to create of a world in which
everyone is a change maker. I was grateful, but I didn’t
even understand what it meant to be a social entrepreneur.
“If you want a better understanding, read How to Change
the World by David Bornstein,”viii he told me. The book’s
subtitle alone seemed like the title of a major action plan:
Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
In the book, I read about Brazilian Fabio Rosa and
his low-cost technology for providing electricity to rural
areas; Indian Jeroo Billimoria’s Childline, an initiative for
improving street children’s access to emergency telephone
services; and South African Veronica Khosa, who created a
nursing service for AIDS victims in poverty-stricken areas.
Reading the book, I noticed a common feature between
these initiatives and those of–you guessed it–bacteria.
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Similar to humans, when they’re not adapted to their envi-

ronment, they have a few options. The easiest is to migrate
and look for an environment more conducive to their
survival, although that’s not always possible–especially in
the case of humans. It will be hard to change planets once
we wreck our environment beyond repair. The second
option, the most dangerous, is to mutate. Like a lottery,
random mutations only rarely land on the winning combi-
nation that allows the organism to survive in its new envi-
ronment. The third option, which the book illustrated over
and over again, is adapting the environment to your needs.
In biology it’s called “niche construction” and “ecosystem
engineering.” Humans do this very well, as do bacteria,
but the best example comes from beavers. Lakes are their
preferred habitat, not rivers. In the absence of natural lakes,
they build dams as a way to engineer the ecosystem, not
only for themselves and their offspring but for the neigh-
boring species as well. I began to think about the beaver
as a metaphor, wondering how one might go about re-en-
gineering the learning ecosystem. This is a key piece to the
larger puzzle this book hopes to convey.
we are living through a paradigm shift
But I didn’t realize its importance at the time. It still

wasn’t clear to me if the signs of change I was seeing more
and more of weren’t merely evidence that there can be
exceptions to the rule while the rule remains nonetheless
the rule. But perhaps a new paradigm was appearing, a
transition moving toward a new worldview. The Amer-
ican philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhnix
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popularized the term paradigm shift and demonstrated

very well how difficult it is to know when such intellec-
tual crises are occurring in real time. He showed that
when a prevailing worldview generates contradictions,
those who ascribe to that worldview will simply ignore
the anomalies. Eventually, however, a free thinker will
come along and attempt to reproduce the anomalies.
When it turns out that they can be reproduced, these are
no longer considered anomalies, but rather evidence that
a new paradigm is emerging.
In the early 1960s this idea was revolutionary, and
indeed it remains troublesome for those who still want to
believe that science is somehow objective. Kuhn argued
that, more than the results of lab experiments or new
emerging theories, the predominant paradigm that a
scientific community ascribes to will determine what
questions it finds worth considering. Are the new ways
of learning and researching anomalies? Or will digitaliza-
tion bring about a new paradigm?
I wanted to find out for myself, so in 2011, the CRI
organized the first NightScience event for discussing new
ways to learn through research. Night science is a term
coined by French biologist François Jacob, winner of
the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. He
discussed two different cultures in science. He said science
in the works has two aspects, what could be called day
science and night science. Day science employs reasoning
that meshes like gears; its results that have the strength of
certainty. Night science, on the other hand, wanders blind.
It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start.
Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, ques-
tion itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort
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of workshop of what’s possible, where what will become

the building material of science is worked out.x
There are examples of night science throughout the
world, and you will read about them throughout these
pages. Indeed there are too many of them to pass them
off as mere anomalies.
we’re born scientists, yet so soon we forget
Also in 2011, American psychologist and philosopher

Alison Gopnik gave a brilliant TED Talk called “What
Do Babies Think?”xi based off her books The Philosoph-
ical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth,
Love, and the Meaning of Life and The Scientist in the
Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind.xii Its
main message is one I now live by, and it can be summed
up in a few words: “We’re born scientists.” She shows that
child brain development occurs the same way scientific
understanding does, i.e., through experimentation on the
surrounding environment. If this is innate behavior, it’s
what surrounds us that can help us harness and develop
our potential as scientists.
In science journals as of late, more and more articles
are being published by children at younger and younger
ages. That’s certainly an anomaly that should make us
reconsider the prevailing worldview. Also regular people,
sometimes referred to as citizen scientists, are publishing
more and more in science journals. This was an anomaly
too, but over time it has become something of an estab-
lished practice. It’s part of a movement that’s considered a
new branch in research called citizen science. We would
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soon do our part in contributing to this paradigm shift

when we created a program that it’s my great pleasure to
describe to you now.
Here again, the genesis of this initiative was contin-
gent on a very important encounter with Ange Ansour,
a translator-turned-schoolteacher in a Priority Educa-
tion Zone school outside Paris. I passed along to her an
article about bumblebees from the British Royal Society’s
biology journal. The article had been written by 8-year-old
students in a science class.xiii “It would be great if our kids
could have the chance to work with bumblebees,” she said.
“But French national education would never allow bees in
the classroom. We could try ants though.” Laurent Keller,
a world-renowned myrmecologist, or ant specialist, put me
in touch with two of his colleagues from Pierre and Marie
Curie University: Thibaud Monnin and Mathieu Molet.
They agreed to get on board and be available to Ange’s
students via e-mail to answer questions they may want to
ask (themselves) throughout the year. Then we built an ant
habitat in Ange’s multi-age classroom.xiv At the end of the
year, we had the students present their observations and
findings, each reporting two things they learned, similar
to how scientists present at symposiums. It lasted an hour,
and my colleagues from the CRI and I were astonished.
Tamara Milosevic, a biologist and education pioneer inter-
ested in learning through research, took the floor.
“I have learned so many things from you today,” she
said to the children. “How were you able to ask your-
selves so many questions?”
“The first question we asked ourselves at the beginning
of the year was whether or not we could ask questions,”
the students answered.
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“You didn’t think you could?” Tamara asked.

“No,” the students said. “Grown-ups are always saying,
‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ At home, too, some of us have
parents who say it’s not good to ask too many ques-
tions. So, when the scientists told us it was good to ask
questions, we were confused. We talked it over, and we
decided that when it came to the ants, we could ask all
the questions we wanted.”
“So, then you made your observations and wrote to the
scientists when you didn’t understand something?”
“No, first we looked in the books at the library, and then
on the Internet, but eventually we figured out we couldn’t
find all the answers in books or believe everything that
we found on the Internet. We found Vikidia [like Wiki-
pedia but for children] and we added things to the article
about ants. We wrote to the myrmecologists only when
we really couldn’t find an answer.”
“Do you have an example?” she asked.
“Like how does the queen eat? Because she never leaves
the ant colony.”
“And what was the scientists’ answer?”
“The ants use their ‘crop,’ a second stomach in which
they can store food for the ants who never leave the
colony. But first it took us a month to understand all the
myrmecology vocabulary.”
At first, the students reproduced laboratory experi-
ments that researchers had already done. They did this
until one day they came up with results that didn’t match
those of the researchers. Specifically, the ants had built a
wall that barred entrance to the ant colony. They wrote
to the myrmecologists about it, and they responded
that they didn’t know why the ants had built the wall.
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Their hypothesis was that the ants were perhaps depos-

iting things from within the colony. The children had
their doubts about that hypothesis, however, because it
didn’t fit with their observations. So, they tested it out.
They did an experiment in which they took down the
wall and scattered little scraps of paper and leaves and
things throughout the habitat. The ants responded by
building an even bigger wall with the debris the children
had deposited, disproving the scientists’ hypothesis. The
children understood that, while scientists know a lot, they
don’t know everything, their explanations aren’t always
right, and you can test the different hypotheses.
That has been one of the most successful and enriching
experiences we’ve had, and I love sharing it. I did just that
with a journalist from the New York Times on a plane trip
back from the World Innovation Summit for Education
(WISE), and the story piqued his interest. He wound up
coming to the CRI and to Ange Ansour’s classroom, and
he wrote an article about the students. Our young scien-
tists had made waves all the way across the Atlantic!xv
I was also invited on French public radio to share the
story on a segment called Les Savanturiers, a portman-
teau of French words savant, meaning intelligent, and
aventuriers, adventurers. The adventurers of intelligence.
The knowledge explorers. The kids really liked it as a
title, and French public radio eventually let us use it as
the name of our new education program.
Ange’s class had a Twitter account with hundreds
of followers, and eventually even the City Hall of Paris
heard about her class. The city was reforming school
extracurricular activities at the time and was looking for
new ones. We wanted to spread the program to schools all
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throughout Paris, and although it was painful for Ange to

part with her students, she agreed to join our team to help
set up identical programs in 20 afterschool workshops.
We then found 20 PhD holders from different fields to
lead these groups in 20 different research topics, span-
ning from astrophysics to botany to myrmecology.
And it was a huge success!
The kids learned to love the scientific method, and their
teachers sat in on our workshops, stayed throughout the
sessions to learn about what we were doing, and some
even asked us to take over science classes in their schools.
We of course refused. We could work with them, we said,
but never replace them. Little by little the Savanturiers
started programs in preschools, then branched out to high
schools, including vocational and technical high schools.
The program even got certified as part of President François
Hollande’s social-reform initiative La France s’engage (“take
action France”). This made it easier for us to set up even more
workshops and get recognition from bigger institutions.
Just like the CRI itself, the Savanturiers grew from just
one classroom, developing rapidly by taking on more and
more opportunities.
A good example of this is the teaching innovations we
helped start in Paris suburb Gennevilliers in partnership
with the local city government and French electronic-sys-
tems company Thales, which has a site in Gennevilliers.
The project shows how a research center can catalyze an
educational ecosystem that’s local, challenging, and inno-
vative, serving the high standards of the public school
system and located in an area seeking improvements
in education. Since September 2015, this partnership
between the Thales Foundation and the Savanturiers
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has created a virtuous cycle that benefits the entire city.

Dozens of classes from primary school through secondary
school undertake various learning-through-research
projects, with the Savanturiers helping with lesson plans
and engineers from the Thales company volunteering to
provide scientific input.
The success of the Savanturiers is based on how bene-
ficial it is for students as well as teachers, as they derive
professional development from the program as well. The
Savanturiers won over the City Hall of Paris, which offered
its support and agreed to expand the program throughout
the city. Thales also plans to implement the program at its
other sites, both in France and abroad, and other regions
of France and other companies have also reached out to
create similar partnerships that they see as positive for their
employees, teachers, and of course, students. The boost
that the Savanturiers helped to provide has turned into an
empowering program for everyone involved.
At the last Savanturiers conference at the Thales site,
where students were presenting their findings, three of
the mothers of students who themselves had found out
they could become scientists also got on stage to share
discoveries from their investigations.
travel broadens the mind,

both for the young and those
who stay young at heart
One of the great advantages to going to the Ecole Poly-

technique is using the officer stipend to travel during vaca-
tion periods. After a short time, I had traveled throughout
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Europe before venturing out to other continents. I learned

so much. There’s a common French expression that goes,
Les voyages forment la jeunesse (“Nothing shapes a young
mind like travel”), and European study abroad programs
such as Erasmus, trans-European internship programs,
and interim years for traveling are looked upon as real
advantages for students.
The Chinese have another way of expressing the same
idea. They say that if you’re familiar with only one way of
doing things, you’ll have difficulty imagining another way
of doing things. If you have the opportunity to experience
other ways of doing things, you can keep imagining more
possibilities. French philosopher and expert on Chinese
culture François Jullien demonstrated the same notion
through philosophical concepts. He compared the way
the Chinese and the Greeks understand the certain ideas
in completely different ways. For example, in Chinese,
the word for “crisis” has two meanings. One means some-
thing dangerous, the same meaning we have, but another
means opportunity, or a chance to change the way people
think about a given situation.
For children (and adults) who grow up in two or more
cultures, encouraging them to reflect on these diverse
ways of perceiving things can help them understand the
complexity of the world. It can help them be aware of
the importance of cultural context and language in one’s
outlook. Migrant children, for example, will construct a
“third culture” that is neither the culture of their parents
nor that of the country of refuge. These children are
sometimes called third culture kids. Culture for them
takes on a meaning that is very subjective and specific.
While we need to be prepared to help these children
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through identity crises they may face, their third culture

makes them more open, adaptable, and more suited than
most to understand globalization and its challenges.
International studies have shown that Australia and
Canada are two countries better equipped than France
at helping immigrant children succeed. These countries
welcome them by celebrating their culture of origin
and inviting them to be ambassadors of that culture so
as to share it with others. When they travel elsewhere
throughout their lives, they’ll then share the culture of
their country of adoption.
In Singapore, a rich cultural melting pot, heads of
companies and especially schools are sent around the
world to observe how colleagues in other countries do
the same work. Their duty is to learn from others, be it
through their successes or their failures. This open-mind-
edness has contributed to the success of both the Singa-
porean economy and particularly the education system.
We could learn something from this system, sending
around the world the members of our “learning society,”
which has so much to learn from other cultures, saying
nothing of how much we learn about ourselves when put
in role of the outsider.
collective intelligence is more powerful

than artificial intelligence
When I think of the CRI’s history and all the projects

described in this book, I get very optimistic, or perhaps
more than optimistic. I like to think that the historical
moment we’re living through is similar to the one in the
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18th century that produced the Enlightenment thinkers.

In just a few decades, they invented the press, science,
publishing, science journals, and modern democracy. At
the outset, the Enlightenment thinkers were an extreme
minority, but then they all began talking to one another,
setting up an informal network or “invisible college,” to
use British chemist Robert Boyle’s term from the 1640s.
At that time, it took several generations for anything to
change, both because cultural transformations take a long
time by nature and because the technology they had for
exchanging information, i.e., the printing press, was very
slow. American historian Elizabeth Eisenstein dates the
start of what she called the unacknowledged revolution
with the invention of the printing press.xvi
Today’s technologies are much faster, and our revolu-
tion isn’t based on one technology like the Enlighten-
ment was. Rather, it’s based on a galaxy of interconnected
technologies: genetic, biological, cognitive, nano, and so
on. And we have more and more access to these tech-
nologies on more and more devices, namely our smart-
phones. We are still a long way away from being able to
fully imagine, let alone analyze or really understand, the
impact our phones have had on our lives, so numerous
are the potential ways they have changed how we live.
We lack spaces for thinking about our future, and simi-
larly, spaces where foundational and applied research
aren’t opposed to each other. They can help us assess
the ethical and social implications of the technological
advances we’re seeing.
We have to lead a collective reflection on these issues
and mobilize collective awareness, both with regard to
major technological transformations and the great chal-
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lenges our planet faces, i.e., biodiversity loss, climate

change, etc. We won’t be able to meet these challenges
without collective action. We should mobilize collective
intelligence in all spaces where humans come together,
starting with classrooms, businesses, and government
bureaus, and we must reorient these spaces toward these
goals. These spaces as they are currently were designed
with implements and organizing principles dating from
the 19th century–mostly hierarchical, small-scale, and for
the purposes of control. All information rose to the top
so that those at the top could remain informed and send
decisions back down for everyone to follow.
where there is evolution,

there is tension–and that’s normal
Let’s come back to Socrates. The charges condemning

Socrates to death are revealing. Not only was he accused
of introducing new gods, but more importantly he was
accused of corrupting youth. His prosecutors could foresee
political fallout from his teachings. Should education
based on curiosity take precedence over education based
on allegiance to institutions, the city-state was at grave risk.
Socrates’ defense for his actions was meek. He admitted
that what he was doing was not allowed or acceptable. He
did not deny the accusations, and he would die for it.
That age-old tension still exists between, on the one
hand, those who submit to institutions and mechanically
repeat lessons based in outdated knowledge, and on the
other hand, those who believe in a system based on the
capacity to wonder, question everything including the
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rules, and create the world of tomorrow. This tension is

also political, which is important to keep in mind when
trying to understand the fierceness of debates on educa-
tion policy. We’re seeing a confrontation between two
systems that seem to be diametrically opposed to each
other, and when their proponents face off, the sparks fly.
That’s how it is in any transitional period. The Athens
that condemned Socrates to death was the same Athens
that produced the West’s first philosophers and invented
the first forms of democracy, science, secondary schools,
institutional education, etc. The Renaissance witnessed
similar tensions because of the major technological
advance that was the printing press. In our own time,
with the birth of the Internet and the digital revolution,
we see similar tensions. These tensions are sometimes
better understood by the avant-garde, the artists at the
cutting edge of these changes. That’s why the CRI seeks
to be a middle ground, or an intermediary space that
catalyzes interactions between the “upper ground” (insti-
tutions) and the underground (innovative individuals who
are blazing new trails but who are often left isolated and
even marginalized).
three idiots trying to dream up

the future of education
Although I am by far the least artistic member of my

family, the community I grew up in placed art at the
center of culture and life. Art allows us to explore other
ways of seeing the world and can take us beyond what
we’d be capable of experiencing if we didn’t have it. J.
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Roger Hollingsworth, an American historian and soci-

ologist, showed that the best researchers are very often
artists, as they are able to break down barriers, move
freely between different worlds, and play with one realm
of imagination or another.xvii
From a very young age, I was always a big reader. I
remember at the age of 6 reading my first novel while my
parents were asleep. At the library, I read everything I
could get my hands on that had to do with mythology and
legends from different cultures. I was extremely fortunate
to grow up in Avignon, a city with lots of festivals and a
major mecca for theater. I learned a lot from the perfor-
mances and the discussions we’d have afterward in the
narrow streets and cobblestone plazas of that old papal
city. When I got to Paris, I went to a lot of art exhibits and
discovered the richness of cinema in movies from every
era and from all over the world. On occasion I would
even go into a movie theater for the first showing and
not leave until the last showing. There too, discussions
between friends after the movie was always enlightening.
My favorite movie is 3 Idiots, an Indian movie that
didn’t get distributed much outside Asia, which is unfor-
tunate, as it was number one at the box office in several
Asian countries. I first heard about it from Filipino and
Chinese students of mine, and I’ve watched it a total of
five times already. It’s a window into how the Indian
higher education system works. The system is even more
competitive and ruthless than most, with bullying and
family and social pressures that push many young people
to commit suicide.
But the film is profoundly joyful and funny. The leader
of the three idiots, Rancho, is unerringly creative and
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funny. He winds up becoming the top student in his class

while he actively denounces the limits of the system. He
even woos the daughter of the school’s very traditionalist
dean. Drawing from his experience, he goes on to start
a school in the foothills of the Himalayas. There, chil-
dren can exercise their creativity by solving problems
and patenting their solutions. The movie is partly based
on true stories, for example that of Sonam Wangchuk, an
Ashoka Fellow. He began a school where students find
solutions to the challenges they find in their communities.
He also leads interesting debates on the values and struc-
ture of education systems.
I would love for everyone to see this cinematic jewel that
demonstrates in the funniest of ways the paradigm shift
and tensions covered in this book. The film forces us to
ask how we got to this point in our education systems.
Are young people trying to find what’s right for them
really idiots? If that’s true, then there are countless idiots
out there who want to infect everyone with change. I’ve
never seen a movie or even documentary on the impact of
a given film, but I really want to see one about the effect
3 Idiots can have on young people (and everyone else for
that matter). It’s all the more worth it if helps us realize
that what we see in the movie is a reality and that indeed
there are spaces, more and more of them around the world,
where we can learn differently and help build the future.
In its ability to move us in the most profound ways and
have an impact on millions of people at the same time,
cinema represents an opportunity to develop awareness
and change our collective culture. I bet that the impact
of cinema could be even greater if we gave ourselves
opportunities at the end of the movie to meet the other
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moviegoers, who like us were so drawn to the emotions

of the film that they literally “got in motion” when they
saw it. Discussing with people other than those in our
close circles, expressing our reactions, and cultivating our
reflections with others can be impetus for starting collec-
tives that can move toward action in ways that people
individually either can’t or won’t do.
Every era has had a space to debate things. The Agora is
where the Greeks talked over the issues that worried them;
Parisian salons and cafés are where the Enlightenment
thinkers met for discussion; many television programs
played a similar role hosting moderated debates. I’m not
sure that talk shows and social media handle debate quite
as well. Debate should help both the debaters and the
viewing audience to grow. We’ll likely need to find a new
way of having open discussions in the digital age.
Art can open our imaginations, and discussion can help
us understand where others are coming from. There are
people at the CRI and elsewhere who are passionate about
both. I think these are essential for the health of our
democracies and our capacity to think about the world to
come. Cinema lets us see through the eyes of another, and
by analyzing the emotions we felt during the experience,
we can know both ourselves and others better.
“know thyself”
More generally, what I want is for schools to reconnect

with the Socratic teaching “know thyself.” It’s an imper-
ative that should be at the heart of the education system.
What do you know about yourself? What do we know
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about ourselves? As technological advances continue and

computers know more and more about us–at least things
about us that we can’t know or would rather forget–I
think we have an increasing need to ask ourselves what
it means to be human, what it means to be oneself, and
where we want to be in this rapidly evolving world.
Young people are more motivated than anyone to look
for answers to these questions. And innovations rarely
come from those already in power.
Now that you know me a little better, let’s continue
our journey and take a moment to talk about a central
issue, which is that in order to learn, you must start by
unlearning.
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
4
Before you can learn,
you have to unlearn
There’s a story, perhaps you’ve heard it, that illustrates

how hard it is to give up old ways of beliefs and ways of
doing things. It’s the story of the macaques on Koshima
Island, Japan. To attract the monkeys out of the forest for
observation, scientists came up with the idea of placing
sweet potatoes on the island’s sandy beach. This trick
made the potatoes hard to eat, though, as the potatoes
got covered in sand that ground on the monkeys’ teeth.
An adolescent macaque named Imo came out to the
beach, pulled a potato out of the sand, then washed it
in the ocean before eating it. Her friends came by, and
she showed them how to wash the potatoes, and then all
the adolescent females adopted the behavior. Next, the
adolescent males picked it up, and then the adult females,
then the alpha males. Sometime later, the scientists placed
rice on the beach instead of potatoes. The exact same
sequence occurred. Clever little Imo found a way to get
the sand off the rice. A brief aside: Getting sand off rice is
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not as easy as you may think. Since one of the aims of this
book is to motivate its readers to wonder about the world
and do research, I’ll let you figure out how to do it. And
don’t just look it up online. Once you figure it out, you’ll
admire the ingenuity of this not-so-distant cousin of ours.
Anyway, the exact sequence occurred of transmitting
the new skill within the troop. It goes from adolescent to
adolescent, then from mothers to alpha males.i
Japanese macaques are not the only species in which
the alpha males have trouble questioning old habits
and adopting new ones. The history of science is full of
discoveries that took years to be accepted as fact simply
because the alpha males–in this case the researchers with
the most power–refused to admit that their vision of the
world was wrong.
One of the most famous is a tragic case, that of Ignaz
Philipp Semmelweis (1818–1865). By the way, his story is
exceptionally retold in the book Semmelweis by French
writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.ii Semmelweis was a
German Hungarian physician who specialized in obstet-
rics. He noticed that women preferred giving birth with
midwives rather than with doctors, not simply because
the women liked consulting with other women over men,
but because women felt survival rates were higher with
midwives. Semmelweis looked into the phenomenon
and found it was true. Mortality rates in the clinic where
student doctors performed deliveries were higher than in
the clinic where midwives worked. He then observed the
differences in practices between each clinic. Each clinic
followed the same procedures except for one impor-
tant difference: The student doctors went directly from
autopsying cadavers to delivering babies without washing
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Before you can learn, you have to unlearn
their hands. It’s one of history’s most tragic ironies. The

student doctors were autopsying women who had died of
childbed fever in the hopes of finding a cure to childbed
fever, meanwhile it was the doctors who were infecting
them with the disease by not washing their hands before
going into the delivery room.
Semmelweis then published his findings, making the
case for the correlation between hand washing and
mortality from childbed fever and recommending that
doctors wash their hands. No one believed him except for
one doctor, a man who had delivered his beloved niece
without washing his hands, and his niece later died from
the disease. Upon learning that it was he who had caused
her death, he committed suicide. For Semmelweis, it’s
perhaps his great tragedy that the only person who
believed him wound up killing himself. After years spent
struggling in vain to get the medical community to take
his findings seriously, he suffered a nervous breakdown
and died shortly after, dejected in a mental hospital. It
wasn’t until Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur understood
the mechanisms of infection that hygiene would grad-
ually become standard practice. Today, Semmelweis is
recognized as the father of the fight against nosocomial,
or hospital-acquired, infections, although there are still
those who don’t wash their hands as often as they should
or think critically about their own behavior.
Semmelweis may have lived 150 years ago, but
humanity is still far from immune to repeating such trag-
edies. Someone can be right about something, but it still
takes a number of people (hopefully influential people)
to agree with her for it to be considered right. It’s not
hard to imagine that Semmelweis’s colleagues were not
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brutes but rather honest doctors who wanted nothing

more than to save lives, and for that very reason they
were unable to accept the notion that they had involun-
tarily caused the deaths of so many.
It’s also the case that scientists who make important
discoveries that challenge orthodoxy will have the hardest
time accepting subsequent paradigm shifts, in which
they themselves are being challenged by the younger
generation.
our brains will have us think the moon is

made of green cheese
If you type “rabbit-duck illusion” in a Google image

search, you’ll see a well-known optical illusion that was
first published in a German magazine in 1892.iii It’s a
classic optical illusion in which some people who look
at it see a rabbit, others see a duck, and some see both.
This particular optical illusion became popular in 1899
thanks to American psychologist Joseph Jastrow. He
used it to show how our culture acts on our brains in the
production of representations. Social media loves these
brain-bending images, and if you type optical illusion in
an Internet search, you’ll find dozens of other examples:
figures that start to move when your eyes move, identical
faces that seem to express different emotions depending
on the image’s heading, etc.
The fundamental idea behind them is that our brains
interpret signs from the physical world. Nothing is fixed.
Everything is filtered. This function in our brains gives
us a considerable advantage and has done so for a long
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time. Our remote ancestors could distinguish between

predators and prey just from a few visual clues thanks
to this capacity in the brain. We’re fortunate that we can
produce sense out of very complex data in the world, and
this has given us an undeniable evolutionary advantage
throughout history.
the allegory of the “alle-gorilla”
I thought these little optical illusions were all fun and

games until I looked at one in a scientific context. It was
during one of our stays on Île Berder, the place where
the CRI in part started. One day, one of our colleagues
showed us a video of an experiment in which a team in
black T-shirts and another in white T-shirts intermin-
gled while passing basketballs back and forth to the
other members of their team. We were told to count the
number of passes the team in white made.iv It’s actually a
difficult exercise. Each one of us had a different answer
by the end. We were then asked if we had noticed
anything strange during the video. I hadn’t seen anything
except that at a certain point something was trying to
get in the way of my concentrating. Our colleague then
had us watch the video a second time, this time without
counting the passes. We saw, right in the middle of the
passing exercise, someone in a gorilla costume walk to
the center of the frame, do a bit of chest-pounding, and
walk off. It should have been impossible to miss, right? I
couldn’t believe my own inattentional blindness.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about how many
gorillas I had missed throughout my life, including in my
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life as a scientist. When scientists focus all their energy

on a single phenomenon, we’re really just counting the
number of passes. The gorilla video was a revelation for
me, as I realized that in science we can get so focused on
one thing that we miss the blatantly obvious. I now refer
to this experience as the allegory of the alle-gorilla.
Cognitive scientists have identified dozens of our cogni-
tive biases, which affect how we process information.
An example of one of these is backfire effect, also called
boomerang effect. This was at the center of a much-
talked-about study in the US in which Republican voters
were presented with factual information that contradicted
what Republican candidates at the time were saying. Not
only did the facts not change the minds of the voters, but
the facts further entrenched initial convictions.v The find-
ings are somewhat unreliable considering that the most
talked about of these experiments couldn’t be repro-
duced. Nonetheless, a potential hypothesis is that, when
challenged, people will seek above all to defend them-
selves and the group they feel they belong to.vi
Another very common cognitive bias, one which goes
hand in hand with backfire effect, is active information
avoidance. It posits that I will avoid not only the informa-
tion that challenges my beliefs and threatens my identity
but also the information that could be potentially bene-
ficial to me. Heavy smokers don’t read many studies on
the link between cigarettes and lung cancer, just like how
alcoholics don’t read studies linking alcohol to various
liver diseases. They’re vaguely aware of the truth, but they
don’t want to look further into it.
Huntington’s disease, which progressively breaks down
nerve cells in the brain, was also looked at from a cogni-
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tive bias perspective. It’s a potentially fatal disease and

one that we still can’t cure. Worse still is that it’s an auto-
somal dominant disorder, meaning that you as someone
with Huntington’s disease have a 50 percent chance of
passing on the disease to your child. Economists will
tell you that if you know you’re at risk of dying 20 years
earlier than the average life expectancy, you’ll plan your
life differently. You won’t save up for retirement, perhaps
you won’t have kids so as to avoid the risk of passing on
the disease. In short, you’ll take a different approach to
life. Rationally speaking, you have every reason to find
out if you have the disease, but the psychological cost of
finding out is so heavy that only 5 percent of those at risk
get tested.
This is one of many limits to the rationality of Homo
economicus. For those who haven’t taken economics,
Homo economicus is the theoretical human being
who behaves with strictly rational self-interest. We
all manifest the limits of our rationality to varying
degrees. At some point, you’ve likely objected to going
to the doctor for tests or avoided opening an envelope
containing the results of an important medical test. If
this doesn’t sound like you, then it probably sounds like
someone you know.
the power of cognitive biases
Another amusing test that confirms the power of this

cognitive bias is the following: Ask a bunch of people
if they think they’re smarter than the average person.
The majority of them will respond yes, but statistically
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speaking that can’t be the case. This is the same answer

you get when you ask people if they feel they’re better
drivers than most. In a formal experiment, some of those
interviewed were told that people close to them had also
been also interviewed, and they agreed he or she was
above-average smart, attractive, etc. “But we didn’t ask
your friends why they felt that way. Would you like us to
find out?” Yes, of course! Find out as much as you can!
Ask them more questions! Tell me everything!
Another group was told that people close to them were
interviewed and felt he or she wasn’t above-average intel-
ligent or beautiful. “But we didn’t ask them why. Would
you like us to find out?” Uh, no. “What if we paid you?”
Absolutely not.
Results of these kinds of experiments are always the
same, whether it’s a question of health, beauty, intelli-
gence, or social standing. The fact is we don’t really want
to know what others think of us, especially if we think
their responses will be negative ones. Don’t believe me?
You don’t need a PhD in behavioral science to prove it.
Your Facebook account will tell you. How many of our
“friends” think or speak poorly of us? How many have a
completely different point of view from us? The answer
is not many. By contrast, how many of them affirm our
beliefs? How many of them are part of the same tribe
we’re a part of? The answer is the majority.
popping our filter bubbles
Facebook’s algorithm, like all social media algorithms,

aggravates the effects of our cognitive biases. It suggests
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to us friends and shows us news and opinions that are in

line with what we have already liked based on previous
Internet activity. There’s no question: It’s the cross-fertili-
zation of cognitive biases and the prejudice of algorithms
that makes it so hard to pop the filter bubbles that form
around us on the Internet, making it easier for fake news
to gain traction. After all, isn’t it so nice just to preach to
the choir?
The filter-bubble phenomenon existed before the
Internet and social media. Throughout history, anybody
who has ever wanted to push the human race toward
more rational beliefs, more rigorous science, or more
open, democratic debate has had to face impenetrable
filter bubbles. Read or reread the early Greek philoso-
phers, the first democratic thinkers, the Enlightenment
thinkers of the 18th century, even the founders of the
Internet. The Internet founders were brilliant minds
convinced that mass circulation of information, ration-
ality, and scientific proofs would foster democratic
debate the likes of which had never been seen before
and, in the long run, improve how democracy functions.
But it hasn’t gone that way, which is in large part due
to the power of our cognitive biases and our need for
recognition within our tribe.
However, there do exist situations in which we’re better
able to bear disappointing news or question our own
beliefs. This happens when we feel supported, cared for,
listened to, and in a way, loved. No matter what age you’re
living in, that takes time.
How can we create such an environment in an age
of mass circulation of information? How can we start
to value reason over emotion? Since the 1970s, the late
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French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio had been

warning us about the global accelerations technology
would set off. Something he said in 2010 remains a
scalding truth: “We’re experiencing a synchronization of
emotions, a globalization of affect. All at once, anywhere
on the planet, we can all feel the same terror, the same
worry about the future, or the same panic. It’s pretty
incredible. We’ve gone from synchronizing our opinions–
made possible with freedom of the press–to synchronizing
our emotions. For example, emotional communities now
rule where common-interest groups based on social class
once used to define the political left and right. Our soci-
eties used to be based on common interest; now they’re
based on a communism of affect.”vii
How do we rebuild the discussion forum? How do we
go back to considering other points of view? Where can
we go to move beyond our usual ways of thinking? This
is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.
It’s all the more complicated when, after we recognize
cognitive biases in others, we have to acknowledge our
own cognitive biases. How will I conquer my own refusal
to learn? How will I overcome my own active information
avoidance?
(un)learn from experience
Today, eliminating cognitive biases should be at the

heart of all education-policy proposals. We can and must
come up with exercises that help us change our points of
view and see things from the point of view of the other,
and we should implement these starting in preschool.
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The French foundation La main à la pâte does just this.

The French expression “mettre la main à la pâte” liter-
ally means “get your hands in the dough,” illustrating
their core mission of getting children actively involved
in science curricula through hands-on activities, which
are complemented by reflection, group work, etc. The
foundation strives to promote and develop science and
technology education starting at the primary and early
secondary school levels, both in France and abroad.
Interestingly, those who work with the foundation don’t
champion the importance of science as a first argu-
ment. Whether it’s astrophysicists Pierre Léna and Yves
Quéré or Georges Charpak, winner of the Nobel Prize
in Physics, they all stress the value of scientific exper-
imenting as a way to help kids bridge the disconnect
between how they think of the world and the world as
it is. When you do an experiment and write down every
step of it in a notebook, you start to realize that the world
can be counterintuitive. When you’re the one confirming
the results of an experiment, it’s worlds more enriching
than when the teacher simply describes to your class the
past results of the experiment–it doesn’t matter how bril-
liant and persuasive the teacher is.
Chemist Richard-Emmanuel Eastes, who also has
a PhD in cognitive science, got involved early on with
La main à la pâte. He later created another associa-
tion called Les atomes crochus (“atomic bonds”) and
designed for science classes a series of experiments
meant to surprise and amaze, e.g., showing that water
can start on fire.
According to Eastes, conducting scientific experiments
can even change the structure of our neural networks.
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He explains this using as an analogy of something called

allostery. Allostery is a way of altering protein activity in
the body. Our neural networks are a bit like networks of
protein reactions in that they can get stuck in a certain
configuration, and to change that configuration, a lot of
energy is required. In the case of changing a network of
protein reactions, temperature change provides the neces-
sary energy. For neural networks to change, it takes curi-
osity, i.e., positive motivation. This is the neurobiological
explanation for why it’s so hard to change our minds or
see things from a different perspective.
When we find ourselves in stress-filled environments,
we feel threatened and we conform more easily to the
status quo, especially if everyone else feels the same way
we do. But when we find ourselves in more comforting
environments where we can own up to our misinterpre-
tations or even change our opinions altogether if we so
choose, then it’s easier to be curious. Then we see that
we start at a certain point in our thinking, accept being
challenged in that thinking when contradictions become
apparent, and eventually, modify our thinking.
in search of pleasure, happiness,

and meaning
We’re also victim to various physiological biases

because we are programmed to seek out things that give
us pleasure, namely food, which we need to live, and sex,
which is essential for reproducing as well as recognition,
which we need as social beings.
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The environments our ancestors evolved in lacked foods

that were rich in sugar, salt, and fat, which is why we now
devour foods that are sweet, salty, and fatty whenever
we can. The neural networks that fire when we eat such
foods use a neurotransmitter called dopamine, and dopa-
mine can have adverse effects. American pediatric endo-
crinologist Robert Lustig, who has long studied obesity
and diabetes, talks about this phenomenon in his book
The Hacking of the American Mind.viii Pleasure-seeking,
which is controlled by dopamine, is the enemy of happi-
ness, which is mediated by serotonin. From using social
media to eating lots of sugary and processed foods, cheap
pleasure has never been so easy to come by thanks to a
host of new products and services that are marketed as
the missing piece to our happiness.
Pleasure and happiness are at the center of Lustig’s
book. In addition to being a doctor, he’s a professor at
the University of California, San Francisco. He explains
the science behind his findings very clearly, and likewise
he makes clear the gravity of the potential implications
for modern society at large. Not only is happiness not the
result of so many accumulated pleasures, but our mad
pursuit of pleasure can actually inhibit feelings of fulfill-
ment and contentment.ix
Lustig illustrates that many addictions, i.e., to alcohol,
tobacco, drugs, and gaming, all involve much of the same
neural circuitry. He’s critical of corporations that take
advantage of our pleasure-seeking biases to maximize
their profits despite detriments to our health and, ulti-
mately, our happiness. He wants to make us conscious of
these biases while also calling for regulation to protect
us. He also encourages us to spend more time with those
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we love, e.g., by doing more cooking and eating together,

activities that are more likely to make us truly happy.
Another book, this one by French psychologist Jacques
Lecomte,x works in tandem with Lustig’s book, as it’s all
about things that help us give purpose to our lives, which
include, as Lustig recommends, prioritizing time spent
with those we love, doing something creative, and getting
involved in projects that have an impact beyond ourselves.
experimentation beats intuition
When you satisfy your curiosity through scientific

experiments, you may feel little sensations of happiness as
you stimulate the neural networks that interpret the world
more scientifically. That’s what the La main à la pâte and
Savanturiers programs believe can happen, as does every
person who feels that a scientific understanding of reality
can make us better citizens. This is because our socie-
ties are becoming more and more based in science, and
through science we can go from false convictions rooted
in intuition to other ways of thinking. Over time science
helps inhibit our mistaken beliefs.
The major benefit of a scientific approach is that it’s
the best deterrent against yet another bias: ideology.
It’s harder to agree with someone else when our own
values are at stake, which explains why scientists usually
agree more often than politicians do. The best known
example of this concerns the atomic bomb. In the 1940s
and 1950s, American and Soviet intellectuals were in
absolute agreement on one issue: that so much progress
had been made in harnessing the destructive power of
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the atom that a nuclear holocaust would be imminent if

the wrong button was pressed. These experts concurred
that everything should be done to keep either super-
power from doing just that, which led to the start of the
Pugwash movement, among other initiatives. In 1995,
the Pugwash movement won the Nobel Peace Prize
for its contribution to diminishing the role of nuclear
weapons in international politics. While scientists in the
Pugwash movement did not see eye to eye on politics,
they could at least be of the same mind when it came to
the destructive potential of the atomic bomb.
shedding your own ideologies
While not all confrontations among human groups

are as radical as the standoff between the Eastern and
Western blocs after World War II, humanity has deeply
divergent views when it comes to values. In his books and
TED Talks, American psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers
very lucid analysis of these divides. He identifies five
moral foundations in every human society.xi
The first moral foundation is care, i.e., protection and
concern for others. It’s what pushes a mother to protect
her children or makes us feel compassion for our kin
or people who are suffering. It’s the reason why we feel
animosity toward those threatening people dear to us.
The second foundation is fairness, concern for reci-
procity and equality. It’s the foundation of a just society.
Third is loyalty. This is the reason why humans have
been able to form the largest communities in the history
of the animal kingdom. Cooperation between groups of
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other animals can reach only a few dozen, and only the
parents in the group are able to cooperate. This is some-
thing Harari talks about also, particularly in Sapiens.xii
Haidt ponders the irony of the fact that loyalty finds its
most enthusiastic expression in both fighting (mounting
an army to go to war) and playing (supporting a particular
sports team). But which group should we be loyal to: our
friends, family, tribe, neighborhood, city, region, country,
continent, or planet? Why must we choose?
The fourth foundation, authority, is also inherited from
our evolutionary past. But who or what has authority?
Whoever or whatever causes us to grow, said Michel
Serres. He came to this conclusion after looking into the
etymology of the word. It comes from the Latin word
auctoritas, which is derived from same root as Latin
augere, meaning “to augment,” “to grow.”
Lastly, the fifth foundation is purity, and what people
find pure they tend to consider sacrosanct. It’s different for
everyone but always something at the center of our lives.
The most bitter conflicts are fought over values, what
we mean when we say equality, community, authority, or
sanctity. And we consider to be unmoral those who have
different morals than we do.
In Haidt’s view, how you vary with regard to these
moral foundations will give a pretty good indication of
your political leanings. You can test it out yourself on
the website Haidt created, http://www.yourmorals.org
(not available in Europe at the time of publication). On
the website you’ll respond to a series of questions, and
the results will show you what percentage of people
fall in the same place on the political spectrum as you.
The most valuable takeaway from Haidt’s work is how
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difficult it is to step outside of our points of view and

come to terms with the fact that how other people see
the world can be no less grounded or legitimate than our
own. We’re trapped within our neurons, cognitive biases,
and moral values too.
Education can help, though, which is why biologist
Livio Riboli-Sasco, cofounder of the Association Paris
Montagne, created a program called the Atelier des
jours à venir (“the workshop of days to come,” from a
line in the Pablo Neruda poem Esperemos). At the
outset, the program was interested in introducing young
people from low-income areas to the sciences. Eventu-
ally, the program began conducting science-communi-
cation sessions in conflict zones around the world, such
as in Palestine, Israel, and the former Yugoslavia. He’s
someone who’s honest about the limits of his program
and others like it: “If you were to have kids in these
divided communities play a match soccer against one
another, it could either be aggressive and full of fouls
due to nationalist rivalry or unifying and sportsmanlike.
The same goes for science.”xiii
Finding neutral ground in science is a chance to learn
how to work with others and realize they too are rational
people. Once this is established, then the more difficult
issues can be examined. Anything is possible, even the
best possible outcome, when the starting point is seeing
that the other is not dumb, ignorant, or purely wretched.
Anything is possible when we realize that we can disa-
gree with others and still find common ground in scien-
tific truths, which I remind you are themselves only
temporary. They too will be called into question as we
discover more and more about the world.
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learning to say “i don’t know”
There’s a preliminary step to integrating scientific

methods into education, and that is training teachers. I
don’t mean educating them in the sciences, although they
should have a minimum of science training. I mean devel-
oping their ability to say “I don’t know” to students, to
make discoveries with the students during experiments,
and to come to terms with the fact that cognitive biases
can also lead teachers astray.
When it comes to education, certain cognitive biases
can be quite terrifying when we consider their impact
on a large scale. The Pygmalion effect is one of the
most famous. At the beginning of the school year, if you
point out a few students to a teacher and tell him these
students are really excellent, whether or not it’s true,
these students will have shown the most progress by the
end of the year.xiv The way teachers view their students
has a major effect on outcomes. The teacher will hold
higher expectations for these students, be warmer to
them emotionally, give them more feedback about their
work, teach them more extensively, introduce more
difficult material, and give them more opportunities to
answer and ask questions.xv
A more well-known phenomenon is that how students
think of themselves is also a cognitive bias. In one exper-
iment, a teacher told students they were all getting the
same test when in fact half of the class got an easy test
and the rest got an impossible one. The first half passed
and the second half failed. This was repeated once more
with the same students in the pass and fail groups. It
was then repeated a third time, but this time the exer-
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cise, a relatively easy one, was the same for everyone.

Those who passed totaled only 80 percent, meaning 20
percent failed. The 20 percent who failed were all in the
fail group for the initial two tests. When you’re used to
passing, you have a better chance of passing again. When
you’re used to failing, you’re likely to fail again, and this
for “no apparent reason.”
It’s likely that a significant number of the successes
and failures we experienced in education were linked to
cognitive biases such as these. Generally speaking, we
misunderstand how the brain works. It’s still something
of a black box for most people.
i think like they do, therefore i am
Our brains also get tricked by social biases. Social

biases are tied to what group we belong to, what ideology
we identify with. A study about attitudes toward climate
change was carried out in the US, and the purpose
was to find out what kinds of people believed global
warming was real. I’ll take this opportunity to remind
everyone that global warming is a scientific truth, based
on well-established evidence. Level of education was not
a determining factor among those who did not believe in
global warming. Politics was the key. Among those with
lower levels of education, Republicans and Democrats
had the same percentages of people believing as not
believing. What’s interesting is that as level of education
rose, the more Republicans denied climate change and
the more Democrats were convinced of it. This is social
bias. Individual biases get amplified by the biases of the
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group. If you believe that all the members of your group

think a certain way, then you’ll be partial to reasoning
that leads you to the same conclusions as them.
This is what the argumentative theory of reasoning
demonstrates, developed by Hugo Mercier and Dan
Sperber.xvi French psychiatrist Guillaume de Lamérie
had this to say about the theory: “It makes the hypoth-
esis that decisions are most often made based on intu-
ition, as reason is used only afterward to justify why a
given decision was made. The primary goal of reason is
not to improve knowledge, find truth, or make better
decisions, but rather to persuade others in debate and
undermine those who would try to tell us otherwise.”xvii
When the Internet is used correctly it can help combat
biases, but social media pushes us toward yet another
bias: confirmation bias. We tend to select channels of
information that confirm what we already believe. When
we stumble on a website that challenges what we believe,
we’re not likely to visit it again. What an immense priv-
ilege to be afforded unlimited access to information,
yet we don’t venture outside what we already believe,
confirming the legitimacy of what we think and there-
fore the legitimacy of who we are. Open-mindedness is
an illusion. We only reinforce what we already believe.
The good news is that there’s an antidote, even in the
case of the American study I described above. There’s
a small minority of people who don’t follow the domi-
nant behaviors in their communities. What do they have
in common? Curiosity, that nasty flaw that could be the
greatest personality trait of the 21st century. Those who
are more open to doubt are constantly on the lookout
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not to be misled, thus they seek out information that

challenges their opinions to perhaps change their minds.
I’ll say again that everyone, both children and adults,
people with no degrees and those with too many degrees,
can have difficulty handling information that startles our
brains. A cognitive-science experiment was conducted
on psychology students in which the students were
shown data that contradicted something that had just
been explained to them. Specifically, they were being
shown what’s called genetic regulation, discovered by
André Lwoff, Jacques Mood, and François Jacob, which
won them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in
1965. The genetic-regulation model was such a profound
break with what we knew about genes, it can seem coun-
terintuitive. It’s a bit like the rule that throws off so
many students when they learn relative numbers: more
multiplied by more and less multiplied by less both yield
more. Those conducting the study asked the students
to try to reason it out aloud. The only ones to figure it
out were those whose first reactions were along the lines
of, “That’s interesting–it’s not going the way it should.”
This was only 10 percent of them. The rest were stuck in
the mind-set of “It’s not working” and “It doesn’t make
sense,” which kept them from being able to dig deeper.
To show you to what extent it’s difficult for us to accept
scientific paradigm shifts, Thomas Kuhn, whom I’ve
already mentioned,xviii based his findings on another
famous experiment carried out by Jerome Bruner and
Leo Postman in the late 1940s. If you type “red spade
experiment Jerome Bruner Leo Postman”xix in a search
engine, you can try out the experiment yourself on
YouTube before reading on.xx
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If you didn’t do it, I’ll explain it. Playing cards are dealt
out at a very fast pace, and you have to name each card.
Almost no one realizes that something is off when shown
the cards at high speed; for example, a 4 of spades will
be red and a 3 of hearts will be black. Everyone simply
says 4 of hearts and 3 of spades and moves on to the
next card. Then the speed slows down, and the more it
slows down, the more the participants see the discrepan-
cies. Yet even at a very slow speed, some participants still
don’t notice the discrepancies, and they get mad when
it’s pointed out to them. “I’ve had enough of this!” they
say, or “I need to go to the bathroom,” “I need a drink
of water,” “I want to do something else,” “This test is
dumb,” etc.
What these experiments show is that we all have cogni-
tive biases, but some have more than others and are less
capable (or totally incapable) of changing perspective
when faced with something that does not fit within their
preexisting frame of reference. Kuhn used anomalies to
prove that even scientists, who are supposed to be open
to doubt, have difficulty changing perspective. Most of
them think, “This anomaly is useless; it doesn’t fit within
my paradigm, so I won’t spend too much time thinking
about it because I have other things to do within the
dominant paradigm.” And don’t get me wrong: A lot of
the time they’re right not to waste their time with anom-
alies. Anomalies can arise from statistical or experi-
mental errors and not be worth our time. But if we never
investigate them, we’ll miss paradigm shifts.
To put it another way, when something doesn’t add up,
should we automatically think it’s merely an exception
to the rule and the rule is by no means in question? Or
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should we give ourselves the opportunity to look into it

further to try to figure out if, by chance, a new rule is
emerging?
so many whys
Curiosity is like a muscle: You have to work at building

it. Having children and teenagers recite ready-made
answers to old questions breaks down their desire to
discover new things. Let’s encourage them to ask ques-
tions. Let’s stimulate their curiosity. Then they’ll be able
to challenge their own beliefs. But we have to start now.
Kids begin asking a lot of questions around age 4, and it’s
likely that this is closely tied to curiosity. If you’ve ever had
a 4-year-old child or spent time with one, then you know
this. What should we do when kids start asking a lot of
questions? Should we say, like my son’s teacher, that he is
asking “too many questions”? An education system that
evaluates students based on their ability to answer old ques-
tions is missing something, I think, especially since we can
find the answers to those old questions on the computer.
In the past, it was helpful to know the answers to the ques-
tions of the past because the world at any point in history
was similar enough to what came before it that the old
answers remained relevant. In a world in which everything
changes so rapidly, however, and in which computers store
all the answers to the old questions, we need to be able to
find new answers and ask new questions. If not, we’ll miss
out on something that’s key to understanding and thinking
about the transition we’re living through.
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Certain experiments show children the effects of

representation biases and the importance of asking ques-
tions. One such experiment was carried out in several
schools throughout the world. It took a familiar object to
the children–it didn’t matter what it was–and asked kids
to study it closely. Then the object was taken away, and
the kids were asked to draw it from memory. Once their
drawings were done, the object was brought back out,
and children were asked to comment on the differences
between the object and their rendering of the object.
Then they were asked to reflect on why there were differ-
ences. The children slowly caught on to the idea that it’s
not easy to remember all the details of an object. They
realized also that representation on paper and representa-
tion in the brain are two very different things. In essence,
the children discovered subjectivity.
They were then asked to look at the differences
between each of their drawings. They noticed each
one was very different. Why? Again, there were several
possible answers. Perhaps it was because they each had a
different point of view when drawing the object. Perhaps
also it was because the children were influenced by an
archetypal model of that object from their home life, and
at home the object was different. Again they discovered,
perhaps without even realizing it, that the way we look at
objects is biased due to both point of view and personal
experience. We have to consider also the fact that some
are better at drawing than others.
What’s most interesting is that Gilda Darlas (another
Ashoka Fellow), who designed this experiment and
others like it, observed that children who took part in
these kinds of exercises were then less violent at recess.
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Her interpretation is that when children later disagreed

about other things, rather than think the other was dumb
or mean, they were able to take into account that the other
had a different point of view, a different take, and that
through dialogue, they could find ways to work through
the disagreement instead of pound on one another.
the fable of the blind men

and the elephant
Gilda’s experiment reminds me of a fable that I enjoy

telling from the Indian subcontinent.xxi
One sunny day, six blind men from India, all inquisitive
men of learning, sought out an elephant in order to learn
more about it.
The first man touched the elephant’s broad, robust flank,
and exclaimed, “God help me, the elephant is like a wall!”
The second man, feeling the tusk, cried out, “No, no! It’s
cylindrical, smooth, and pointed! The elephant is like a
spear!”
The third man approached the animal, took its squirming
trunk in his hands, and said, “In my opinion, the elephant
is like a snake.”
The fourth man reached his hand out and patted the huge
leg, thereby concluding that the elephant was like a tree.
The fifth man stretched out his hand and, happening to
grab the elephant by the ear, said, “Even the blindest of the
blind would deduce that the elephant is like a fan.”
The sixth man felt around, seized the swinging tail swat-
ting the air, and recognizing it immediately, he said, “The
elephant is like a rope.”
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SUMMARY
The six blind men debated passionately at length, each

going to every length to try to convince the others that his
was the correct interpretation.
It seemed they would never agree, when a wiseman who
was walking by overheard their argument.
“What has you so worked up?” he asked.
“We can’t agree on what the elephant looks like!” they
said.
Each man then stated his argument. The wiseman smiled
slightly.
“Each of you has told the truth,” the wiseman said. “You
each have a different description of the elephant because you
each touched a different part of the animal. The elephant
indeed has all the traits you describe.”
“Oooooh!” they exclaimed.
And the discussion ended there. Each of them was very
pleased to have provided a right answer, as each one had
found part of the truth.
This fable applies as much to the children mentioned
in the previous experiment as it does to scientists coming
from different disciplines who believe that their disci-
pline alone has a monopoly on the truth of a given issue.
In fact, we need input from all disciplines.
If you try to understand from a historical perspec-
tive the Spanish flu pandemic that struck just as World
War I was ending, you’ll see that the outbreak was the
result of poor living conditions and mass migrations
taking place at the end of the war. If you approach it
from the point of view of molecular biology, you’ll know
that it was a mutation of the flu virus. In my opinion,
these two perspectives complement each other, and if we
really want to understand what took place, we need both
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SUMMARY
perspectives. Each discipline narrows its focus to one

part of the reality without seeing the other parts, and
they miss the gorilla pounding its chest right in front of
their eyes.
Take the example of carbon. We can study it from
the point of view of chemistry and try to understand
the bonds of a CO2 molecule. We can take the biolog-
ical perspective and ask why carbon is essential to life.
We can also adopt the perspectives of climate change or
energy consumption or even the arts, as there are ways
of sculpting with carbon and using carbon to draw. We
can even write poems and read novels about carbon and
diamonds. Some children may be more interested in one
perspective on carbon than another perspective, but it’s
very likely that in the end, they’ll understand it’s really
all the same thing. They’ll see that while its impacts are
different depending on different contexts, each disci-
pline offers only one facet, and that some facets aren’t
the reality but rather convenient ways of representing
the reality. In countries such as France, however, each
discipline continues to carry on like the blind men in the
fable.
I’ve shared the fable in so many different encounters
that, for a symposium in the south of France, creativity
consultant Rémi Sabouraud sought out artist Thibault
Franc to make a sculpture inspired by it.
It’s a sculpture of an elephant made from various
assorted objects, including even a few elephants. Also
for the symposium, Rémi made a video of me blind-
folded and discovering the sculpture for the first time.
I felt around all the parts but was completely unable to
figure out what the object was made of. The video was
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called “Défense d’y voir,” which means “no seeing” and

in French is pronounced the same way as “ivory tusk.”xxii
On stage at the symposium, Rémi had six people from
the audience do the same thing, thereby playing the six
blind men. Since then, I have had more than 100 people
do this exercise when they visit the CRI. The funniest
of these was when Rob Lue, a personal friend and
professor at Harvard, thought he had the answer. “It’s
a palm tree!” he shouted. Once the blindfold was off,
he came to terms with his limitations, saying, “I truly
am a biochemist.” What he meant was that analyzing a
purified protein, for example, is only one way of under-
standing the complexity of life. He then took the exer-
cise to his students, and only one of them understood
what fractal nature of the object represented. That
student happened to be both a pianist and scientist.
While he explored with one hand the smaller constit-
uent parts, with the other he assessed the overall struc-
ture. In the end, everyone understands the fable and the
need to work together in order to better understand how
different perspectives can complement one another.
getting out of your silo
The way education and research functions at universities

in most countries makes biases stronger. Each discipline is
stuck within a silo that has little communication with the
other silos. This practice is not inherently ridiculous or
unproductive; in the past this was essential for scientific
progress because it brought together lots of researchers
who all knew the same things and worked the same way.
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That way of doing things can always help you go far. The
problem is that we’re never encouraged to leave the silo.
To get a job, you have to excel in your discipline, i.e., your
silo, and gather a team around you that you get along with,
which is the silo within a silo.
In France, secondary school teachers are trained in
these same silos, unlike primary school teachers. It’s to
the point that when you try to get them to think differ-
ently, it’s very difficult for them. Their angry reactions
every time the Ministry of National Education tries to
introduce a bit of interdisciplinarity in the curriculum is
evidence enough that these silos are heavily reinforced
structures. Apart from a few zealots, most teachers aren’t
against interdisciplinarity in principle, but many of them
weren’t raised with the opportunity to do experiments at
a young age, so they think that interdisciplinarity should
exist only in higher education, after the basics in each
subject matter have been fully mastered.
The problem with having to master one discipline
before you can use it in combination with other disciplines
is that this takes a long time. I know this from experi-
ence. It was my studies in engineering, math, and physics
that got me interested in bacterial evolution, and after I
began studying genetics I got interested in evolutionary
biology. Up to that point, I hadn’t encountered any resist-
ance. It wasn’t until I wanted to start studying evolution
and ecology that I was told, “No, going from molecular to
evolutionary biology is something you can do only toward
the end of your career.” So you have to win a Nobel Prize
in molecular biology before you can start studying evolu-
tion? I ignored what they said, convinced that molecular
biology and genetics were understandable only from an
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SUMMARY
evolutionary biology perspective, whereby you see that

organic compounds evolve in response to evolutionary
challenges. If we’re able to discuss with molecular biolo-
gists, experts on antibiotics, and evolutionary scientists all
at once, much more thorough work can be achieved.
there’s no age requirement for

interdisciplinarity
Some countries are less rigid than France in this regard.

In the French education system, you choose the general
field you want to specialize in at age 15 and continue
specialized studies from there. Other countries continue
to offer general education in the sciences and humanities
through secondary school and into undergraduate studies.
I think this is the right approach. There’s even some-
thing more to be gained by implementing this approach
as early as primary school and to develop it further in
secondary school. It will help children understand the
different facets of an issue, not confuse them. When they
create different dots surrounding an issue, they can then
connect them to form a truly robust understanding. We
have to show them how each discipline works on its own
while at the same time make them aware of how complex
each one is in combination with the others.
I’m not alone in thinking this way. This is exactly what
the countries do that score highest on the PISA (Program
for International Student Assessment) test.xxiii They are
Finland, Canada, South Korea, and Singapore, among
others, and they obtain the highest scores in reading,
science, and math. They understand that there’s no age
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SUMMARY
requirement for interdisciplinary learning, all while not

skimping on the fundamentals, “reading, writing, and
arithmetic,” as people say.
Research has shown that an important key to success
in education, in no matter what subject, is motivation.xxiv
Reading, writing, and arithmetic become much more
interesting when we’re motivated to understand these
subjects and communicate with others about them. To
see concrete examples of ways we can implement these
interdisciplinary approaches with children, check out
the Savanturiers website.xxv There, you can discover
how, inspired by their work with ants, students in Ange
Ansour’s classroom composed poems and songs about
ants, studied the importance of ants in Australian aborig-
inal culture, and even learned about ants in English–
all while fulfilling to the letter the requirements of the
French national curriculum. On the website, you can
also read about how Amélie Vacher’s 9-year-old students
in the Bordeaux region studied the brain by combining
sports and neurobiology.xxvi With a ball-passing exercise,
they demonstrated how nerve impulses get transmitted
across the synapse. There are lots of other examples that
show the benefits of what Americans are calling T-shaped
learning, the vertical stem of the T symbolizing depth of
learning in a field, and the cross stroke of the T symbol-
izing the ability to collaborate across disciplines.
Throughout the world, communities are getting together
to create alternative research environments based in the
benefits of collective intelligence and breaking down
disciplinary and institutional barriers. If you don’t mind,
I would like to share a few of them with you.
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SUMMARY
impatient patients
Temple Grandin is an American scientist and researcher

in animal science. She was born in 1947, and when she
was 3 years old, her parents were told that she suffered
from irreversible brain tissue damage. They were told she
would never be able to read and couldn’t do anything
productive with her life. What she actually suffered from
was difficulties with autism, but very little was known
about autism in those days. It was often misdiagnosed
and no treatment existed at the time. Temple’s own
mother had to come up with various solutions that she
found to work, and later in her life, Temple would say that
her mother figured out on her own the standard autism
treatment that doctors use today. It would be Temple
herself who would document and analyze her autism the
most extensively, however. Take 20 minutes to watch the
TED Talk she gave in 2010 called “The World Needs All
Kinds of Minds.”xxvii
Based on her experience with autism, she wrote a book
called Thinking in Picturesxxviii in which she explains
how her mind works. Likewise in 2010, a film by Mick
Jackson tells Grandin’s story performed by Claire Danes.
Grandin doesn’t believe that all people with autism will
become high-level scientists or genius programmers in
Silicon Valley. She simply says that autism has a vast spec-
trum, which means that while some people with autism
lack the ability to speak, others will excel in certain fields,
namely those in which being detailed-oriented or having
intuitive understanding of complex systems are particu-
larly valuable. She also draws important lessons from her
experience, lessons which can benefit everyone that touch
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namely on the benefits of stimulating children’s attention

and putting greater emphasis in school on subjects that
develop hands-on and artistic skills and not just abstract-
thinking skills.
Temple Grandin was a patient...who was impatient.
When medical facilities could neither treat her nor take
a deeper interest in her condition, she explored her
pathology and made groundbreaking advances.
social sci-entrepreneurs
Sharon Terry is a mother of two patients who like-

wise were impatient. She told her story in a TED Talk in
2016.xxix
Her story begins in 1994, two days before Christmas.
Sharon was concerned about rashes she had been noticing
on the side of her daughter Elizabeth’s neck. Elizabeth
was 7 years old then. Sharon took her to see a dermatol-
ogist, who looked briefly at the little girl’s neck and diag-
nosed her with pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), a rare
genetic disorder that causes vision loss that can result in
blindness, as well as many cardiovascular problems. It’s a
premature-aging disease that causes some to die in their
30s. To top it all off, the dermatologist looked at Sharon’s
other child, Ian, age 5, and diagnosed him with the
disease as well.
Researchers from Boston came to draw blood from the
whole family as part of a research project to try to iden-
tify the PXE gene. A few days later, researchers from a
second medical center in New York came asking for
blood samples as well, and this surprised Sharon. She
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told the researchers to share samples with the Boston

research team. The researchers from New York laughed.
That’s when she realized a sad fact in research, which
isn’t limited to biomedical research: Teams of researchers
work in competition with one another. It lit a fire under
her and her husband, who decided they were going to
change the rules of the research game.
What does research on PXE need to advance? DNA
and clinical data. So, she and her husband created a
nonprofit organization that collected blood samples and
medical histories and made these available to scientists
for no cost on the condition that they share their findings.
Realizing this wouldn’t take research far enough, they
borrowed bench space at a lab at Harvard and learned
how to extract DNA. After a few years they found the
PXE gene, created a diagnostic test, organized a research
consortium, and carried out studies. They joined forces
with the Genetic Alliance, a network of advocacy groups
and research organizations that build resources for
research on all diseases, not just PXE.
This is just one of many successful examples of citizen
science. Sharon and her husband, despite their lack of
initial training in biology, were able to generate advances
in science by breaking down barriers that were thought to
be impenetrable. She speaks about then President Barack
Obama’s championing of citizen and open science at the
time. Obama was a staunch advocate of such initiatives,
holding ceremonies at the White House for distinguished
individuals and organizations who promoted open
science. Sharon Terry is the perfect example of a social
entrepreneur of science, or a “social sci-entrepreneur.”
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And she’s not the first. The French Muscular Dystrophy

Association (AFM), famous in France for its annual
telethon, was created in 1958 by Yolaine de Kepper,
mother of seven children, four of whom were boys
with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In 1987, Bernard
Barataud and Pierre Birambeau, also parents of children
who suffered from muscular dystrophy, got French public
television to help the AFM put on a national telethon, a
fund-raising practice started in the US in 1966. Thanks
to this annual telethon, the AFM runs one of the world’s
largest facilities for developing gene-therapy products for
rare diseases, and it funds the four laboratories included
in the Biotherapies Institute, a world leader in research. It
took nearly half a century for the AFM to get to where it
is, but today, thanks to technology and open science, we
can now create robust citizen-science ecosystems in the
span of a few years.
serious games
Foldit is what’s called a serious game. Serious games

help people, myself included, understand the new path of
education in the 21st century.
This particular game was born out of an interdisciplinary
encounter at the University of Washington, in Seattle. It
was between biochemist and protein expert David Baker
and computer-graphics and game-design expert Zoran
Popović. Were these two in France, it would have been
hard for them to meet, as games are not taken seriously
in France, or rather, where games are taken seriously in
France, you’re not likely to run into biologists there.
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SUMMARY
At the time, David Baker was interested in digitally

modelling proteins, which is difficult to do and requires
a lot of computing power. His first idea was to borrow
computing power like SETI@home, a network of Inter-
net-connected computers that collects and analyzes
radio-telescope data. People who participate in the
network leave the SETI@home program running on their
computer while the computer is not being used, and this
provides a massive computing-power network.
David Baker used the SETI@home network, changing
the name of his software to Rosetta@home. Its func-
tion was to perform trillions of calculations in order to
predict the shapes of folding proteins. A few participants
Rosetta@home network were curious about the program
as they watched it working on their computer screens.
They wrote to Baker, telling him that they thought his
algorithm could run more optimally and that they wanted
to help guide it. So Baker went around talking to people,
trying to find ways to make the network more interac-
tive. A friend put him in touch with Popović, who helped
Baker turn the network into a multiplayer online game.
Thus Foldit was born.
To train players, they have them predict protein struc-
tures that are already known to science. This helps players
gain an understanding of the nature of these structures
for them to develop a solid working knowledge of the
rules of protein folding. Over time, the game will begin
introducing folding problems that science has yet to solve,
and usually from there players get sucked in. It’s not just
learning about protein folding that players love. The
game adapts to the players, figuring out how to present
problems to them in ways that kept them interested and
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thus helps them get better. There’s another reason why

it developed the following it has: Playing the game has
a bigger purpose. Predicting protein structures contrib-
utes to research in medicine. For example, players figured
the structure of an enzyme involved in the reproduction
of HIV. The hundreds of thousands of Foldit playersxxx
together possess a collective problem-solving power that
surpasses both the automated software and the scientists
designing the software. And the scientists who design the
technology must in some small way be victim to cogni-
tive biases, as they’re typically worse at the game than the
non-scientists. The non-scientists are able to think outside
the box, a box they didn’t even know existed.
The game is constantly being improved. By collecting
data on player performance, the developers found that
some players are better at the start of the game, others
in the middle, and others toward the end. Based on this
finding, they made it so that teams could be generated
automatically based on skill sets, and they also found
ways to let players automate their approaches. In 2010,
an article was published in the science journal Nature,
and among the listed authors of the articles are “>57,000
Foldit players,” recognizing their contributions through
their play.
in favor of participatory science and

citizen science
The Genetic Alliance, AFM, Foldit–you can say that

these examples aren’t fundamentally changing how
things work, that participatory and citizen sciences
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are exceptions to the rule, and that the fundamentals

of knowledge continue to be produced by traditional
institutions. My feeling is that the many examples are
too numerous to consider them anomalies and that
we can head toward a new perspective. Digitalization
is bringing about a paradigm shift, and it’s making us
rethink everything. One of the best Foldit players is a
child, and another–you can’t make this up–is a secretary
at a research lab!
I’m very happy to find that some of the larger institu-
tions are starting to incorporate some these methods
in their research projects. Every year, the Inserm trains
hundreds of patients and family members of patients
to help them develop of new treatment protocols. Since
2012, the Institut Curie has supported the Seintinellesxxxi
(“breast-cancer fighters”), a cancer-research initia-
tive that’s not restricted to investigating breast cancer,
cofounded by French surgeon Fabien Reyal and breast-
cancer survivor Guillemette Jacob. The group’s goal is to
speed up cancer research using digital means to recruit
study volunteers, and rather than run clinical trials, they
want to hear stories, be it of surviving cancer or caring
for a loved one affected by cancer. Their research is thus
sociological as well as biological and epidemiological.
If you are in France and would like to participate in
what the Seintinelles are doing, you can visit any one of
the sites they operate out of, for example La Paillassexxxii
(“the lab bench”), which is one of the largest open-com-
munity labs in the world. The lab was cofounded by
Thomas Landrain, a CRI alumnus who was a member of
that first synthetic-biology team to take home a prize at
MIT’s iGEM. At the lab, you can learn how to extract
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your own DNA–which today is child’s play really–and

perhaps be inspired to go even further.
Other games allow us to push advances in sciences
and can be used as much for contributing positively to
change as for helping young people acquire life skills
and knowledge. Games for Changexxxiii was founded in
2004 and seeks to empower game creators throughout
the world to design games that have a real-life impact. As
we talked about previously, movies get us to empathize
with someone else by placing us in the skin of a character,
changing the way we look at the world as we live through
that character’s experiences. Games go even further
because they make you a player rather than a spectator.
You’re made to live through the various game scenarios,
be it as yourself or as another character. In games we
further develop the essential skill that I keep stressing,
i.e., being able to see things from someone else’s perspec-
tive, keeping us from being prejudiced and seeking more
creative solutions than those that reinforce our own
biases, be they cognitive, social, moral, etc.
competence without ethics is only ruin

of the soul
Games can also force us in often striking way to ask

questions about the ethics of our actions. Why should
we keep improving on things? What’s the meaning of
progress? I remember a game I discovered through
Games for Change in which players had to improve a
railway network. When they reached the finish line of
the game, it was then revealed to them that the railway
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network they had worked to improve was taking Jews to

Auschwitz. There are few ways as striking and unforget-
table as that to show you that before we act, we should
think about the ultimate aim of what we do and what the
consequences will be. Competence without ethics is only
ruin of the soul.
Katie Salen founded a secondary school in New York
City called Quest to Learn where curricula are centered
entirely around games. Curriculum designers partner
with game designers to develop lessons. I sat in on a
middle-school-level introduction to genetics class. They
didn’t use the typical method of using blue eyes or brown
eyes to explain variation and how genes get passed on.
Instead, they played a game in which students built
monsters as a way to look at how a phenotype from a
recessive gene can skip one or several generations.
The first generation of monsters had a certain number
of genetically inherited traits, e.g., running faster or being
a tougher fighter, coded in dominant and recessive alleles
(the kids used all the correct genetics terminology, only in
the context of a game). From each successive generation
of monsters, the kids had to pick which monsters would
reproduce, i.e., the faster runners or the tougher fighters.
The kids were also asked at the end of each class what
ideas they had to help improve the game. The purpose of
this was not only to make the game more fun but also to
get the students to think about all the different aspects
of the game, which was a way to help them think more
systematically.
Students from Quest to Learn won the math competi-
tion at the New York City Olympiad Tournament, which
is all the more remarkable considering that most of the
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students came from low-income backgrounds. It’s worth

noting that they did particularly well on sections that
required teamwork.
If you’re worried that your children play too many
games, read Katie Salen’s book Quest to Learn: Growing
the School for Digital Kids or Peter Gray’s book Free to
Learnxxxiv. Peter Gray is a researcher in psychology who
was curious about how his son’s chances of success may
vary due to the fact that he was enrolled in an alterna-
tive school where students from ages 4 to 18 choose their
own activities. He compiled a lot of anthropological and
ethological evidence showing how young mammals and
humans develop numerous skills through unsupervised
game-playing. His conclusion was that, for our ances-
tors, the most important things to learn were learned in
informal settings where kids of different ages and skill
levels learned together in total freedom. He also looked
at the success of alumni of democratic schools where
children and adults make decisions together. He showed
that students from these schools did better in college and
excelled in their jobs because they matched their inter-
ests. By learning through games and hands-on activities,
they could explore their interests and develop the ability
to learn from others. This is what our ancestors did before
formalized education, and kids in these schools appear
to learn all the skills necessary to lead successful lives as
adults of today.
In Free to Learn, Peter Gray encourages children’s
freedom to pursue their own interests through games,
showing that they do acquire all the knowledge and
skills they need, but do so with more energy and passion
than traditional students. To help children grow in this
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constantly changing world, we have to trust their ability

to teach themselves and undertake their own self-devel-
opment. Basing his ideas in psychological and historical
anthropological research, Gray argues that play in total
freedom is the best way for kids to learn to manage their
lives, resolve problems, live in their community, and be
emotionally stable.
If you’re someone who excels in a game that draws on
working in teams and thinking systematically, always
remember to put it on your CV. Job recruiters talk about
hiring certain candidates because they were top players
in World of Warcraft. Their reasoning is that, if the
candidate has experience managing a team online, she’s
very likely capable of doing so in real life, as work teams
interact more and more online.
Let me just be clear about one thing though: I don’t
believe all schools should resemble Quest to Learn and
democratic schools.
to flow or not to flow
The reason why it can be difficult to understand all

this, and get others to understand it as well, is because
the benefits of so-called informal learning haven’t been
sufficiently studied and because any learning implies a
stage of awareness. It’s not enough that I simply learned
or understood something. I must also be aware of it, espe-
cially if I plan on implementing that knowledge or skill in
the future. In order for a game to teach me the basics of
genetics from a made-up example–monsters and dragons,
etc.–I first have to believe that I can learn through games,
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i.e., that the genetics of mice and humans are based on

the same principles.
Along with their teachers, kids have to convince their
parents and friends as well that these methods can work.
Yet there are so many people who believe that if educa-
tion isn’t in some way boring or even painful, then some-
thing’s missing. This belief is as common as it is false.
Scientific research shows that we never learn better than
when we feel motivated and enjoy what we’re doing.
Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi inter-
viewed hundreds of successful people in various lines of
work, namely in the arts and sciences, in an effort to find
out what it took for them to be at their most creative and
productive. Everyone described the same phenomenon
at work, which was almost like a state of mind. It’s when
they stop feeling hungry or tired, no longer feel like they
are “working” with all the constraints that come with
work, and they even forget they’re working altogether. At
its best, this phenomenon feels like a moment of ecstasy
that they’re not necessarily aware is taking place. In fact
they feel as if they didn’t even exist anymore. Mihaly
called this state a flow experience,xxxv and according to
him, this is the state in which we learn the best.
Flow is typically a state in which we forget about
ourselves when we’re doing something we enjoy, namely
playing. Anyone who has tried to get the attention of a
child–or if you yourself have been or continue to be
this child–who is completely engrossed in a particu-
larly enthralling game. Reading a novel or watching a
movie can also move you into flow. Teaching as well, if
you have the right personality for it, can get you in flow,
that is until that bell so unnecessarily interrupts your
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flow. A slight tangent on that point: There’s no biological

or man-made law that requires classes to last one hour.
Studies on attention span say that classes that involve
passive listening should be much shorter, and classes that
involve something particularly enthralling should have no
predetermined length at all. The hour-long class is some-
thing we inherited from an age when the day was divided
up by prayer times and when we had only clock towers to
tell us the time.
This is why some teaching methods that try to get
students into flow start by reforming the class schedule in
order to do away with the counterproductive system that’s
so common. While it is after all necessary to implement a
bit of organization, these programs find a middle ground
where the day is divided up into more optimal time slots. If
we shortened lessons to 45 minutes, we’d have 15 minutes
left over at the end of the lesson, time when our attentional
resources are greatly reduced anyway. Those 15 minutes
can be carried over to the end of the day, week, or quarter
to be used in ways that optimize students’ ability to get into
flow, e.g., developing their own projects.
the teacher-researcher
Whether it’s Finland, Canada, or certain countries in

Asia, the countries adopting these approaches all have
one thing in common: They have invested heavily both
in education research and teacher training and have even
combined the two.
Research is a record of reality. It gives us facts. Once I
gain awareness of the fact that stress has a negative effect
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on learning and I measure the impact of that effect, I’ll

then take more care to create a classroom environment
that eases stress. Once I gain an understanding of the
brain mechanism responsible for consolidating memory
during sleep, I can better explain to children (and
parents!) why it’s so important not to go to bed late and
avoid stimulating activities right before bed.
I’ll share an example from a symposium at the Collège
de France, France’s free, no-enrollment, no-degrees high-
er-education institution based in Paris. Mélanie Strauss, a
neurologist who got her PhD at the CRI, gave a lecture on
the benefits of napping in children ages 3 to 6.xxxvi
She discussed an experiment published in the science
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that measured these benefitsxxxvii. Specifically, researchers
measured the accuracy of children’s recall of how to
perform a visuospatial task depending on whether they
had napped and how long after the nap. Recall was tested
immediately after they were taught to perform the task,
later in the day after some children took naps while
others didn’t, and then the following day. The difference
the following day was up to 20 percent, which should lead
us to conclude that midday naps are very important.
The contrast is just as stark for teenagers. Adolescence
is another crucial development phase in which our neural
circuitry needs lots of sleep for optimal brain function.
These data are very important and transcend the
usual heated debates in France and elsewhere about
school curricula and teaching methods. Whatever your
style of teaching is, biological laws will get the best of
your students, and this will impact how effective your
teaching is.
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The other benefit of combining education research

and teacher training is that teachers learn the scientific
process. They’re encouraged to think of themselves as
education researchers in the classroom and to evaluate
their teaching practices. Ideally, this will inspire teachers
to enter into dialogue with their colleagues in order to
discuss the latest in education research. This is actually
already happening in many schools around the world. In
a similar vein, it motivates teachers to attend education
symposia, just like professional researchers whose job it is
to try to test their theories against scientific doubt.
the singapore method
This method is beneficial at every level of educa-

tion. We can take inspiration from a model used in the
English-speaking world called Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning (SoTL). With SoTL, teachers gain profes-
sional recognition for not only creating and sharing valu-
able research resources for the education community but
also developing real improvements in their classrooms
with students achieving higher rates of success.
These are the principles at the heart of Singapore’s
incredible education system. The Singapore method has
been explained incorrectly by some in public discourse,
so I would here like to set the record straight. The success
of Singapore’s education system isn’t just based on the
connection it establishes between theory (I learn a rule)
and practice (I solve a problem using the rule). The real
secret of the Singapore method is that since the 1980s,
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the country has made education research the focus of the

teaching profession.
It’s almost hard to believe, but two-thirds of schools in
Singapore have teaching and learning centers in-house
that help teachers examine the effectiveness of their
methods and work with other teachers to solve problems
and learn from one another. The Singapore method is a
lot of trial and error, observation, and adjustment. There
is no prominent educator, all-powerful minister, or lumi-
nary education researcher dictating instructions from
the top to be implemented down the chain of command.
Singapore has created a system in which teachers improve
their methods themselves and then share these innova-
tions with colleagues.
action-research
Japan has developed a similar approach called Lesson

Study (kenkyu jugyo) in which a school’s teachers, often
accompanied by researchers, will study, plan, teach,
observe, revise, and share lessons in various curriculum
areas.xxxviii There’s an initial test phase in which teachers
sit in on their colleagues’ lessons, not to observe them so
much as to observe how their students do in the lessons.
Usually each teacher will observe a specific student or
group of students and to try to identify what happens
for them when they finally understand a lesson or, to
the contrary, what goes wrong when they feel they don’t
understand. Teachers then meet to share their observa-
tions in an uncritical dialogue that’s open to the trial-and-
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error process. Little by little, they put together the lessons

in a given subject that fit the needs of their school.
This approach is similar to what American social
psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1940s called action-re-
search, which has seen renewed interest over the years.
In Lewin’s own words, action-research is “a comparative
research on the conditions and effects of various forms
of social action, and research leading to social action[,
as research] that produces nothing but books will not
suffice.”xxxix It’s not enough simply to base teacher training
on research findings, although this practice is all too
uncommon in its own right. Teachers also need to be
trained in research methods and get introduced to the
differences between methods, e.g., that research methods
in sociology are different from those in cognitive science
or computer science.
Once we’re able to adopt the mind-set of a researcher,
we’ll likely carry out experiments with our classes all
the time, establishing control groups, observing, quanti-
fying, comparing, etc. Teachers should have the ability to
adopt an approach that’s not just self-reflexive but crit-
ical of their own methods, and teacher training should
focus on developing this ability. Then when teachers
are faced with students who are having difficulty with a
lesson, they’re less likely to fall back on a one-size-fits-all
solution that in terms of sheer probability is not likely
to be very effective. While it is partially true that, as a
French expression goes, “education is turning repetition
into a form of art,” lessons shouldn’t be repeated identi-
cally in every context.
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1%
Without the necessary resources allocated to educa-

tion, implementing these approaches is unrealistic. We
would need more extensive teacher training and more
time, both in classes and schools. This is what Singapore
understood so well when it made the decision to invest
more in education research. And yet education in most
countries is one of the few major sectors in which there’s
not enough investment in research and development,
while in the other sectors promising the jobs of the future
we invest heavily in R&D. If countries were to invest only
1 percent of their education budget in research and devel-
opment, education would be revolutionized within a few
years. It is my firm belief that research and development
in education would have a much clearer impact on quality
of education than if we were to, for example, reduce class
sizes by 1 percent, which is a widely discussed measure.
taking children seriously
Why aren’t education-research approaches more wide-

spread in schools? I think one of the primary reasons is
that we don’t take children seriously. And that’s a mistake.
When my daughter was 8 years old, she placed a book
in my hands one day and said very earnestly, “You’re
going to love this.” It was the life of Louis Braille told
by Margaret Davidson in Louis Braille: The Boy Who
Invented Books for the Blind.xl And my daughter was
right. I loved it. If you’re not aware of who Louis Braille is,
you’ve at least heard of braille, the tactile writing system
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he invented, which millions of visually impaired people

today use throughout the world. He invented the system
when he was a teenager.
He was born with sight but blinded himself at age 3
playing with an awl in his father’s harness workshop. His
parents wanted him nevertheless to have an education and
were able to get him into the Royal Institute for the Blind,
in Paris. Other tactile systems for reading were already
in existence, but the most common one was not very
useful. It was easy enough to read but you couldn’t write
in it, as the alphabet could be printed by machine only.
Another system existed that was a cryptography used in
the military, but it was not very efficient. Besides, why
would young Louis, hungry for books, have any interest
in reading about moving three cannons here, five there,
etc. At the age of 12 he started work on the system that
would make him famous. His system consisted of cells
of up to six raised dots in two parallel rows, making for
64 different possible combinations. The free-spirited and
avid learner he was, he completed his school’s curriculum
and was asked to stay on as a teacher’s aide. Eventually he
was made a teacher and taught a diverse array subjects:
grammar, history, geography, math, and music!
Nonetheless, Louis’s writing system was initially met
with hostility by school administrators. They felt that
if children spent time learning his new system, they
wouldn’t learn the standard alphabet they used and
would thus lack the skills necessary for the outside
world. Louis shared his invention with his peers at
night in the dormitories, and they loved it. Even after
teachers began seeing children using Louis’s system,
they remained doubtful as to whether the children really
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could read with it or, since blind children often have an

excellent memory, whether they had already known the
books by heart. A public demonstration was eventually
held. Adults chose a book at random, encoded it using
braille, and gave it to the children to read. The children
could read it perfectly.
It would take another decade for Charles Barbier, the
inventor of the military cryptography, to acknowledge not
the superiority of braille–that would have been too much
to ask–but its practicality. In an address given in 1833,
Barbier commended the reduced size of Louis’s symbols
and his writing system based on the use of a slate and
stylus, saying for these innovations Louis was owed a debt
of gratitude.xli
Forty-seven years later, Helen Keller was born in the
US. At the age of 2, she was afflicted with an illness that
left her blind and deaf, thus she would have more diffi-
culties than most children combatting her isolation. She
was unable to communicate with others except through
touch. Her parents eventually came across Anne Sullivan,
someone who would be an extraordinary teacher for
Helen and who was herself visually impaired. With
extraordinary patience, Anne Sullivan got Helen to
realize that she could in fact communicate with others.
She had Helen touch water, then she traced the word
water in Helen’s palm. This is when everything opened
up for the little girl. Until then she had been a difficult
child, but she suddenly became well-behaved with an
enormous appetite for knowledge. She learned braille and
sign language and became the first deafblind person to
earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Later in life she would
become a public speaker and an activist for socialism,
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SUMMARY
feminism, and pacificism. She told her story in her autobi-

ography The Story of My Life,xlii which became the inspi-
ration for the 1962 film The Miracle Worker directed by
Arthur Penn. If you have children, I highly recommend
having them read another of Margaret Davidson’s biogra-
phies, simply titled Helen Keller.xliii
The legacies of Louis Braille and Helen Keller united
in 1952 at the centennial of Louis Braille’s death. The
French government decided to honor him by moving
his remains for burial in the Panthéon joining the great
men. For the occasion, Helen Keller was invited to Paris
to be made Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
She gave a moving speech, which she wrote in French,
at the Sorbonne, and in it she stated that the blind are as
indebted to Louis Braille as the human race is to Guten-
berg. One quote from her has always stuck with me: “The
only thing worse than being blind is having sight and
no vision.” There’s a videoxliv of some of her speech as
well as of the hundreds of blind people who processed
arm-in-arm through Paris following Louis Braille’s
remains to the Panthéon.
confidence and transmission
The stories of Louis Braille and Helen Keller, who are

both in my personal pantheon, contain morals that, in
my opinion, should be at the foundations of the educa-
tion system. We should have confidence in our chil-
dren’s abilities to find ways to pursue their own interests.
We should believe that they can be taught, even when
everything seems like a lost cause. And lastly, we should
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ensure that the discoveries of one generation are passed

on to the next.
You find very similar morals in the story of Babar
Ali. His is a story I first read about in a BBC article in
2009. The article dubbed him “the youngest headmaster
in the world,”xlv as at the time he was only 16 years old
and seven years prior he had begun giving classes in his
backyard for kids in his neighborhood.
He came from a middle-class background and could
afford to go to school. His neighbors, on the other hand,
didn’t have the $40 per year necessary to pay for school
in that part of Bengal. So every day after school, Babar
taught them what he learned and did that day. Not
only did the children keep coming back every day, but
they brought their friends, too. Babar’s parents saw no
problem with letting their son transform their backyard
into a school. Some of the first students he had would
later go on to start their own schools. When the BBC
filmed him seven years later, he had 800 students!
In a way, Babar Ali and his friends gave new life to
a system that was relatively popular in the 19th century
called the monitorial system. In the very first public
schools in the 19th century, it was not uncommon for
one teacher to have hundreds of students. The schools
implemented a pyramid structure for mentoring. As
soon as one student understood something, that student
would then transmit that knowledge to other students,
who would transmit it to others, and so on and so forth.
It’s a method that’s at least as effective as our traditional
education methods. It certainly doesn’t instill in students
the same respect for authority that traditional education
does. In a few cases, some monitorial systems became
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breeding grounds for seditious and revolutionary ideas.

Since most nations back then valued respect for authority
over the most quality education method, they turned
away from that system, even though it works wonders.
As proof, today Babar Ali is invited all over the world
to share his experience, and we even invited him to the
CRI. He attended a conference of ours in which children
were the only ones on stage explaining to us what it is to
learn in the 21st century.
Today, digitalization and social media are making it
possible for hundreds of Babar Ali’s to step forward all
over the world in all different kinds of contexts.
In the US, Sylvia Todd is one them. She has a show,
Super Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Show,xlvi and it’s
outstanding. When she was 6 years old, she and her
father went to the Maker Faire Bay Area, a festival for
DIYers (“do-it-yourselfers”) and beloved by the hundreds
of makers who flock to it every year. For those who don’t
know, makers are people who, with only their hands and
a bit of help from 3-D printers, make objects, reconfigure
and improve objects, or invent whole new objects.
Returning to the Maker Faire for the third time, Sylvia
began filming her YouTube show. “Me and my dad just
wanted to do something fun,” she says in her TEDx Talk.xlvii
As an aside, her father was a school dropout who became
a programmer. At just 8 years old, Sylvia was handing out
business cards to spread the word about her show. It was
the beginning of what would be become a soaring success
that would get her on stage at several TEDx Talks.xlviii By
the time she was 12, her videos had been watched by nearly
2 million people. Every video ends with the same line, a
kind of mantra: “Go out there and make something!”
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The Obama administration, which also advocated for

makers,xlix eventually heard about her. She was invited to
the White House Science Fair,l where she presented to the
president a watercolor painting made by a robot she created.
One of the inventions she’s most proud of is a pendant
that changes color based on the heart rate of the person
wearing it. Making it required a good deal of knowledge
about the physiology of the heart, technology, and art.
She’s another example of a child who learned how to do
pretty extraordinary things and share what she learned to
help others learn.
“trust us and expect more from us!”
Again in the US, Adora Svitak, born in 1997 in Spring-

field, Oregon, learned to write at age 4, and at the age of
6 her mother got her a computer with a word processor.
By the age of 8 she had written 300 stories on it, and
she decided she wanted to get published. Her first book,
Flying Fingers,li contains a few of these stories with
advice for young writers. With the help of her sister
Adrianna, she wrote a follow-up to the first book called
Dancing Fingerslii that was published in 2008. And so,
by the age of 11, she was one of the youngest writers
in history. Three years later she became the youngest
person to give a TED Talk, titled “What Adults Can
Learn From Kids.”liii With her dry sense of humor, she
makes the case that adults should listen more to chil-
dren because unlike them, children still dream about a
perfect world, undeterred as they are by the weight of
humanity’s past failures. “We love challenges, but when
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expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them....

Trust us and expect more from us.” At the age of 16, she
was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley.
Crossing the northern border of the US into Canada,
we meet Craig Kielburger. Born in 1982 in Thornhill,
Ontario, Craig read about the murder of a Pakistani boy
named Iqbal Masih, 12 years old, the same age as Craig at
the time. Iqbal had been a slave in a textile factory since
the age of 4 and was assassinated for being an outspoken
activist against child labor.liv
Craig was devastated by Iqbal’s tragic death and decided
to act. He began by asking permission to raise awareness
about child labor at his school. He founded a group with
11 of his friends called the Twelve Twelve-Year-Olds,
which later became Kids Can Free the Children. The
charity continued to grow, eventually shortening the
name to Free the Children, and their first major action
was getting 3,000 signatures for a petition that was sent
the prime minister of India calling for child-labor activist
Kailash Satyarthi to be released from prison. At age 16,
Craig published his book Free the Children: A Young
Man Fights Against Child Labor and Proves That Chil-
dren Can Change the World.lv Free the Children is now
called the WE Charity and has lifted one million people
out of poverty in 20 years. Craig Kielburger has received
just about every humanitarian award imaginable for the
fight he has led.
When we hear so many stories of young people taking
action, common sense would tell us that these are no longer
exceptions to the rule. I think these young people are the
sign of a paradigm shift, one we should follow as we rede-
sign the education environment for the 21st century.
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Of course, children didn’t wait until the 21st century to

dream big dreams and fight to make them a reality against
all odds. It’s the Internet that has changed everything.
Now the barriers to knowledge have been taken away,
and knowledge can go anywhere in the world. This is the
new paradigm. In it we have to draw on children’s curi-
osity, enthusiasm, and generosity, much more so than we
did in the past.
unleashing children’s creative potential
I’ll share three modern-day examples of education

programs that have had an impact on thousands of kids
and that demonstrate the power kids can harness with
just a little bit of direction from adults.
The first started in Venezuela, known as El Sistemalvi
(“the system”). It all started in 1975 in the garage of the
late economist and pianist José Antonio Abreu. He began
offering music training to children from poor families.
His goal was not to turn them into virtuoso musicians,
but rather to teach them to listen to one another, which is
one of the greatest gifts that playing music has to impart.
As many musicians say, you can’t go to the beat of your
own drum. You can’t play too loud when the rest of
the band is playing quietly, or vice versa, and you can’t
suddenly change tempo in a song. A band is in its very
essence a school for listening.
More than 40 years later, El Sistema has provided music
training to 400,000 children from underprivileged back-
grounds, and some world-renowned musicians have come
from the program, namely Gustavo Dudamel, who has
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been music director for some of the most prestigious

orchestras in the world. And the El Sistema program
has spread all over the world, with teaching locations on
every continent.lvii
Any way you look at it, El Sistema’s results are over-
whelmingly positive. Many of the children have found in
music an activity in which there’s no limit to their growth.
They gain self-confidence and develop healthy relationships
with themselves and others. Students even find ways to
convert their music skills into learning skills at school. For
example, they realize working with fractions is the same
thing as dividing quarter notes into eighth and sixteenth
notes. This first example is of a movement that draws on
children’s limitless desire to learn despite the difficult envi-
ronment in which they may be growing up.
The second example comes from India, specifically
from the Riverside School in Ahmedabad. The school
was founded in 2001 by Kiran Bir Sethi on the principle
notion that the best way to learn is through action, and
the best way to inspire people to take action is to get them
to improve their immediate surroundings.
The school has kids follow four steps. The first is to
identify a problem that affected them personally; second,
think of a solution; third, test the solution; fourth, write
down observations to then share. Each step draws on
essential skills. In the first step, empathy; second, crea-
tivity; third, action; fourth, sharing.
This education method draws on design thinking, a
collaborative creativity approach used in the world of
design. Kiran tested her unique curriculum first with the
200 students at Riverside School but was soon bringing
her empowerment thinking to the 30,000 children of
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Ahmedabad by convincing the city to organize a chil-

dren’s day once every two months. The busiest streets in
the city get blocked off, and kids and teenagers fill the
streets to play and create. It was during one of these festi-
vals that Ahmedabad created the first child-friendly street
crossing in the world. To mark the street crossing, kids
got to paint big, colorful flowers on the pavement to make
drivers aware that children were present, no doubt more
effective that simple white lines.
Two years later, Kiran Bir Sethi would bring her educa-
tion to 100,000 children throughout India. The kids from
Riverside wrote to 32,000 schools, challenging students
to identify a problem that affected them personally, told
them to pick a week to dedicate to finding a solution,
and then implement it. One-hundred thousand children
answered their call. They started literacy classes for their
parents, found ways to eradicate plastic-bag pollution,
launched a campaign against child prostitution, and
created fundraisers to buy hearing aids, among other
great ideas.
“be the change that you wish to see in the

world”
In her TED Talk, Kiran Bir Sethi says that contagious-

ness is a good thing.lviii She says we need to spread the
“I can” virus, and to do just that, she created an initia-
tive that goes far beyond the Riverside School. It’s called
Design for Change, a program to help kids develop
21st-century skills through design thinking, and it has
chapters all over the world,lix including one in France
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called Batisseurs de Possibles (“builders of possibility”),

run by Florence Rizzo.lx If this all sounds to you like a
nice idea but perhaps a bit cumbersome and a hindrance
to academic learning, I would like to point out that the
Riverside School is ranked among the top 10 in India
with regard to scores in math, English, and the sciences.
There’s no age requirement for getting involved in
programs like this. The Batisseurs de Possibles even
awarded an honor to a project done by 4-year-olds at
the Saint-Joseph de Yaoundé school in Cameroon. The
problem these children had identified was that one of
them had been seriously injured in the eye while playing
soccer with a plastic bottle–the school could not afford an
actual soccer ball to play with at recess. A possible solu-
tion could have been banning soccer at recess, but with
children in Cameroon that’s not very realistic. Instead,
they decided to make balls out of recycled plastic. And
if you think that sounds easy, it’s not. They had to collect
plastic bags and learn a lot of complex science to find
ways to get the bags to stick together to form the ball.
My third example is that of the website of the World’s
Largest Lesson,lxi started by Project Everyone and
supported by UNESCO and UNICEF. The website lists
the United Nations’ 17 global goals for sustainable devel-
opment to eradicate poverty, protect the planet, and guar-
antee prosperity for all.lxii They are:
1. No Poverty
2. Zero Hunger
3. Good Health and Well-Being
4. Quality Education
5. Gender Equality
6. Clean Water and Sanitation
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7. Affordable and Clean Energy

8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequality
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
12. Responsible Consumption and Production
13. Climate Action
14. Life Below Water
15. Life on Land
16. Peace and Justice Strong Institutions
17. Partnerships to Achieve the Goal
To tackle each goal, the World’s Largest Lesson offers

multimedia education resources in nearly 40 languages
for both children and adults.
Just picture fusing this awareness-raising project with a
program like Design for Change, which tries to highlight
the fact that global issues all manifest themselves at the
local level. You could put millions of minds and imagina-
tions to work throughout the world to solve these major
problems.
This is very similar to the method used by scientists to
tackle problems. To me, there’s no difference between
kids doing research to find solutions to problems in their
immediate environment and children being researchers,
period. But here again, it’s the reductionist view that
adults tend to have toward children that stands in the
way. We should listen to children, provide a space for
them in which they’re free to learn and develop, where
they can explore issues that affect them, ask questions
about things they’re interested in, find answers to these
questions while learning at the same time, and perhaps
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even make an impact on the world along the way. And

all this without any pressure from adults. Then anything
would be possible.
when children search–and find
This is what French-British astrophysicist Rodrigo

Ibata did. He works at the Strasbourg Astronomical
Observatory, in Strasbourg, France, as well as at France’s
center for scientific research, the CNRS. Rodrigo let his
son Neil, then 15 years old, work with data the Observa-
tory had gathered on the satellite galaxies surrounding
the galaxy Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own.
Scientists at the Observatory had been trying unsuc-
cessfully to find the logic behind the configuration of
these galaxies. So they concluded that the galaxies were
independent of one another. On the Saturday afternoon
before Neil started school again, his dad asked him to
develop a computer program that could help him visu-
alize the galaxies’ positions and rotation speeds. At first,
he was just applying knowledge that his dad had taught
him, but by the next night, he had found an answer to
the problem by using vectors he had studied in math
class. Neil’s dad had been guiding Neil along during
the two days Neil spent on the computer program. They
eventually both noticed that the satellite galaxies were
in fact rotating around Andromeda.lxiii Neil coauthored
an article with his father that was published in Nature.
The CNRS formally recognized Neil’s contribution to
their research, stating that it was he who was the first to
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prove the rotation of a disk of satellite galaxies around

Andromeda.lxiv
So discoveries can be collective, too.
Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist and a parent. Like a lot of
parents, he agreed to participate in career day at his son
Michael’s school, Blackawton Primary School, in Devon,
England. When Beau asked the children if they liked
science, their response was, “kind of.” Beau said to them,
perhaps you haven’t been told this yet, but science is actu-
ally a game–the point of science is to understand what
game nature is playing. He talked to them about his work
with bumblebees and how he was convinced that bumble-
bees play tons of games. He asked them what games they
thought bumblebees played and what were the kinds of
questions one should ask to find that out. The children
were enthralled. What if bumblebees can think? How do
they adapt? According to Beau, five of the fifteen questions
that the kids came up with on the spot were questions
scientists were trying answer in science journals. It’s proof
that kids aren’t as naive as one might think.
The children under Beau’s supervision came up with a
design for an experiment that would answer their ques-
tions. It was already known that bumblebees recognize
colors, but could they recognize patterns? The children
conducted their experiment, analyzed the results, and
showed that in fact bumblebees do recognize patterns.
They then wrote an article that was published in Biology
Letters, the biology journal of the British Royal Society,
the world’s oldest science academy. The children coau-
thored the article with Beau.lxv The last sentence of the
article is fantastic: “Science is cool and fun because you
get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”
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we never see what’s there; we only ever

see what was useful to see in the past
Two years later, Beau did a TED Talk called “Science

Is for Everyone, Kids Included” alongside one of his
students from Blackawton, Amy O’Toole. By then she was
12 years old.lxvi The talk begins with a funny game that
harkens back to our discussion of cognitive biases, i.e.,
the duck or the rabbit and the “alle-gorilla.” He has the
audience read aloud what they see on the screen behind
him. One slide shows: “W at a ou rea in,” and everyone
in the audience reads in unison, “What are you reading?”
Why didn’t they read out what was written–that is, “W at
a ou rea in”? Beau explained:
It’s because perception is grounded in experience. The
brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning
out of it, which means we never see what’s there, we never
see information, we only ever see what was useful to see
in the past....We’re only ever responding according to
what’s been done before. But actually, it’s a tremendous
problem, because how can we ever see differently?
Beau then makes the case for playing games as a method

of scientific inquiry through the story of the Blackawton
bees project. He says the purpose of the project was to
get children to see differently and change their relation-
ship with the world, not just to understand the behavior
of bumblebees.
It was in part thanks to Beau’s story that the CRI was
inspired to create the Savanturiers program.
Beau’s story illustrates the well-established fact we’ve
already mentioned: that we are all born scientists. Let’s
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look back to the work of American psychologist and

philosopher Alison Gopnik, a professor at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. She established a poignant
parallel between the way we discover the world in child-
hood and the rule for judging probabilities developed by
18th-century British mathematician Thomas Bayes. The
Bayes Rule is a way of sorting through possibilities in the
world based on one’s prior beliefs and what one judges
to be likelihoods based on patterns of evidence.
Without being aware of it, a baby thinks according to
this rule:
p(H|D) = p(D|H)*p(H)/p(D)
The rule is also the model for the reasoning doctors use
to establish diagnoses and that e-mail filters use to sort
spam out of your inbox. This is an innate process, and
Alison Gopnik shows that essentially from the moment of
birth we begin to formulate hypotheses about the world,
test our hypotheses, and adapt them until we find a satis-
fying result. Furthermore, we do this unencumbered by
cognitive biases, which build up over time in our brains.
Quite comically, she proves this through experiments she
conducts in which 5-year-olds solve problems that stump
her students at Berkeley. “Babies and children are like the
research and development division of the human species...
and [adults are] production and marketing,” she says.lxvii
A publication of hers in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Scienceslxviii showed that preschoolers and
adolescents are the most flexible learners in terms of
ability to grapple with unfamiliar hypotheses that are
consistent with new evidence. It’s important to take this
into account if we are to maximize their development so
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they can reach their full potential, and this is both for
their own good as well as for the good of anyone who may
one day benefit from their creativity, which could be all
of us.
Another important point she makes is that humans
take more time for cognitive development than any other
species. A newly hatched chick is able to stand immedi-
ately, while it takes humans several months. Likewise at
birth, chickens learn everything they need to know for
their survival, without learning much of anything else after
that. By contrast, humans have an extended childhood in
which we learn to strike a balance between exploration
and exploitation, or in other words learning and making
use of what we learn. Our exploration is hindered by
adults, oftentimes just to keep us from putting ourselves
in danger. Yet whether it’s at home or in school, the more
free, experimental spaces we’re offered as little scientists,
the more effective our exploration will be.
I agree that it’s justified to prohibit children in some
measure. But I’ve found that when children are given
more freedom and their curiosity is encouraged, their
growth is immense. It’s necessary to let children explore
and discover new things so that throughout their lives
they can continue developing the most significant of their
discoveries as children.
errare humanum est
The tension between exploration and exploitation is

nothing new. Whether you’re a bird looking for a place
to build a nest, a prospector looking for gold-bearing
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deposits in the earth, someone doing research on the

Web, a CEO on the hunt for new markets, or just
someone trying to plan your future, you can ask your-
self how much time you should spend exploring and how
much you should exploiting what you’ve found. The Latin
maxim Errare humanum est (“it is human to err”) can be
interpreted two different ways depending on how you
define “to err,” which means both “to make mistakes”
and “to wander.” Both seem pertinent to me. In order
to make progress, we need to be free to make mistakes
and to wander and explore. Machines will be delegated
more and more exploitation responsibilities in society, i.e.,
doing repetitive tasks we already know how to do, leaving
humans to do more exploring. Since exploring can be
difficult and frustrating, we need to learn how to explore
well. Being able to explore will be an increasingly impor-
tant skill in the future.
In the past, once we found our niche in society, we’d
spend our lives exploiting or making use of everything
we had learned up to then in order to fulfill our role. In
our rapidly changing world, it seems clear to me that we
need be able to do more exploring, as resources can dry
up, gold can get depleted, markets can shift, and changes
in the environment can render our exploitation strat-
egies obsolete. For the explorers of the past exploring
unknown territories, their success and even their survival
could depend on how well-prepared they were, if they
had a map and the appropriate gear, if they had a team of
experienced explorers alongside them, and if they’d read
works written by the explorers who came before them.
In all societies, there will be those who exploit what
has already been explored, and there will be those who
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continue exploring. This is who researchers are, equipping

themselves with scientific methods to make themselves
as effective as possible while exploring the unknown.
They have fine-tuned their techniques and can explore
anything and everything, no matter how small, large, or
complex. They’re constantly pushing their research further
by making use of new instruments and approaches that
offer new possibilities. We can also discover new ways
to explore, but we have to be prepared to stray from the
beaten path. One way of doing this is by cutting across
disciplines, asking new questions, catalyzing diverse new
collectives, and mobilizing collective intelligence.
As an explorer, you must be prepared to ignore those
who don’t understand what exploration is, i.e., that you
won’t simply be exploiting the discoveries of the past as
they do. Your discoveries as an explorer may even call
into question the discoveries of the past. Young people
are always looking for new ways to explore, and while
intergenerational conflicts can be difficult, it’s the best
prepared among the younger generations who are sure to
have a bright future. This is likely why Helga Nowotny,
who studied the sociology of science before becoming the
first female president of the European Research Council,
encourages young people to become competent rebels, to
develop their skills without losing their sense of rebellion,
to continue exploring new possibilities. In the world of
business, exploitation would be the short-term strate-
gies, i.e., managing in a way that maintains discipline and
limits risk. Exploration then means taking risks, making
room for mistakes, experimenting, and having long-term
vision. For businesses in the changing world, striking a
balance between exploitation and exploration in strategy
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is one of the keys to survival, especially for businesses that

tend to stick to the exploitation side of things.
It’s likely that the Homo sapiens of the past often had
to ask themselves, “Is it better to continue exploiting the
land we have or explore new lands?” Today, we’re real-
izing that we must both explore new ways to exploit and
exploit new ways to explore. To do this, I think we have
to create open platforms for innovation and creativity and
make these platforms available to everyone motivated to
explore new possibilities, whether that’s in education or
the professional world. We should especially encourage
children to learn to explore in a safe environment where
they have the freedom to make mistakes. The trust we
confide in them as children will stay with them for the
rest of their lives.
you said “new” teaching methods?
What I’m saying is not in itself revolutionary. I’m always

bothered when I read or hear people talk about “new”
teaching methods when talking about experimental
education practices, the kinds that create these sorts of
free spaces that draw on children’s innate curiosity, love
of games, and ability to cooperate.
In the late 19th century, Italian physician Maria Montes-
sori began to take an interest in education philosophy,
and in 1907 she opened her own school. Montessori was
one of the first women in Italy to become a doctor. She
started at a psychiatric clinic and there became inter-
ested in the educational problems of intellectually disa-
bled children. The first school she would open was for
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slum children of normal intelligence, and in it she imple-

mented methods she had developed working at the clinic
and through research. She organized lessons around
using concrete materials for the children to manipulate,
and soon she discovered that the children were able to
do much more than anyone else thought they could. She
taught them to read, write, and do arithmetic and even
took them to sit for the national standardized tests. Her
students would up scoring better than most children
from more privileged backgrounds in Rome. While her
alternative methods didn’t always earn her many allies,
she certainly left a lasting impression on everyone who
knew her.
She would go on to open other Montessori schools and
spend 40 years of her life traveling throughout the world
to lecture on the benefits of her methods and to train
teachers in these methods. Today, 100 years later, many of
her methods have been integrated into traditional educa-
tion without teachers’ being aware they were developed
for intellectually handicapped and slum children. Apart
from her innovative approaches to teaching, what I like
most about her is that it was through experimenting,
documenting, sharing with others, and training others
that she created her revolution.
According to the International Montessori Associ-
ation, there are more than 20,000 Montessori schools
throughout the world. The Montessori method seems
perfect for preparing young people to meet the challenges
of this century. I base this both on scientific studies of
Montessori classrooms and the stories of certain Montes-
sori alumni who happen to be the greatest innovators in
our time, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
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and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to name only a few.

Both of these tech companies have been very innovative,
founded on the principles of using and sharing machines
and having greater access to knowledge. These are skills
at the heart of the Montessori method. Page and Brin
have credited their years at Montessori school more than
their time at Stanford with teaching them to be self-mo-
tivated and independent, which they say helped them to
create Google.lxix
Like Maria Montessori, Célestin Freinet also had a
very prolific career in education. In 1920, Freinet was
returning from the battlefields of World War I to south-
eastern France where he became a teacher. There he
developed a free, experimental school founded on the
idea that kids should be active in class rather than passive
sponges absorbing information dictated by the teacher.
Just like Montessori’s students, Freinet’s students over-
came the odds to score very high on standardized tests.
One of the key aspects of his method was communi-
cation. Freinet felt that we’re more inspired to write if
we’re writing to someone and for a specific purpose.
Thus he had installed school printing presses for corre-
spondence between schools in which editorials on the
various projects children were involved in would be
published. It makes sense that, 75 years later, the first
teachers in France to experiment with using Twitter in
the classroom came from backgrounds in free experi-
mental schools.
Like many innovators, Freinet and Montessori faced
many difficulties, combatting the naysayers, challenging
conservative attitudes, and constantly defending the cause
of educating all children, including the poor, marginal-
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ized, intellectually handicapped, etc. For a wonderful film

based on Freinet’s experiences, I recommend watching
L’école buissonnière, which means “skipping school,”
directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois.lxx
innovating for everyone or creating

an elite?
Is it possible to move beyond these few small success

stories and scale experimental education?
In the wake of World War I, many educators tried to
do just that. You can learn all about them in a wonderful
television documentary called Révolution école, directed
by Joanna Grudzinska.lxxi The film uses archive footage
and photos, much of which have never been seen before,
to tell the story of dozens of educators–not only teachers
but also doctors, philosophers, etc.–who tried to create a
school that would work toward building a peaceful world
after the carnage of the war. Swiss education reformer
Adolphe Ferrière was able to bring together these educa-
tors under the New Education Fellowship, formed in the
period between the two wars.
The documentary shows brilliantly how their pacifistic
dream of “never again” was shaped in the trenches of
World War I only to be smashed to pieces when World
War II swept Europe.
Among them were many thinkers whom you may know,
including Maria Montessori and Célestin Freinet. Others
were Rudolph Steiner, who developed the philosophy of
anthroposophy, based on the idea that the human intel-
lect can come in contact with the spiritual realm, and
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this in the underlying philosophy of Waldorf education.

British educator A.S. Neill ran a free self-development
school called Summerhill School, which you can read
about in his book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to
Child Rearing.lxxii There was Belgian education pioneer
Ovide Decroly, whose Decroly method is still followed
by schools in Europe. German education reformer Paul
Geheeb established two progressive boarding schools, in
Germany and Switzerland respectively, that applied his
methods of employing both students’ intellect and motor
skills in education. Polish doctor Janusz Korczak refused
the sanctuary offered him by the Nazis and followed the
children he worked with at his orphanage to the death
camps.
There was a good deal of conflict within the move-
ment. Members couldn’t decide whether to try to form
an enlightened elite who would guide the people toward
the light of peace or if they should try at all costs to
build a system that was open to everyone, although the
undertaking would be so enormous it could never really
be carried out. These questions remain relevant.
Can we repeat their experiment? Can we apply ideas
discussed here on a large scale?
I believe we can.
We can start with what Beau Lotto did with the
students at Blackawton Primary School, and you can
look at what biophysicist Samir Brahmachari is doing
with the thousands of students who participate in his
Open Source Drug Discovery program.lxxiii Its aim is
to research neglected diseases that affect mostly poor
countries, as market forces in the West make it unprof-
itable to pursue research and development in these
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fields of research. The program’s biggest undertaking

was creating a computer simulation of the tuberculosis
genome in order to understand the functions of all its
biological parts. There are thousands of research articles
on tuberculosis, but due to a lack of funds, no one had
ever made the effort to compile all their data to create
a systems-biology model of its genome. Only 50 percent
of the tuberculosis genome had been understood until
then.
It occurred to Samir Brahmachari that he could crowd-
source Indian students to read the scientific literature on
the subject. They would extract all the information on
tuberculosis genes they could find in the articles, map
the genome in a database, then build a model of it to be
able to run genetic and systems-biology tests on it. He
had several students work on each article so as to cut
down on the workload for each student, and eventually,
they succeeded in creating the first ever systems-biology
model of the tuberculosis genome. He uses the model
to identify all the different genes, the proteins that play
the most important role in causing illness, and then finds
new targets for drugs, and the students themselves try to
synthesize these drugs.
At every step of the way, Samir Brahmachari crowd-
sourced students from all different disciplines, be it chem-
istry, genetics, genomics, etc. His program won him the
Open Science Prize from Science magazine, and he really
earned it. He was able to bring together citizen science,
open science, and the collective intelligence of young
people in order to face a global challenge. I hope to see
more and more Samirs in the world as time goes on.
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better acknowledgement
I’m happy to say that today, several major global institu-

tions have taken a big step forward and acknowledged the
incredible accomplishments of young people. The most
illustrative example the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize being
awarded to Malala Yousafzai. She was 17 at the time, the
youngest Nobel Prize winner to date.
Six years before winning the prize, she was speaking out
against the Taliban’s prohibition on educating young girls
in the rural region of Pakistan where she lived. She then
began blogging for the BBC about her daily life among
school closings. Not only did she live in the region, but
her father had founded and ran the school she attended.
She wrote using a pseudonym in her blog, but the Taliban
found out who she was anyway.
On October 9, 2012, members of the Pakistani Taliban
stopped the school bus Malala was in on her way home
from school and attempted to kill her. She was shot in
the head but miraculously survived, later to be flown to
England for an operation. After months of treatment and
recuperation, she took back up the cause of education as
a right for young girls, later to tell her story in her book
I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for
Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.lxxiv
The corecipient for the Peace Prize that year was
Kailash Satyarthi, the prisoner whom, if you’ll recall,
Craig Kielburger petitioned to have liberated. The Nobel
committee’s message was clear: that they were supporting
“the struggle against the suppression of children and
young people and the right of all children to have an
education.”lxxv
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While remarkable progress has been made since the

year 2000, especially with regard to educating girls, nearly
60 million children still don’t have access to education,
namely children in war zones. There are also millions of
children in refugee camps whose parents must prioritize
food and health over education, although organizations
such as Libraries Without Borderslxxvi are hard at work
to combat this. They’ve tried to bring digital education
to children with the portable multimedia center they’ve
designed called the Ideas Box. The Ideas Box contains
“satellite Internet connection, a digital server, a power
generator, 25 tablets and laptops, 6 HD cameras, 1 large
HD screen, board games, arts and crafts materials, hard-
cover and paperback books, and a stage for music and
theatre,” all in a highly durable and energy independent
case.lxxvii
It’s true that behind all the initiatives we’ve been
talking about are truly exceptional teachers, researchers,
and young people–who often have the help of extremely
supportive and encouraging parents. But what they’re
doing are things anyone can do. Even if the person who
started a given initiative is exceptional, reproducing the
ideas and adapting it to other contexts is something anyone
can do. If you look continent by continent at the countries
whose students score highest on the PISA test, they have
all put in place reforms that support observation, experi-
mentation, learning through trial and error, and coopera-
tion. The countries in question are Finland, Singapore, and
Canada, among others, i.e., countries that are very different
from one another in terms of political and social organiza-
tion. Interestingly, what they also have in common is that
they invest substantially in learning-science research.lxxviii
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getting away from hierarchy
France is still trying to understand what’s needed in

order to implement dynamic education methods such
as the ones we’ve been discussing. And it’s not for lack
of trying. Rather, France seems unable to throw off the
system it’s had for years, one that’s far too hierarchical.
To offer an example, the Ministry of National Educa-
tion did understand that making it easier for teachers to
communicate with one another was an important part
of stimulating innovation. Of course, this isn’t a ques-
tion of reinventing the wheel, neither in the classroom
nor in the school; it’s just about teachers communicating
with one another, exchanging, seeing how other teachers
came up with solutions to similar problems that they
have. What did the ministry do to facilitate the exchange
of information among teachers? It created a completely
new social network, ViaEduc, and it was entirely closed...
even though we know the engine of innovation is open-
ness. As a result, teachers interested in education inno-
vation get in touch on Twitter and Facebook rather than
ViaEduc.
As it so happens, these kinds of gaffes don’t happen just
in France. Before Wikipedia was the top Internet encyclo-
pedia, there were two competing Internet-encyclopedia
projects. One wanted to create the greatest encyclopedia
by bringing together the best researchers in world. The
other believed in crowdsourcing intelligence and wanted
to open the project to everyone, while of course following
a set of best-practice guidelines and establishing a fact-
checking system. After a few months, the first project
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had written a few hundred articles, while the second had

thousands.
I hold Wikipedia in the highest regard, and in a similar
vein I have tremendous admiration for the French educa-
tion system. But being a meliorist (someone who believes
the world can be made better through human effort), I
try to practice constructive criticism as a means to move
things forward. With regard to Wikipedia, I have just
one criticism. In English, there are often two versions to
the same article: the regular article and a version of the
article in simple English for those who have less mastery
of the language. A simple version in every language
would be extremely useful, and not least for children. But
this doesn’t exist. Simpler encyclopedias do exist, such as
Vikidia,lxxix mentioned previously, but they are less well-
known and thus receive fewer contributions. Just as there
are simplified dictionaries, there should be large, collabo-
rative encyclopedias accessible for people of all ages who
could, for example, select their level of difficulty using
the same color-coded classification system you’d find at a
ski hill, i.e., green, blue, red, and black.
This isn’t just for the purpose of making knowledge
accessible. It’s about getting young people to contribute,
which can help them understand how knowledge is
created. I’ll share a brief anecdote from my own family
life. At age 7, my daughter Sophia loved whales. After
reading every book on whales that she could get her
hands on at the library, she went online to see what more
she could find about them.
“Dad,” she called out to me one day. “I think there’s a
mistake. On Vikidia it says that whales eat only plankton.”
I didn’t see what the problem was.
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“You know as well as I do that killer whales eat other

things. I saw a video of killer whales eating sea lions.”
So, I showed her how to use the editing function to
correct the information, and then showed her how to
create a new page if she wanted. The following year, she
did just that, writing the page on orcas.
This made an impression on me because when I was
growing up in the 20th century, I would never have
thought that a page in a dictionary could have been
wrong, and even less so that I could have contributed
to editing it. If we could get every young person today
to contribute information to open-source articles at their
language level, we would have a lot more content and
numbers of contributors, and we could show young
people how consensus is created. Going further, in
language class, students could compare the same Wiki-
pedia article in different languages. This is something I
do as a way to see the different points of view of different
cultures. It can help students see that consensus is not
always universal–not by a long shot. If you’re fortunate
enough to be able to read in different languages the arti-
cles on love, Napoleon, or Crimea, you’ll see that certain
concepts and ideas about history are not at all seen the
same way around the world.
thousands of hummingbirds
Have you heard the legend of the little hummingbird

and the forest fire? A forest fire swept across the land,
and while all the other animals were fleeing the fire, the
little hummingbird, thinking, “I’m going to do something
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about the fire!” flew over to a nearby stream, grabbed a

drop of water in its beak, and flew over and dropped it
on the fire. It did this over and over again, saying to itself,
“I’m doing the most I can do.”
The hummingbird in this story represents meliorism,
which, as Wikipedia tells us, is not mere optimism.
Rather, it’s the belief that our efforts can create a better
world than if natural processes were left to their devices.
The world is not perfect, but we can continue to work
toward making it better. This is what Voltaire’s Candide
means when he says at the end of the book, “We must
cultivate our garden.” French philosopher Alain put it
another way: “Pessimism depends on mood; optimism
depends on sheer will.”
In the education field, there are thousands of humming-
birds. British journalist Charles Leadbeater wrote a fasci-
nating book about them.lxxx He didn’t want just to describe
a series of education innovations taking place around the
world. He wanted to uncover the logic underlying all of
them and show how to go from a single hummingbird with
a drop of water to systemic change. That means organizing
with different communities, working with institutions
without getting swallowed up by them, etc. After all, what’s
difficult for most people is not innovating; it’s getting
things done on a massive scale.
humanizing the system
Some countries, France among them, have difficulty

with hummingbirds. In the French education system,
everything is supposed to be uniform. All programs
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are the same everywhere: Teachers and other education

staff are placed here or there based on their credentials,
with no regard to where they may be a good fit given the
particulars of the school in which they’re placed. For
school principals, however, it’s the opposite. If they want
to get anything done, a charismatic personality is the only
way forward. The worst part is that in many teachers’
lounges throughout France, even talking about wanting
to do things differently is generally frowned upon. Should
any teachers be ever so unfortunate as to garner media
attention for new ideas, they’ll be subject to scorn.
And yet, behind any innovative program anywhere,
and behind any school that has been able to adopt new
methods, there are innovators. French audiences discov-
ered in 2017 a host of innovative French educators in the
documentary Une idée folle, which means “a wild idea,”
directed by Judith Grumbach. The teachers featured in
it were from nine different French schools both public
and private, and they are the heroes of this truly feel-
good movie about education methods centered around
empathy, creativity, cooperation, self-confidence, and
taking initiatives. It’s not a film about schools that are
struggling; rather it’s one about children who are happy,
teachers who are fulfilled and engaged and who show
that caring for students and having high expectations for
them are not mutually exclusive.lxxxi What’s the difference
between these schools and others? It’s that these teachers
want to find paths for their students to succeed, no matter
what criticism they may encounter.
There are wonderful people behind education inno-
vations everywhere. Columbia’s Escuela Nueva (“new
school”) model was generated in large part thanks to
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the work of Vicky Colbert,lxxxii the daughter of educators

and who herself studied the sociology of education and
comparative education. Her model has spread to 20 coun-
tries and has changed the lives of 5 million children.
At first, her goal was to design a system that was adapted
to children in rural areas. These kids often have to work
on their families’ farms to contribute to family income.
At Vicky’s school, kids can progress at their own pace,
which keeps them from dropping out because they never
have to repeat grades. It’s not the teacher who’s the center
of the lessons, but the children themselves. Children are
also encouraged to be “participative, democratic, [and to
know] how to share and work in teams.”lxxxiii
Vicky Colbert doesn’t claim to have invented a new
method or consider herself on the level of Montessori,
Decroly, Steiner, and Freinet. She was simply able to bring
progressive education ideas to Columbia’s national educa-
tion policy. Typically, only wealthy children have access to
progressive education, and this despite what these educa-
tion reformers had envisioned. Vicky was able to make
progressive education low-cost, effective, and available to
everyone.lxxxiv
Here as well, we notice a common thread among the most
effective teaching methods. They put faith in the ability of
the students to contribute to solving complex problems
and have an impact in the community. At the outset, the
idea was to provide an education solution for marginalized
sections of society, and Vicky’s school wound up creating a
modern education model fit for our time.
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the incredible success of Catts
Pressoir school is indistinguishable from the ambition of
its director Guy Étienne and his family. From primary
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school through high school, the 650 students at the

school focus on observing the world around them and
identifying problems in their communities. They pick
a problem that matters to them and then work together
toward a solution by doing research. At the end of the
year, they share their results in a science fair.
For example, after the 2010 earthquake, traffic lights
stopped working and streets became dangerous places
for pedestrians, especially school children. Students from
Catts Pressoir primary school invented a way to fix the
traffic lights that was more economical than the system in
place. They took their idea to city hall, proposing that it
would likely be useful in other parts of the country as well.
Other students from Catts Pressoir created their own SMS
gateway for sending text messages, as the general cost of
sending text messages was too high. A major undertaking
at the primary school level is a mass reforestation project
of Haiti, which has already planted 1.2 million trees. The
Haitian president has publicly stated he took inspiration
from this Catts Pressoir project in developing his own
reforestation program. The students were interested in
understanding earthquakes that plagued their country
and studied them, connecting with other schools and
researchers abroad. They wound up winning medals in
international Olympiads of geology.
learning to learn
Just like Vicky Colbert, Guy Étienne is implementing

an approach that focuses on the importance of learning
to learn. This will prove to be a major education idea in
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our time because it brings together fundamental learning,

technical skills, and the major social questions that
coming generations will have to face. A brief anecdote:
The students at Catts Pressoir were one day working on
robots, and one of them, a primary school student, gave
his robot a number. Guy asked him why, and the student
told him that, this way, if the robot did something bad,
the student would know which one it was. This student
understood on his own the ethical risks in robotics, and
these ethical questions are currently at the center of a
lot of high-level legal battles going on around the world,
whether it’s dealing with liability in accidents caused by
self-driving cars or the use of military drones.lxxxv
Another hummingbird, Shrinath Kalbag, established
in 2002 a fab lab at Vigyan Ashram in Pabal, India. This
was the same year that MIT’s Media Lab opened its first
fab lab. Kalbag’s Vigyan Ashram is part of the Indian
Institute of Education, housed a in low, 40-square-meter
building located about a four-hour drive from Mumbai.
The fab-lab philosophy was developed by physics
and computer-science researcher Neil Gershenfeld
in two legendary MIT classes, the first of which I’ve
already mentioned: “How to Make (Almost) Anything”
and “How to Make Something That Makes (Almost)
Anything.” Gershenfeld was inspired by maker culture
in California and familiar with the ethics of hackers. He
took these ideas and implemented them at one of the best
universities in the world.
A fab lab is a great example of the kind of place I’ve been
talking about where people can learn and create freely.
There you find digital tools for working on all kinds of
materials, and at its best, people are granted access to the
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fab lab so long as they let others see what they’ve made so
that they in turn can learn from it. Essentially, a fab lab
is perfectly adapted to teaching methods that encourage
“doing” and crowdsourcing solutions to problems.
The Vigyan Ashram fab lab, established with the
support of MIT, was the second in the world. Kalbag
brought in young rural dropouts and sent them to nearby
farms to learn about the problems farmers were having.
Then, working together in the fab lab, they would try to
build something to solve a given farmer’s problem. Once
they came up with something, they were then encouraged
to start their own businesses with their inventions, as it
was very likely that other farmers were having the same
problem. We see here how solutions can be transformed
into products and services.
The same thing happened when the CRI’s Savanturiers
program began working with students from vocational
high schools. When students found solutions to the prob-
lems they were working on, local entrepreneurs offered
to partner up with them to file patents for their inven-
tions. From Mumbai to Paris, hundreds of thousands of
inventions are just waiting to be made. All we have to do
is show people the ways of learning differently and free
them from passive learning in the classroom.
Putting innovative teaching methods to practice is not
a matter of working miracles. It just takes paying close
attention to students to try to combine our observations
of the students with what scientific data say. That’s how
we can bridge ethics and science, the scientific method
and the needs of the local communities. This is also how
we educate conscientious citizens ready for the challenges
of this century. The skills that Catts Pressoir focuses on
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are skills that most schools don’t spend much time on:
understanding yourself, empathy, organizing a work team,
gaining a sense of responsibility and initiative, having a
scientific mind-set, being creative, having the skills neces-
sary to be a change maker, respecting established guide-
lines, and leadership.
humanity at the core
I just want to be clear: The purpose is not to create a

class schedule with one hour of building empathy, one
hour of respecting guidelines, etc. It takes methods that
can teach effective math, language, and history skills in
order for these personal skills to develop. What’s impor-
tant to keep in mind is that the ultimate goal is larger
than each individual subject area, that formal academic
skills should never be prioritized over non-cognitive
skills and social skills.
The Escuela Nueva and Catts Pressoir are two schools
that focus on humanizing the system and allowing
students to make their own choices. The countries that
are able to apply these teaching methods at the national
level, such as Finland, Singapore, and Canada, are able
to make the institutions themselves less top-heavy.
According to international comparisons, they are better
at reducing inequalities than French schools, even
while French schools bear proudly above their doors
the national motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (“liberty,
equality, fraternity”).
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empathy in the education environment
Changing attitudes and introducing a culture of ques-

tioning doesn’t have to come at a significant cost. It
would be easy, for example, to carve out regular times for
teachers to discuss innovations that are being tested else-
where in the world. What should we take from the exam-
ples of Catts Pressoir and the Escuela Nueva? Ignore
them because our specific context is different? Or can
we can borrow from these approaches and adapt them to
our context? But notice that doesn’t mean adapting it to
the top-down model. The simple fact of teachers’ working
together as a learning collective, or even better a learning
collective with ties to other learning collectives, is enough
to spark positive changes. That’s because learning collec-
tives build trust, at least so long as the members of the
learning collective feel that administrators are genuinely
looking out for their best interest and that administrators
are willing to listen to them when needed. Having inspec-
tors come to schools goes back to the days of Napoleon,
which is why we should change the name of that job title,
as the word carries with it a connotation of control and
punishment, and school-inspection practices are getting
better, though slowly. Teachers need mentors, not police
officers. They need people to listen to them rather than
enforce arbitrary rules on them. They need empathy, not
judgment. Contrary to what some teachers may have been
told by their higher-ups, it’s not just children who deserve
empathy.
You’ll have understood by now that throughout the
entire world, there exist real education models that meet
the needs of this century. We need to foster them, facili-
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tate communication between them, and legitimize them.

How can we know which ones they are? We notice that
each one of these innovative systems reject rote learning
and embrace the ability to formulate new questions.
Geoff Mulgan, CEO of the National Endowment for
Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), started a
network of innovative schools called Studio Schools,lxxxvi
“studio” to harken back to the studio system of the
Renaissance, when young people learned by working
and worked while learning. Geoff’s definition of what
a school of this century will look like is very clear. For
him, putting knowledge to use involves three types of
“loop learning.” First-loop learning is fitting new data
into existing models. This, according to him, is what most
mainstream education does. Second-loop learning gener-
ates new concepts and categories. This kind of learning
is better adapted to the new millennium, but it doesn’t
address the complexity of our world. Finally, third-loop
learning is developing new ways of thinking.
The first form of learning won’t have much more of a
future, as this learning will be taken over by artificial
intelligence. The second and, above all, third forms of
learning should last much longer. It may be that no one
knows how the world will change, but we know at least
that the ability to adapt to change will be one of the most
important skills to have.
Those with experience in innovative learning will be
much better prepared.
SUMMARY
5
Learn to ask (yourself)
good questions
How will we learn in the 21st century? We don’t need

to wait for the next big trend innovation in education to
know the answer. We need only look back to the method
Socrates developed in ancient Greece that he called the
maieutic, which is the Greek word for midwifery. Indeed,
he saw as a form of midwifery his duty as a philoso-
pher, i.e., drawing out people’s ideas and understanding
through questions and dialogue. “Maieutic” comes from
the name of the Greek goddess Maia, synonymous with
the earth and growth, and we can see why Socrates was
drawn to this comparison, as Socrates’ own mother was
a midwife.
As we saw in the last chapter, we’ve made a lot of
advances in cognitive science and our knowledge of the
brain since Socrates’ day. Similarly, digital technology and
artificial intelligence have revolutionized the way knowl-
edge is produced and spread.
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from maieutic to “maieutech”
How can we marry Socrates’ method with the Internet?

We’d need what we could call maieutechnology or
socratechnology, i.e., technologies that can help us mobi-
lize both individual and collective intelligence to then
develop our intelligence in the tradition of humanity’s
greatest thinkers, from Buddha to Confucius to Socrates.
Collective intelligence is our best defense against getting
surpassed by artificial intelligence, but once again we
need to organize collective intelligence a bit more and go
further than current collective-intelligence tools such as
Wikipedia and Foldit have.
Collective intelligence is not simply the sum total
of information on a given topic. Certain opinions and
hypotheses on that topic should be given more weight
than others. It comes down to the quality of what in the
printing press and digital world is called editorialization.
Who compiles opinions? Who structures the various
opinions? Who’s separating the wheat from the chaff,
the good from the bad? To use an example from the
chess world, in 1996 Russian chess grandmaster Anatoly
Karpov, who dominated chess internationally for 20 years,
played a match against the entire world.i The world team
decided on moves by vote, and Karpov beat them hand-
edly. Why? Because there was no system for catalyzing
and channeling collective intelligence. People could vote
for bad moves. If we have no way to distinguish between
good and bad moves, collective incompetence is as likely
as collective intelligence!
A much more interesting match was against Garry
Kasparov from June to October 1999, two years after his
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Learn to ask (yourself) good questions
historic loss to IBM’s Deep Blue. The player community

was invited to vote on the moves that were suggested by
four young, brilliant players: Elisabeth Pähtz, then 14
years old; Étienne Bacrot and Irina Krush, both 16; and
Florin Felecan, the oldest one at 19. They were in charge
of organizing the collective intelligence of the world team.
There was one move made per day, so they had 24 hours
to discuss and vote on every option. Kasparov ended up
winning, but in his book,ii he describes the match as one
of the finest and most challenging of his career.
Since then, he has developed the idea of marrying
human and artificial intelligence in chess to create
“centaur chess,” but instead of meaning half-human and
half-horse, he means half-human and half-computer. I
support this development. Once we can properly cata-
lyze and channel collective intelligence–and our example
shows the important role of young people in this process–
we can continue strengthening it with the calculating
power of computers.
The great science journals build their reputations on
their editorship. When you submit an article, it’s read
and discussed by peers, then you have to defend your
ideas, and in the end an editor will make the final deci-
sion to publish you or not. The process is not perfect, as
each year journals have to withdraw articles with incor-
rect information that slipped through the net, yet statisti-
cally speaking these journals guarantee the best possible
quality of information and help drive scientific progress.
You can also enrich your approach by calling on collec-
tives. Michael Nielsen wrote a bookiii on new ways to
carry out research, and in it he shares the poignant story
of British mathematician Tim Gowers. Gowers is a Fields
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Medal winner, which is to say one of the best math-

ematicians in the world, yet a few years back there was
a problem that had him stumped. He decided to solicit
help from the readers of his blog, and within a few weeks
they had helped solve the problem. In the wake of that
experience, Tim created Polymath,iv an online platform
for mathematicians to collaborate on new math problems.
Some see Gowers’s massive collaboration movement as a
sign that the old cliché of the solitary mathematician with
only pen and paper to aid her will have to be reimagined
in the age of the Internet.v
It’s also thanks to the quality of Wikipedia’s editorship
that it has proven to be one of the best encyclopedias in
the world. As more and more people become more and
more educated, knowing how to mobilize and organize
individual, computer, and collective intelligence will
become increasingly important.
knowledge and acknowledgement
In order to make the knowledge society a reality, we

need to give proper acknowledgement to those who
create and share knowledge. And these people are
numerous. Diplomas acknowledge that you have acquired
certain knowledge. Patents acknowledge the rights of
those who have come up with new inventions. Science
journals acknowledge contributions to the sciences. All
these forms of acknowledgement are relics of the age of
the printing press.
Digitalization has come up with newer, faster, and
more innovative kinds of acknowledgement. Hundreds
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of platforms offer users ways to promote or discourage

things, from Facebook Likes to stars on TripAdvisor or
more elaborate feedback systems such as those in Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs). But what most of these
systems actually do is create a reputation for the thing
being evaluated rather than acknowledge its quality. On
top of that, the things being evaluated tend to be limited
to recreation activities, services, and products. Never-
theless, acknowledgement in one’s field is a strong moti-
vating factor for many people. A 2013 study coauthored
by French economist Yann Alganvi showed that the most
active contributors to Wikipedia were motivated not by
altruism but by “barnstars,” i.e., symbolic awards existing
within the Wikipedia community that acknowledge
important contributions from editors. Wikipedia’s editors
then showcase their barnstars on their Wikipedia user
pages.
How can we bring together the seriousness of the older
forms of acknowledgement with the speed and scale of
the newer ones? We can’t abandon the older ones because
not all ideas and knowledge are equal. It’s a challenge that
I believe should be taken up by the experts who work
for the public good. They should draw inspiration from
systems already in existence and making the different
approaches more effective, as no one system is sufficiently
neutral and exempt from bias.
Scientists thought they could judge the importance of a
given article based on the number of times that article was
cited in other articles. The idea was proposed by physicist
Jorge E. Hirsch, so this index for measuring the impact
of certain research was called the h-index. Although
the index is relatively new, biases appeared very quickly
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wherein certain researchers began citing each other as a

deliberate means to increase each other’s h-index. It was
also noticed that interdisciplinary research, which now
holds some of the most promise for the future, used to
be undervalued, as each separate field preferred to stay in
its silo rather than venture outside of it and cite a source
from a different discipline.
No index on its own is exempt from bias. Only by
aggregating several indexes can we arrive at the clearest
possible picture.
And having this kind of clear picture is so important.
For Confucius, there were three ways to attain wisdom.
The first is by learning from your mistakes. This way is
demanding, painful even, as you need to be willing to face
your own fallibility. The second is reflecting on a situa-
tion long enough to see every possibility and, that way,
avoid making mistakes. It’s less painful but even more
demanding, as you have to overcome your mental barriers
and invest a lot of energy. The third, which he said is the
simplest, is by imitating the wisest people around you. This
is undeniably the most common, but we have to know who
the wisest people around us are. And we have to be careful
not to get fooled by those pretending to be the wisest
among us. Furthermore, this approach, while necessary,
leaves little room for new ideas and new questions.
A second evolution would consist of integrating less
formatted knowledge into the notion of knowledge
worthy of being transmitted and considering as sources
of this knowledge people from different walks of life. As
we saw previously, an essential step for avoiding all the
cognitive traps that our brains set for us is to try to know
ourselves. Supposing we can ever fully know ourselves,
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this process can take a lifetime, and yet it’s not part of
any curriculum recommendations. It is relegated to the
private sphere and depends on personal initiative alone.
candles of knowledge and

acknowledgement
In some societies, such as those in Africa, people seek

self-knowledge from the old sages. Who are the old sages
in our lives? They’re likely not the ones claiming to be
sages. Why not create a platform where we could collec-
tively identify their practices in order to benefit from their
accumulated life experience? In economics, non-rival
goods are goods that can be possessed by many people at
the same time and consumed repeatedly without ruining
their quality or depleting them. Empathy, love, wisdom,
and ideas are like non-rival goods. If we call on those who
possess them to transmit them, they wouldn’t lose anything,
and we could all benefit from it. We would even then be
able to spread it to others, a bit like when you light a candle
from another candle–the first candle doesn’t go out.
As in English, the words in French for knowledge and
acknowledgement are very similar: connaissance and
reconnaissance. In some classrooms I’ve visited, chil-
dren give candles of knowledge and acknowledgement
to people in their lives who have helped them progress.
The candles were given as often to teachers as to parents
who had taught them to ride a bike, for example; to
friends who helped them understand a difficult aspect of
grammar; or to older siblings who had taught them to be
nicer to younger siblings.
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We find these kinds of the systems of acknowledgement

on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, but those compa-
nies collect data on us for their own benefit rather than
our own. Moreover, their systems are still rudimentary
and don’t provide a particular incentive to share ideas,
which is essential in the society I’m calling for: the society
of knowledge, acknowledgement, and sharing.
Let’s be clear, I’m not trying to make, or not only, a
moral argument. My argument is also pragmatic. Artifi-
cial intelligence today lets us process unheard-of amounts
of data. Take for example a condition we still know little
about, autism. It seems autism is due to complex and over-
lapping factors, hundreds of genetic combinations playing
out in thousands of different scenarios. If everyone, scien-
tists and families alike, who knows something about a
case of autism were to document it, perhaps we could
identify yet-undiscovered correlations and possible ther-
apies that, at least for certain forms of autism, may work
better than others. Some researchers are already doing
this. I know that because a few of these researchers are
at the CRI. What I’m talking about is a massive change of
scale, putting collective intelligence in motion at a scale
we’ve never seen.
Behind such mechanisms is the idea that everything
must be done to enhance both knowledge and the ability
to share and to make information visible in a way that lets
us identify those who hold this knowledge, the same way
we give out diplomas at schools and universities. Thanks
to technology, we can now fuse together on a large the art
of creation (Maia) and the creation of fortunate encoun-
ters (Portunus).
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what “hands-on” can teach

the bookworms
In this regard, intellectuals are far behind those who

work using their hands. Maker culture, born on the
west coast of the US, was an early advocate of sharing
knowledge and tools, as Walter Isaacson describes in a
book called The Innovators.vii Well before Steve Jobs and
Bill Gates began their legendary tinkering in garages in
Silicon Valley, later to produce the computers that would
revolutionize our lives, maker culture was literally taking
root in small, isolated farming communities desperate for
ways to collaborate in order to solve problems. A bunch
of little learning communities cropped up and with them
a culture that would later invigorate American industry.
This history explains in large part why today California is
so innovative. Chris Anderson, a Silicon Valley guru and
former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has said that
maker culture laid the foundations for “the new indus-
trial revolution” that digitalization ushered in.viii
Just as the teaching methods that respond to the great
challenges of our time already exist and are just waiting to
be developed and networked, the technical principals and
tools that we need to build the society of knowledge and
acknowledgement are already out there. They’re called
skills portfolios. In them, you document what you’ve
learned, meaning not only diplomas but also awards and
certificates that show you’ve acquired specific knowledge
or skills as well as honors in the arts and sports, certifi-
cates and titles you’ve earned over the course of your life
acknowledging what you’ve achieved and learned through
experience, whether it’s volunteering, political activism,
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etc. Skills portfolios draw the map of our knowledge and

skills in a way that’s incomparably richer, more varied,
and denser than diplomas alone. It’s a kind of super CV.
Sharing these paths and experiences would also provide
an extraordinary guidance tool. Training and career paths
are less and less linear as we enter a more dynamic world
where professions are constantly evolving. If we could see
the paths taken by others in the profession I want to work
in or know which professions people with my same back-
ground have entered, this could be a valuable guide, for
people of all ages but for young people especially.
a map of possibilities
The idea is not to force people in a certain direction

or make them feel they have no free will. The current
system does a fine job of that already, unfortunately. More
than just an assortment of options, it would structure the
options to show you a map of all the possibilities, like
how a GPS system suggests different possible routes, and
it’s up to you to decide between a highway jammed with
traffic, a dull and direct freeway, or a winding country
road.
The map would show you everywhere you’ve been in the
world of knowledge and how much knowledge and skill
you’ve acquired in various areas. And instead of showing
the time each route would take, the different routes would
show new areas of knowledge you may want to explore
and whether you want to pursue them through tradi-
tional education, online courses, peer-based learning, a
fab lab course, etc. There could also be a geographic map
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showing you all the resources in your area, be it people or

institutions. In sum, the way we meet romantic partners
through Tinder, do ride-sharing through Uber, and find
lodging and homestays through Airbnb, these could all
be applied to the field of knowledge.
In some fields such as programming, these tools are
already in use, primarily because the world of program-
ming is in constant evolution and programmers are
always in need of training, and proof of their training,
in new computer languages and new versions of existing
languages.
Why not extend these tools to everyone? Ideally, this
would be done under the aegis of the public service, as
with diplomas and health records, in order to protect
our privacy and testify to the truthfulness of the infor-
mation in our portfolios. If necessary, a delegation of
different public services could be organized to mobilize
the most relevant key players, but on the condition that
this doesn’t turn into another bureaucratic maze that only
they know their way out of. That’s how we can modernize
the system of acknowledging prior learning, a great idea
made somewhat unrealistic given the complexity of its
implementation.
the monitorial system
One of the models that to me seems the most fruitful is

the monitorial system, as it provides students the oppor-
tunities to grow by teaching other students. And research
confirms what one could imagine to be the case: that
when we pass on knowledge to others, we strengthen our
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SUMMARY
own knowledge and even further it through questioning

from our “students.” Let’s acknowledge that experience!
Let’s provide more incentives than just altruism to get
people to share what they know! We can take inspiration
from the example of Adora Svitak and her alma mater the
University of California, Berkeley, which has programs
that let students create their own courses and gives them
credit for doing so. Let’s offer financial incentives to
those that contribute to creating and maintaining knowl-
edge ecosystems, thus contributing to the building of a
learning society or, even better, a learning planet (an idea
we will discuss later).
wisdom of the crowd vs. collective

stupidity
For as much as I believe in the power of collective intel-

ligence and, in some cases, the “wisdom of the crowd,”
I’m also wary of collective stupidity, which can itself
harness exponential power in the echo chamber of social
media, if not degenerate into fake news and the spread of
hate speech.
Not all points of view are equal. We need proven
processes in place that can take the sum of individual
intelligences to produce collective intelligence. Wikipedia
was able to do it, thus a public service of knowledge and
acknowledgement should be able to do it as well.
This first building block is easy enough to place, and
it’s one that brings us back to our discussion of school. A
child acquainted with producing collaborative content on
Vikidia will be more inclined to contribute to Wikipedia.
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SUMMARY
A child who was encouraged to ask questions rather than

simply memorize answers will have more opportunities
to ask more questions. A child who feels empowered to
exercise her creativity will have fewer inhibitions when it
comes to presenting new ideas. These skills are not diffi-
cult to develop, and there are already myriad programs
that do so. Yet these programs remain if not exclusive,
then on the fringe.
failing to move forward is moving

backward
There’s one place that could and should be at the

core of the innovation reactor and a model of a learning
system: the university, where research and teaching enjoy
equal rank. But universities in most countries progress
too slowly. In this rapidly evolving world, that’s the
same thing as going backward. It’s just like that scene in
Through the Looking-Glass when Alice is running in the
Red Queen’s race and can’t move forward. The Queen
says to her, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you
can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get some-
where else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Lewis Carroll, the man who dreamed up Alice and
her adventures in Wonderland, was a contemporary of
Darwin. Carroll lived in Victorian England at the height
of the Industrial Revolution, and he understood and
manifested in his literature the effects of ceaseless evolu-
tion such as Darwin had described it in On the Origin
of Species.ix The world is in motion, so failing to move
forward is moving backward.
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SUMMARY
on the shoulders of giants
Universities are threatened by stagnation, and they face

the challenge of going from the age of 2.0, i.e., the birth
of digital, to the age of x.0, i.e., organizing learning such
that it constantly enriches itself through contributions
from both teacher-researchers and students. “We are
like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants,” said 12th-century
philosopher Bertrand de Chartres. A contemporary of
his, John of Salisbury, added to this thought, saying, “We
see more and further than they did not because we have
keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted
up and borne aloft on their gigantic structure.”
This image, later to be referenced famously by Isaac
Newton and Blaise Pascal, harkens back to a fundamental
attitude that’s widely held in the world of science, and
that’s the idea that we don’t do good science if all we do is
revere the past. We have to be constantly moving forward
to keep the giant growing. This way, future generations
will in turn be able see “more and further.” Yet most
universities do not produce research on themselves: their
own operations, biases, structure, performance, failures,
successes, etc.
What is the role of the university in the Internet age?
What’s the purpose of having a campus? Do we learn
better in a lecture hall among our peers than at an intern-
ship, in a laboratory, or taking an online course? How do
we articulate knowledge gained in a university setting?
What about outside the university setting–in bookstores,
coffee shops, cinemas, fab labs, etc.? What synergies
are being implemented to get a global vision of student
experience?
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SUMMARY
The answers to these questions do exist in the field,

but we must experiment. This is what’s being done at
the CRI. We should prototype DIY undergraduate and
graduate degrees centered around the United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals. It would be similar to
what Catts Pressoir is doing with younger learners, and
we’ve been able to test it out in summer schools together
with François Grey from University of Geneva, Luping
Xu from Tsinghua University, Rob Lue from Harvard,
and Yann Algan from Science Po, along with their
students. We could mix traditional and à la carte styles.
Students could get involved in service work for a human-
itarian organization, launch a start-up, found a cooper-
ative, go abroad, pursue a sport or artistic activity they
excel in–the possibilities are endless. Students would of
course have to document what they do with their time
and work in reflections on their activities. Their mentors
could ask them to complement their experiential learning
with more traditional approaches such as taking an online
course. In the end, students would acquire the skills that
alternative education environments foster much better
than the traditional university setting. All this would be
recorded in their skills portfolios so that teachers as well
as other students would be able to draw from what their
predecessors have learned and so that these “dwarfs” can
continue “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
unsolicited-studies majors
At the CRI, we’re also developing “unsolicited-studies

majors” based on a system that researchers know well,
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SUMMARY
the “call for unsolicited proposals.” In research, there

are two types of calls for proposals. The first are solicited
proposals, meaning a sponsor is interested in advancing
research on a specific issue. Unsolicited proposals are
when researchers submit proposals that the researcher
herself judges to be of particular interest to the finan-
cial backer. An unsolicited-studies major would work the
same way.
I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re interested in the
impact that artificial intelligence will have on society. As
it functions today, you’d have a choice to make. A degree
in computer science would help you understand the tech-
nical aspects of AI. A degree in philosophy would help
you dig into the ethical questions. An economics degree
would teach you about the impact of artificial intelli-
gence on employment. A psychology degree would get
you thinking about the relationship between humans and
machines. Studies in art would encourage you to reflect
on different scenarios that could play out in society, which
you could then draw from to turn into books and movies.
But not any one path lets you take up the subject as a
whole. Just like in the fable, you have to be just another
blind man trying to describe an elephant by touching
only one part of the animal.
With the unsolicited-studies track, you can take classes
in different departments of your university and even
online if certain subjects are not yet taught at your univer-
sity. The role of the university would be to guide you
in your choices and to establish a required number of
credits. You would document all this in your–you guessed
it–skills portfolio, so that other students who may also
want to study AI’s impact on society can glean ideas from
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SUMMARY
your experience. If after a few years students find they

get a lot out of that particular degree and there’s rising
demand for it, the unsolicited-studies major you created
could become an established major. In our example, it
would be an Artificial Intelligence and Society degree.
more ugly ducklings
Do you think this is all pie in the sky? Think again. I’m
speaking from my personal experience at the CRI. Fifteen
years ago, we created the master’s program mentioned
previously called Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life
Sciences. Its first students, coming from physics, biology,
and engineering backgrounds, worked on the cutting
edge in the life sciences. They soon began thinking up
all kinds of innovative projects, the most emblematic of
which being the one I’ve already mentioned that took the
first Paris Bettencourt team to MIT’s iGEM competition,
and many more would follow. One of these teams was
victorious thanks to outside support from Sara Aguiton,
then a student in the second year of her master’s degree
in history of science and technology at the School of
Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris.
I’ll share the story of their collaboration, which serves as
proof of the need for interdisciplinary approaches and the
importance of phronesis, the ethics of our actions.
In an interview with Le Monde, Sara talked about her four
months spent with these students from the fields of physics,
biology, computer science, and math.x She remarked that
their project dealt with fundamental research and thus was
far removed from application, the result of which being that
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SUMMARY
questions of ethics were almost non-existent in the minds

of the team members. These same members would later say
that it was the ethical perspective that Sara brought to the
team that would give the project a whole new dimension
and that wound up securing the team’s victory in the end.
The jury found that the French team was far ahead of the
other iGEM teams on questions of ethics and that in order
to address those questions, cooperation among specialists
from both the humanities and hard sciences was needed.
The various specialists must demonstrate mutual respect
for one another, and in that regard, the jury said, the Paris
team had been exemplary.
Other CRI projects have launched start-ups, advocacy
groups, and cooperatives. Students don’t necessarily see
themselves as entrepreneurs when they first come to the
CRI, but many have become entrepreneurs because we
provide them with the freedom to create socially engaged
collectives. At the beginning of the year they told us what
they hoped to achieve for that, whereby we set aside for
them a small budget and provided them with access to
our facilities. Their projects created fab labs, maker
spaces, work in synthetic biology, developments in virtual
reality, game-based learning–the list goes on.
Livio Riboli-Sasco, one of our first graduates, created
a science and research cooperative within his Atelier des
jours à venir program.xi Xavier Duportet, who was also
on the CRI’s maiden voyage to the iGEM, started Eligo
Bioscience, a company that develops antibiotics and
holds the record for fundraising in California by a French
biotech company. Xavier also started Hello Tomorrow,
an NGO that provides support for deep-tech approaches
from science entrepreneurs in more than 40 countries.
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SUMMARY
Aude Bernheim and Flora Vincent, when they were

biology students, started Wax Science and ItCounts.
Initially they were part of a club that was interested in
science and design. When the European Commission
launched its video campaign, which intended to attract
more women to the sciences but showed pin-up girls in
stiletto heels in the lab, Aude and Flora decided to take
action. In the fallout of the EC’s campaign, the commis-
sion was smart by making a public apology and a call for
open submissions for a new video campaign. Aude and
Flora put together a team of students from the CRI, and
they wound up winning the competition with a hard-hit-
ting video about gender biases in the scientific field.xii The
two then started Wax Science,xiii which they describe as a
“curiosity detonator, a catalyzer for initiatives that seek to
tear down stereotypes one by one and effect change.” Wax
Science has indeed done just this with both genius and a
sense of humor. You can download their app ItCounts,xiv
developed with students from the E-mma association at
the Paris Graduate School of Digital Innovation. The app
provides modules for counting the number of men and
women in a given meeting or a lecture hall, taking note of
who speaks (and who doesn’t speak) to then give an esti-
mate of gender biases within the group. Flora and Aude
also wrote about the need for AI development that takes
into account the necessity of gender policy.
The reason I’m particularly enthusiastic about their
initiatives is because at a tender age I was made aware of
the issues it’s tackling. When I first moved to Paris at age
17, most schools did not make their dormitories available
to female students. Later in life I joined a collective called
Ouvrons les portes (“opening doors”) that led a social
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SUMMARY
media campaign for equal access to student housing,

which is why I started my Twitter account, @Francois-
Taddei (which I also use to further explore the ideas I
talk about in this book). It’s for the sake of gender parity
as well that this book does not to follow the grammar
rule prescribing masculine pronouns for generic contexts
(e.g., “A child who feels empowered to exercise his crea-
tivity...”), and I’m very thankful that those who helped me
write this book understood why this choice was impor-
tant. I even got publicly involved with other women
and men to work toward the joint initiative launched
by UNESCO and the L’Oréal Foundation to promote
gender parity in the sciences. This is also something I
try to engage in every day at the CRI. Thanks to activism
by both students and staff, we are making step-by-step
advances on this path, which can be difficult to navigate
due to differences in culture, attitude, and awareness of
these issues. I hope to see more and more constructive
dialogue and perhaps even a citizen-science approach
develop around questions of gender parity, which could
spread to all areas where counterproductive gender biases
still exist.
Samuel Huron is someone who came to the CRI after
having followed an interesting path in life. He dropped
out of school when he was 15 but eventually found his
way back to education and came to us because he wanted
to study the Internet. This was at the time we had the
Orange Research Chair, which sought to combine digital
sciences, life sciences, and learning sciences by focusing
on interfacing computers with biology. We brought
together researchers from Orange and different fields,
both academic and non-academic, to work with students
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SUMMARY
who wanted to explore all the potential the Web has to

offer. Samuel wrote a dissertation on data visualization
that won the best doctoral dissertation award from the
IEEE VGTC Pioneer Group.xv
Another student, Antoine Mazières, came to us from
an anthropology background. For his thesis he traveled
to Brazil, but rather than study indigenous tribes as his
colleagues were doing, he went off in search of tribes of
programming and IT geeks. His dissertation on artificial
intelligence communities cut across the disciplines of
digital science, sociology, and anthropology. Like all ugly
ducklings that don’t want to be confined to one field, he
had a difficult time finding people willing to help guide
his research. We’re glad he found the CRI.
Aurélien Peilloux came from a background in physics
and chemistry. He had graduated from the ESPCI, the
school where Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
was once director. Aurélien came to the CRI to work on
a dissertation in partnership with the Institut Curie on
interfacing physics with biology. It was just when he had
received funding for his research that he came to tell me
he had been accepted to the prestigious film school La
Fémis and that he wouldn’t be doing the physics and
biology thesis after all. I suggested he come up with a new
research topic that brought together cinema and science.
And that’s what he did. His dissertation was titled “A film
director’s search for the dialogical relationship between
art and science: from the notion of ‘ideas as feelings’ in
the creative process to an aesthetic approach to knowl-
edge.” His work was highly original, as it combined a
traditional written dissertation with four films he created
that each made reference to one another, entered into
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SUMMARY
dialogue with each other, and formed a consistent whole.

They attempted to respond to the problem raised by his
work, namely of creating hybrid objects that interface art
with science.xvi
Of course, when it came time to put together a
committee for the defense of his dissertation, we talked to
researchers from various disciplines, and their response
was that Aurélien’s work wasn’t something they were used
to seeing in France. So, we brought in a few experts from
other universities, namely international universities where
arts-based research had been around for 20 years already.
These are dissertations in which you have an artist
reflect on his or her art by documenting resources and
experiments in a way that’s similar to scientists. I think
Aurélien’s thesis was the first of its kind in France.
the cri: the crossroads of research

interests
The CRI has been the launching pad of so many other

projects because the CRI is as much an interdisciplinary
research center as it is a crossroads of research interests.
We realized through these various projects that
students generated most of our innovations with regard
to teaching methods. For this reason, our master’s
program directed by Sophie Pène, Jean-François Bonnet,
David Tareste, and Franck Zenasni now has a new
name: “Interdisciplinary and Innovative Approaches
to Research and Education.” The program has three
complementary tracks: Learning Science, Life Science,
and Digital Science, and students do three internships
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SUMMARY
in three laboratories in three different disciplines. One

of the only things we require of students is to combine
experimentation and theory. We want them to deploy
both advanced conceptual thinking skills and exper-
imentation skills. In order to understand the world as
it is, friction between ideas and reality is a must. And
the program has been successful for them. Graduates
have gone on to work in major French and international
universities and research institutes or in structures they
have created (start-ups, associations, cooperatives, etc.).
I’m not saying that veteran professor-researchers
couldn’t have innovated in the ways we have. All I’m
saying is that innovation comes from CRI students, which
is likely due to the fact that they’ve yet to start obsessing
over certain practices or become prisoners of their own
habits. A group of students from diverse backgrounds
who are both motivated and creative will have an unlim-
ited horizon, and to this day nothing makes me happier
than when students come bursting into my office to
announce something they found in research or an inno-
vation they came up with that I myself had never thought
of. What’s more, they’re able to take ownership of their
discoveries and find ways to go even further.
From a French perspective, these programs can seem
very innovative. Internationally–the scale on which
universities should measure their achievements–the
picture’s not quite the same. Many major universities,
namely in the US, offer curricula that are, if not just like
what the CRI offers, then at least founded on the same
principles. All over the US, there are liberal arts colleges
where students often have an open curriculum in which
they choose the courses that matter to them.
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SUMMARY
This model does exist in France, but it’s in the early

phases of development. As a biologist specializing in evolu-
tion, I know that a profound change can begin with small
changes that are difficult to perceive. I want to believe that
this will be the case for the evolution of student practices
and that universities will be able to support these practices
and ensure the quality of what they can provide. In short,
universities should act like caring mentors.
the three freedoms of universities
The principles that gave birth to the modern university

at the turn of the 19th century in Germany were estab-
lished by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote that univer-
sities should no longer be places where knowledge was
forced onto students, but rather a space where caring
mentors protect and advocate for students. The modern
university is founded on three freedoms: freedom to
learn, freedom to teach, and freedom to do research.
toward a project culture
In France, researchers have a major role to play in

France’s state of affairs. Most researchers prefer positions
in which they do research 100 percent of the time in a big
research institution like the CNRS or the Inserm. They’d
rather do this than have a teaching post at a university,
and the system encourages this kind of thinking, as
being committed to teaching and education innovation
is looked down on. And this is despite recent efforts to
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SUMMARY
promote researchers who use their time and energy to

educate students.
The change won’t happen all on its own. I have cited
some examples in American universities, but the climate
in the US is by no means perfect. The tendency to seal
oneself off in a disciplinary silo is real there, too. Inter-
disciplinarity is by no means second nature, and teachers
don’t necessarily try to take on a research role in their
own teaching practices. There do exist however several
incentives to change this, such as Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning (SoTL). SoTL is likewise a professional-de-
velopment incentive that encourages teachers to place
equal importance on partnering with students to make
discoveries in how they learn, publishing findings, and
using these to improve knowledge in the field.xvii
Another characteristic of American systems is project
culture. Problems are addressed and goals are set by
bringing together the multiple areas of expertise. This
is particularly effective in the experimental sciences and
medicine. Whether you’re trying to launch a rocket or
treat a patient, it eventually becomes clear whether or not
the coalition of different experts was beneficial or not:
Did the rocket launch? Did the patient’s health improve?
In the social sciences and humanities, it’s not as easy to
judge.
What’s even harder to do is apply the first of the
Humboldt’s freedoms: the freedom to learn. It means
totally reversing the prevailing logic and putting faith
in students. We saw an example of what this would look
like in the unsolicited-studies majors. This reality applies
to research as well. In Europe, it’s often the dissertation
advisers who chose research topics for doctoral students.
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SUMMARY
At the CRI, we decided to reverse the process and let

PhD students lead the way.
I remember the first evaluation committee for the Fron-
tiers in Life Science doctoral program. The evaluators
on the committee came from different institutions and
couldn’t believe that our doctoral students had come up
with their research topics themselves. The committee
then looked to the students for reassurance: “We were
told you came up with your research topics yourselves,
but we know that can’t be true. Tell us the truth. Raise
your hand if what you’re doing here goes against what
everyone else in France does.” All the students raised
their hands! And then, after asking to speak in English,
the students said, “We came here from around the world
in order to do something new; we’re sorry. We’re going
to speak the international language of science, which will
allow our work to spread across the globe.” The evalua-
tors were stunned. They started by openly bearing their
skepticism and by the end were asking how they could
do likewise at their universities. This is easier to do today
than it used to be, as our latest evaluation of the doctoral
program shows. The name of the doctoral program has
been changed to FIRE for Frontières de l’Innovation
en Recherche et Éducation (“frontiers of innovation in
research and education”). The new format was prepared
with a team that, with director and codirector Muriel
Manbrini and David Tareste, will now work with PhD
students interested in topics that interface digital sciences,
life sciences, and learning sciences.
The freedom to learn, the freedom to teach, and the
freedom to do research. With regard to each one of these
freedoms, the CRI has proven that it is possible to innovate,
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SUMMARY
and I hope we will keep pushing the boundaries further

and further. But there must be more spaces for experi-
mentation and innovation like the CRI for all those who
want to get involved, whether they’re researchers, teachers,
students, or other key players. This is not yet the case.
Yet I’m not claiming in any way that we need to impose
a system like ours on everyone else. While I truly believe
in the virtues of bottom-up design, I don’t think that
this can solve everything. Just as in economics and poli-
tics, a changing world needs virtuous incentives from the
top and a structure capable of identifying opportunities,
seizing on them, and making them available to as many
people as possible at a time. It’s all about placing power in
the hands of individuals who aren’t tied down to yester-
day’s thinking.
the mobile university
How can we make room for new ideas in a standard-

ized system that lacks funding? This question is key, yet
here again the answers already exist. The one I put the
most faith in–open science–harkens back to freedom. It
consists of reinventing our processes of discovery and
encourages all stakeholders both to contribute to research
and to adopt the researcher’s approach.
Everyone can pitch in, even if you’re not in school. All
it takes is a smartphone,xviii which holds more computing
power than NASA had to send astronauts to the moon
in 1969. A smartphone contains an accelerometer, a
gyroscope, a magnetometer, a GPS, an audio recorder, a
camera–the list goes on. And of course, on your smart-
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SUMMARY
phone you also have access to the Internet, a global library

updated in real time that you could spend a lifetime
exploring and still not manage to see everything. Thanks
to social media or even e-mail, you can stay in touch with
a community of peers and mentors at all times.
In a way, with a smartphone, you have access to a mobile
university.
Universities have been successful because they have given
a network of scholars and students access both to the tech-
nologies they need to do research and to books. For Robert
de Sorbon in 1253, it was thanks to his library’s 2,000
books, all donations, that his college could become what it
is today, Sorbonne University.xix For centuries, universities
were exclusive and wealthy institutions, the prerogative of
elites, but today they are within arm’s reach of everyone.
It’s only major research centers with specialized equip-
ment like the European Organization for Nuclear Research
(CERN) that remain out of reach for common mortals. Yet
even the CERN is involved in citizen science, inviting the
public to contribute to their work.
There are still vast regions of knowledge left to explore.
Every one of us has the ability to make brand-new scien-
tific observations and become part of a network for sharing
them. If one day you find a species of plant in your garden
that you’ve never seen before, you can take a photo of it and
share it online to get help identifying it. If no one can help
you, it’s easy to solicit help from scientists. And there are
questions that you yourself can start to ask. Why has this
plant species never been seen before in my area? Could it
have something to do with a change in temperature?
Natural history museums from Paris to Los Angeles and
beyond also host citizen science programs. The EPFL
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SUMMARY
engineering school in Switzerland created an app called

NoiseCapture that calls on people to make sound record-
ings in the Geneva area in order to generate a noise map
of the city.xx Stephen Friend started Sage Bionetworks
and Apple’s Health Research Kit to empower patients
and invite data scientists to contribute to open biomedical
research. Scientists started the Safecast radiation moni-
toring system in the wake of the Fukushima disaster as
a way to map radiation levels around Japan, and it has
since gone international. In the case of Fukushima, they
collected radiation measurements from volunteers and
provided open access to the data they gathered. It’s worth
noting that many people adapted their phones to be able
to measure radiation exposure using open-source hard-
ware.xxi
Had this kind of movement been possible in 1986 at the
time of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, governments
wouldn’t have been able to cover up radiation expo-
sure. At the time, some claimed that radiation exposure
somehow stopped miraculously at the national border.
Likewise, we would have known that mushrooms, which
absorb radiation and contribute to internal radiation
exposure, weren’t safe to eat. In a way, open access to data
is as revolutionary as open access to information.
open science
Data are the raw materials of information, and with

information we can create knowledge. The more we’re
able to isolate something, break it down to the smallest
unit, the better we can understand it. That’s why physicists
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SUMMARY
at the CERN spent months observing the Higgs boson

in their particle accelerator. Today, the Higgs boson is
the smallest particle we’re able to measure. It’s the same
with molecular biologists breaking everything down to a
molecular level, or cellular biologists to the cellular level.
The more you isolate something, the more likely you’ll be
able to understand its properties. Many sciences work in
this paradigm, with very reductionist approaches. Scien-
tists rejoice when they isolate something and can quanti-
tatively measure its specific properties.
But when you isolate something, you cut it out of its
natural environment and can miss a lot of the picture.
The ideal would be working thoroughly on every level–
for example, understanding a species on the molecular
level as well as the ecosystem it inhabits, along with its
cellular function and its anatomy.
Open science, combined with the power of digital,
empowers us to do scientific work outside the labora-
tory. Coming back to smartphones, let’s look at another
example: sleeping. Until recently, in order to get sleep
studies done, you had to spend a night in a hospital hooked
up to electrodes. Their measurements are extremely
precise, but the data are nonetheless affected by complex
exterior factors that have to be parsed through, namely
stress from the fact that you’re sleeping in an unfamiliar
place and your inability to find a comfortable sleeping
position with electrodes all over you. Today, there’s the
“quantified self,” which are primarily apps that let you
collect data on yourself in the comfort of your own home.
An example is iSleeping, developed by a PhD graduate
from the CRI, Maxime Elbaz. There are fewer measure-
ments available on these apps and the data are less precise
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SUMMARY
than what you would get at a sleep center in a hospital,

but they do allow us to collect data on millions of people,
while a sleep center has only a few beds at their disposal.
Also, apps give us immediate feedback, so we can move
more quickly from the data stage to the information stage
when we compare our data with that of other people.
We can answer the question “Is my sleep normal?” We
can also read articles or join discussion forums, talk with
coaches who can help us get a handle on the information,
and so on.
Here we’re seeing another paradigm shift. Just like with
majors and research topics created by students rather
than imposed on them by professors, here it’s the people
providing the data who decide to take part in research.
They cocreate with the scientists, who traditionally come
to a decision to study a topic without consulting anyone.
The cycle becomes all the more virtuous when the two
approaches come together, hence the interest in participa-
tory-science research protocols supervised by researchers,
such as we see with the Seintinelles.xxii That’s how we go
from the information stage to the knowledge stage.
As is the case whenever data is being collected, it
goes without saying that these measures must be strictly
controlled so that everyone’s privacy is protected. You
should be able to provide data on your sleep patterns
without the whole world knowing about them!
toward open-research communities
Mathieu Cisel was the first scientist in France to do a

PhD solely through MOOCs, or massive open online
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courses. After that, he became a postdoc collaborator

with the Savanturiers at the CRI. He once said to me,
“Now that there’s the MOOC, we should create MOOR,
massive open online research.” MOOR would draw from
citizen science and quantified-self applications for the
purposes of learning and exchanging with others.
According to a 2016 survey, very few people have heard
of citizen science. Only 4 percent of those surveyed had
heard the term, yet it was noted that when people learn
what it is, most show interest in getting involved, namely
to contribute to advances in medicine, knowledge on
biodiversity, and the climate.xxiii
Even the CERN has launched citizen-science projects.
Their HiggsHunters program is an opportunity for
citizen scientists to look through the CERN’s images of
particle collisions to try to find Higgs bosons. Another
CERN initiative resembles that of Foldit. You can install
CERN software on your computer so that when you’re
not using it the research center can borrow its power to
run its simulations. According to the CERN, it needs
power from 10,000 computers to match the power of a
typical university computing center.
Oftentimes incentives for citizen scientists are financial,
but much of the time citizen scientists are willing to take
part simply out of an interest to learn. Here again, we can
start to see the signs of a burgeoning learning society. More
and more, regular citizens are both willing to contribute to
research and learning through research. To shift into the
next gear, we need to develop in two key areas.
The first one–and sorry to keep coming back to this,
but it’s so important–is ethics. Forming ethics commit-
tees around biomedical research initiatives has been
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standard practice for a long time. We now need these

kinds of committees around research in computer
science, artificial intelligence, robotics, and education.
At the very least, governments need to expand the scope
of their national ethics committees, eventually forming
more targeted committees, and as well they should create
open-participation forums, a kind of “open wisdom” or
“open phronesis” for citizens. In my opinion, ethical
discussion shouldn’t be restricted to groups of experts
behind closed doors, regardless of how qualified they
may be. This is regardless of whether it’s a public ethics
committee or–perhaps all the more so–a private one.
Take the case of Google’s ethics committee, which has
been dissolved, but regardless, should it really be up to
people paid by Google to lead ethics discussions on the
future of artificial intelligence? If you ask me, the answer
is no.
The second axis is education, and I’ll talk about this
only briefly, as I can imagine I may be exhausting you
on this topic. Education at every level must prepare us to
be stakeholders in the knowledge society and not simply
consumers and data providers. Primary school, once it
throws off the old rote-learning methods, is in a good
position to start guiding children in this direction. The
La main à la pâte programxxiv at the Science Ac’ helped to
launch dozens of such projects, the Savanturiers among
them. Universities by nature have the means do this as
well, as they are made up of professor-researchers. What
universities need are spaces where people from all disci-
plines can meet to discuss the impact of the intelligence
revolution has on each discipline. Secondary schools and
high schools are often on the sidelines of this revolu-
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tion–apart from a few exceptions, thanks mostly to the

initiatives of some particularly innovative teachers and
associations. What’s really a shame is that high schools
in France provide preparatory classes for students trying
to get into France’s elite universities, and it’s these young
people who could really benefit from involvement in
interdisciplinary projects, both individually or in teams,
just like the best students do in major universities around
the world.
from open science to a learning society
Moving toward more open science means working

to bring about a more open society. Participatory-sci-
ence initiatives are not the prerogative of elites and offer
considerable opportunities to learn. A lot of people miss
out on the joys of learning in school but discover them
later in life when they decide for any number of reasons
to take part in research, whether it’s doing sleep studies,
participating in trials for anticancer drugs, etc. These
opportunities widen our field of vision because they take
us from the specific–my sleep, my illness, etc.–to more
general understandings of these issues.
That’s what the learning society is all about. It’s leaving
traces of your most original and innovative achievements.
You explain to others the path you took to resolving a
certain issue. Later on perhaps you create content or tech-
nologies that will help others grasp the concepts. You
help them learn as well as learn to learn. You empower
them and perhaps even instill in them a desire to explore
further.
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major challenges
How can we keep the virtuous cycle going? What

I like to do is name the challenges we face. It’s best to
start with the big ones, and there’s no shortage of them in
today’s world: challenges of inclusivity, sustainable devel-
opment, peacemaking, etc. Let’s not wait for answers
to come from a small group of elites, the people who
have excelled since they were teenagers at “beating”
their classmates in our current competitive system that
rewards students for memorizing yesterday’s knowledge.
In the learning society, let’s get everyone to work together
to come up with creative solutions that will benefit the
greatest possible number in the future. As news magazine
The Economist pointed out, more and more universities
are changing the traditional education model for a chal-
lenge-driven approach to learning.xxv
Let’s look to China for a moment to get a better
understanding.
I’ve been going to China a lot ever since the CRI
worked with Tsinghua University to establish a learning
center designed by a CRI alumnus, Luping Xu. Tsinghua
University is the 2nd-ranked university in China, with its
primarily location in Beijing and a graduate school in
Shenzhen. Shenzhen is where we started “Open Fiesta,”
from Open Faculty for Open Innovation, Open Educa-
tion, Open Science, Open Technology, and Open Art.
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a tiny fishing village, but
due to its proximity to Hong Kong, the Chinese govern-
ment designated it a Special Economic Zone, and after
a few years it became one of the most innovative cities
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in the world. Its population has boomed, numbering 16

million as of 2016.
Tsinghua University has no problem attracting the
best and brightest. Indeed, of China’s 3 million first-
year undergraduates every year, Tsinghua accepts only
3,000 students. Yet heads of the university noticed that
incoming students were lacking the skills that will be
most valuable in the 21st century, namely creativity and
cooperation. In fact, 14-year-old high school students
were found to be more skilled in these areas than the
18-year-olds. The culprit was the year students spend
cramming to prepare for the Gaokao, the national
college entrance exam in China. It stifles any crea-
tivity the students may have. Yet the Gaokao is almost
a national ritual, with some students spending 16 hours
per day studying for it and some families spending thou-
sands of dollars on tutoring classes.xxvi
It occurred to one of the university’s vice presidents
that the school was accepting students based on Gaokao
scores despite the fact that the Gaokao wasn’t perhaps
the best evaluation. Thus the university couldn’t be sure
it was bringing in the best and brightest. Furthermore,
it was unclear if the university itself offered the best
possible education to students, as the school functioned
within the competition paradigm, used the system of
separating disciplines to solve problems, and cultivated
yesterday’s knowledge rather than the ability to be crea-
tive and collaborative.
Thinking about how they could reignite creativity in
students, they co-established Open Fiesta with us under
the direction of Luping, a brilliant researcher in physics,
nanotechnology, biotechnology, and education. The
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goal is to train students to meet the great challenges of

the 21st century using open science, citizen science, and
the open-source technologies that China champions.
Teaching methods are innovative, and social entrepre-
neurship is encouraged.
Why is China–or anywhere else for that matter–so inter-
ested in open innovation? Because it works! Several studies
show how effective open innovation is as a complement to
internal research and development departments.xxvii
This is why platforms such as Kagglexxviii have
emerged. Since 2010, Kaggle has been offering busi-
nesses the opportunity to post issues they’re dealing
with on the Internet in order for data scientists online
to develop algorithms to solve them.xxix General Electric,
Tesco, Microsoft, and NASA have all used it, despite the
fact that the companies cannot claim ownership of the
solutions found using Kaggle. A condition of using a
service such as Kaggle is that, while the company’s orig-
inal source code remains confidential, the solution to the
problem must be made public. InnoCentive,xxx started by
pharmaceutical group Eli Lilly, offers the same kind of
service.xxxi
When open innovation goes hand in hand with collec-
tive intelligence, meaning all those involved share their
innovations with one another, the result is so much richer
than when we just send a problem off to scientists who
never leave their labs. Karim R. Lakhanixxxii at Harvard
Business School demonstrated this with examples from
bioinformatics. Regardless of the size or draw of a given
organization, be it public or private, there will always be
more brains outside the organization to solve issues than
brains inside the organization.
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These spaces where collective intelligence can be

mobilized are excellent for learning. Harvard professor
Richard Elmore developed a systemic way to think
about our different learning environments. Traditional
education is an example of what he calls a Hierarchical
Individual environment: individuals learn within a
program structured hierarchically. This is in contrast to
a Distributed Individual environment in which a self-dis-
ciplined person can satisfy her desire to learn on her
own, free from structure–at a library or on the Internet,
for example. Opposed to individual learning environ-
ments are collective learning environments. Take sports,
for example. Individuals learn together, but according
to rules created by others, i.e. what Elmore would call a
Hierarchical Collective environment. Contrary to this is
a Distributed Collective environment, where individuals
can learn together free from structure, organizing them-
selves however they please (learn more about Elmore’s
system in his MOOCxxxiii).
The Distributed Collective environment is the least well-
known of the four. In it, you find individuals who want to
learn from one another, people such as those described
by Claire Héber-Suffrin when she talks about reciprocal
knowledge-exchange networks. Her thinking is that no
one knows everything and everyone knows something,
so we can only benefit when we exchange knowledge.xxxiv
These sharing networks continue to multiply, primarily
in communities facing never-before-seen challenges and
opportunities, where innovation is a must. We’ve likely all
had experience with each one of these quadrants at one
time or another in our lives. In which setting do we learn
best? That depends on the individuals involved, the issue
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or topic at hand, and the way each of these environments

is organized. Whether you’re faced with open, complex
challenges or simple lists to memorize, different learning
environments will be better suited to different needs.
The philosophy of open is not exclusive to ideas
and coding. You can also use this philosophy to make
objects, such as in fab labs, or make equipment. The
most famous open-source community is Arduino, a
company that develops, fabricates, and sells kits for
building microprocessors and microcontrollers, which
are the “brains” behind so much technology.xxxv And the
processors are low-cost and easy to build. There’s even
an Arduino Day, celebrated around the world. In 2017,
for example, people organized 499 Arduino Day events
in 78 different countries. But going beyond how simple
and cost-effective the processors are, the real power of
Arduino is community.xxxvi
At the CRI and in Open Fiesta, we bring together
open innovation, open education, open science, and
open technology, but these wouldn’t be as impactful if
we didn’t include open art. It’s my belief that artists can
benefit from the philosophy of open and benefit from
what’s being done in other communities. We’ve seen this
taking root in recent years in the proliferation of spaces
and events that bring together arts and science. We’re
living in a time when questions of gender, the human-na-
ture relationship, and life and non-life are acutely raised.
These questions are too complex for any single discipline
to handle. Artists have been questioning the world for a
long time, and it’s up to institutions to find a way to bring
the universe of artists in contact with that of scientists in
order to enable them to engage in dialogue.xxxvii
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Here again, innovation is less unprecedented than one

may think. Until the 17th century when the big academies
were started, knowledge disciplines were not separate. In
Renaissance humanist culture, art and science went hand
in hand, as we see in the great figures of the age. Galileo
and Descartes, not to mention Leonardo da Vinci, were
all trained in art and philosophy. Galileo was an illus-
trator, which aided him in his observations of the sky.xxxviii
In the English-speaking world, more and more STEM
programs are becoming STEAM programs because
science, technology, engineering, and math can harness
even more combustive power by integrating art and crea-
tivity into the curriculum.
Spaces are being created where artists and scientists
can live side by side, such as at MIT, which even hosts
magicians, as technology can be inspired by magic and
the arts and vice versa. While creating these environ-
ments comes down to pioneers doing as much as they
can with whatever means at their disposal, these spaces
thrive when visionary leadership and a bit of budget
come into play. Open Fiesta in Shenzhen was made
possible thanks to then president of Tsinghua University
Chen Jining, who was willing to believe in a systemic
approach to open learning. What he wanted to do was
create a learning community, a place where teaching
methods could be revolutionized and everyone could
live together and learn together. Only a short time into
his tenure, he was named Minister of Environmental
Protection, a position in which he managed to enforce
environmental regulations that none of his predecessors
had been able to implement because of powerful lobbies.
Later, in 2017, he became the mayor of Beijing, and he
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now hopes to create another space dedicated to new

ways of learning that’s open to all.
everyone’s a scientist
As we’ve seen looking at Alison Gopnik’s work, asking

questions is natural for children, and it’s around age 4
when kids ask the most questions, meaning we’re all born
scientists. We’ve also seen that all it can take is an educa-
tion environment where kids can really thrive, and they
can get published in a science journal. The problem is
that after childhood not all of us are trained in research,
nor are we surrounded by caring mentors or put in situa-
tions where we can experiment. How can we cultivate our
natural inclination toward research, then preserve it and
deepen it? What methods are out there to help us refine
and strengthen our gift for asking questions?
These are crucial challenges in today’s world, where
artificial intelligence provides more and more answers,
and the environmental crisis we’re living through is
making us question our societies and lifestyles. This
includes asking questions about how decisions are made,
individually and collectively, or how human or artificial
entities make decisions for us.
If we compare our time to that of Socrates, it’s clear
that we have more reason to question ourselves. Athe-
nians must have faced tough challenges, but the planet
itself wasn’t in danger, and the status of our species wasn’t
disrupted by discoveries in NBIC. We have more reasons
than the ancient Greeks to ask ourselves questions,
humbly accept the fact that we don’t know everything,
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and admit that we live in a world where uncertainty

prevails over certainty.
What should we do? Learn to manage transitions,
to make decisions despite uncertainty? To say “I know
that I don’t know anything” as Socrates did? This state-
ment in Socrates’ time made him a sage of sages. Kant
said, “We measure the intelligence of an individual to
the amount of uncertainties that he is able to support.”
We shouldn’t run from uncertainty, and we definitely
shouldn’t deny it. Rather, we should be brave enough to
ask questions and say “I don’t know” when indeed we
don’t know.
The ability to doubt and question is not easy to assume.
Certainty is far easier to bear, but it’s all the more
dangerous when certainty turns out to be false. That’s
what Socrates understood. He said it’s better to ask
questions and be uncertain than hold false certainties as
truths. That’s what researchers know. They know their
certainties are only temporary. Their certainties are only
certain until something else comes along to complement
or replace them. This doesn’t necessarily mean the former
certainties were invalid. Newton’s laws of physics still
hold in certain domains, even though Einstein showed
us that we can go so much further than Newton did.
Newton’s laws explain the level of our human experience;
they just didn’t go far enough.
Moreover, if we take a moment to think about those
attempting to impose their certainties on us as absolute
and not provisional, we notice that these are people who
aren’t necessarily interested in our well-being. In most
cases even, they are merely looking to control our brains, to
make us docile consumers, if not to lead us altogether into
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fatal forms of extremism, as totalitarian regimes try to do,

attempting to control those who don’t think like them.
Is it reasonable then to keep kids competing against one
another? And likewise, is it then reasonable to evaluate
students based on their ability to answer yesterday’s ques-
tions? I don’t think so. Memorization and calculation,
the two primary abilities on which we test students, are
performed much better by machines than us. It would
make more sense and be more advantageous for students
if we also tested their ability to formulate questions and
devise new approaches. Today, curricula like these are
only introduced at the master’s and PhD level. The ques-
tion that should underpin all education policy in the 21st
century is: How can we make students understand that
there aren’t always definitive answers to good questions?
A good way to teach this lies in considering the same
problem from many angles and encouraging students to
think about questions as either scientific or not scientific.
What is a scientific question? A scientific question is a
question we hope to be able to answer one day. How can
we know if a question is scientific? When we come up
with a method for finding an answer. To do this, we draw
from theoretical corpuses or experimental systems. And
this approach doesn’t apply only to the physical world.
A metaphysical question such as “Does God exist?” can
be treated the same way. As it stands now, scientists are
unable to answer that question. But they can ask plenty of
questions surrounding this question. For example, why do
humans believe in God? Since when have they done so?
How do some cultures go from belief in several gods to
belief in one god? Are these beliefs universal? Do a soci-
ety’s laws change as belief in God changes over time? Are
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people who believe in God better off? Worse off? The

questions are endless, and that’s how science progresses.
We keep asking the next question, one to which we don’t
have an answer yet. In short, even to a question that is
not scientific, scientific questioning can offer partial and
transitional elements of an answer. This makes it possible
to move forward in our knowledge, at any age.
This is how we could create “anti-textbooks,” similar to
what Escuela Nueva did with its Learning Guide, which
resembles a comic book and combines reading, math,
social studies, etc., into each lesson. The purpose of such
a guide is to look at the most poignant questions being
asked currently on a given topic rather than trying to
construct the truth in parts. This is a good way to intro-
duce to students the notion of open questions such as those
in philosophy. What is beauty? What is truth? What is
justice? By their very nature, the answers to these questions
are open-ended. Such a guide would also take into account
the fact that questions are not all of the same kind. Philo-
sophical questions are different from scientific questions,
existential questions different from personal questions, etc.
mentor-teacher
Moving in this direction will be possible only if it’s

accompanied by robust reform in initial teacher training
and continuing professional development for teachers.
Teacher training needs to focus on the values of adopting
a mentor-like attitude. The word mentor comes from the
character of the same name in Homer’s Odyssey. When
Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War, he puts his son
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Telemachus in the care of Mentor, and whenever Odys-

seus’ palace is visited by Athena, the goddess of wisdom
and science, she always takes on the form of Mentor.
The mentor-teacher or tutor-teacher is not without
experience. It’s a professional with a high level of scien-
tific expertise who cares about students and strives to
educate them in a way that’s stimulating and beneficial
to them, without pretending to know more than he does.
The Finnish teachers in the documentary Tomorrowxxxix
embody an attitude of mentorship, and we know that
the Finnish education system produces the highest inter-
national test scores in the world.xl It goes to show that
mentorship fosters serious learning.
As we’ve already seen, this mode of operation also
implies a complete overhaul of the way education systems
are managed. School principals and presidents apply
modes of management without direct authority over
education practice, and school inspectors enforce it, yet
their very job title spells out their mission to police educa-
tors rather than collaborate with them.
In a learning society, teachers are not the only profes-
sionals who can reflect on their practices and continue
developing collectively. Anyone working in any organ-
ization can do this. Some businesses in particular are
becoming savvier in this regard, as illustrated very well
in the book Reinventing Organizations,xli by former
McKinsey & Company management consultant Frederic
Laloux (see also a talk he gave in Brussels xlii). In the past,
if a business wanted to increase its long-term efficiency, it
tended simply to create more and more layers of manage-
ment. This practice made sense in the 19th century. It
was more difficult for information to circulate, and the
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best way to make sure every stage of production was

synchronized was to create more and more management
outposts. Note that many departments in government,
namely education departments, function the same way.
The managerial hierarchy would grow bigger, the cost
of management would increase and, with it, payroll.
Information traveled upward to the top, the top would
then make decisions, send directives back down, and
the managers at the various levels would see they were
carried out.
This management style produced results when the
world evolved at a slow pace. Countries like France and
England were able to maintain very extensive colonial
empires using these principles. You can still see these
in practice today in some older organizations formed
at a time when information traveled on horseback and
steamships.
Today, these management principles leave much to
be desired now that information travels much faster
and changes, evolutions, and needs are ever increasing.
It’s comparable to what we see in neurology. You make
certain decisions consciously while others, reflex reac-
tions in particular, are made automatically in your spine.
When you burn yourself, you react immediately without
waiting for the brain to come up with a directive. It’s the
same for ant colonies. Each ant self-manages going by its
genome, which itself is the product of evolution. Essen-
tially all systems of organization face the same kinds of
questions: In what circumstances should people make
decisions alone, and in what circumstances should infor-
mation be “sent up”?
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With the development of the Internet, e-mail, instant

messaging, and social media, the game has changed
entirely. Information no longer travels on a vertical axis
only. It travels horizontally as well, and it’s now possible
for us to be involved in an infinite number of information
and decision-making spheres in real time.
Laloux created a model to depict the “reinvention of
organizations.” It uses the color spectrum starting with
red being full micromanagement across intermediary
stages to blue for distributed decision-making.
Distributed decision-making replaces the traditional

pyramid structure. It’s a system of collective deci-
sion-making done in smaller teams according to a proce-
dure that’s nonetheless systematized. This is to avoid
the pitfalls of companies who want to appear non-hier-
archical with distributed decision-making but become
only lumbering and inefficient organizations where power
politics run amok behind the scenes.xliii
In biology, we talk about evolvability, which means
an organism’s capacity not only to adapt to a changing
environment and pass on an adapted trait but also–and
most importantly–to pass on the very ability to adapt to
changing environments, e.g., the way antibiotic-resistant
bacteria do.
making “mistakes” in order to survive
The focal point of Laloux’s argument is that if everyone

understands their organization’s overall objective, each
team player will be able to act in the most appropriate
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way on the small scale, sending information up only when

there’s a need, thereby reducing the amount of inefficien-
cies. This structure is possible only in organizations that
consider their employees actual human beings and not
just cogs in a machine. Such companies don’t schedule
meetings late at night when employees should be with
their families, and there are days when families are invited
to visit the workplace so as to integrate work and family
life. In short, companies show their employees feel that,
in the eyes of the company, no one is reduced because of
his status as an employee.
This is what Dominique Pon does as managing
director of one of France’s best private hospitals, the
Clinique Pasteur in Toulouse. Hospital profits are
invested in research and development, and hospital
staff are owners of hospital stock. What’s the hospital’s
secret? According to Pon, investing in humanity does
not simply mean handing out end-of-year bonuses. It
also means investing in well-being at work, which bene-
fits both hospital staff and patients. Clinique Pasteur
has 8 nurses for every 15 patients, 4 times the ratio of
most other hospitals. Since 2015, the hospital has housed
a health-care start-up accelerator, Hi-Lab, which has
helped develop, among other things, apps for preventing
medication errors and a digital patient space. Patients’
families and friends can follow in real time where their
loved ones are, if they’ve been to surgery, etc. Whenever
the hospital has the opportunity to humanize the system,
they do it, Pons said.xliv Taking care of patients and staff
should be obvious, but it has become difficult to do in
organizations that are too constrained by history and
financial and administrative thinking. The more a given
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job involves tasks that can be experienced as degrading,

the more essential attention to the human being is.
open platform for innovation

and creativity
What Frederic Laloux showed to be true in the world of

business, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) has proven true at the state level.
It reported a strong correlation between feeling valued,
happiness at work, and overall well-being.xlv Countries
that create open platforms for innovation and creativity
contribute to creating a win-win situation at different
levels. Individuals are happy, the company is efficient,
and the quality of services improve along with trust in the
company.
How can we bring small-scale success stories to others?
How can we ensure that policy in a hospital in Toulouse
benefits others? Why can’t experiences in the medical
field inspire in some aspects experiences in other fields–
education, for example? Learning organizations try to do
just this. Digital technology allows these organizations to
learn from each other through sharing. Even companies in
competition with one another can find solutions together
to problems that plague the whole sector, allowing it to
progress and adapt to these challenges.
In yesterday’s world, only a small, educated elite had
access to data and made decisions. Today, we’re able
to benefit from tools that allow the greatest number to
contribute to collective well-being. The more we educate
people to contribute, the more people we’ll have looking
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for solutions, and the more we can hope that our prob-
lems will disappear one by one. This is all the more likely
if we document the solutions we find, perfect them, and
share them.
learning to question yourself as

an individual, learning to question
ourselves as a collective
What we’ve said about individuals and their capacity to

learn, as well as to “learn to learn,” can also be said of
the collectives to which we belong: family, region, organ-
ization, country, continent, etc. All these collectives can
be invited to be as learning as possible, and I think this
is largely a shared aspiration, as few of these collectives
seem completely satisfied with the way that they operate.
If you’ve paid close enough attention to your environ-
ment, it’s likely you’ve already noticed signs of a growing
learning society in your area. Throughout the world,
middle grounds and “third places” are cropping up.
“Third place” is a term popularized by American sociol-
ogist Ray Oldenburgxlvi to describe social surroundings
separate from home and work or school where we form
relationships and learn.
Libraries and especially cafés used to be the quintes-
sential third places in the 19th and 20th centuries, before
everyone had access to a global library on the Internet.
Maker spaces are today’s great third place, the most
common of these being the fab lab. At its best, maker
spaces are open to the entire community, and everything
made or created at the maker space is documented so
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that future users can benefit from it. Maker spaces, hack-
erspaces, and hacklabs are designations for neighboring
realities, i.e., providing equipment, functioning on a prin-
ciple of community of practice, and an ethics that values
freedom of access, collaboration, autonomy, and soli-
darity.xlvii
These third places also put together sessions in which
everyone is invited to work on a project together or find a
solution to problem, often one that’s real in the commu-
nity. By nature, these are democratic incubators. You
leave your usual circles of friends, environments, and
influences, i.e., family, school, or place of work, etc., and
the topics addressed collectively are related to citizenship.
You participate in solving a problem that perhaps affects
one of your relationship circles but is not limited to it.
These spaces naturally invite us to move beyond discipli-
nary boundaries since they are not compartmentalized, as
universities can too often be if they are not careful.
These third places are where the learning society finds
its best expression. It’s the most visible manifestation
of a learning society in a given area. It’s a place where
the hummingbirds carrying drops of water, who along
couldn’t put out the fire, can meet one another and
together implement new, effective strategies. Above all,
these third places can also become breeding grounds for
starting new associations, teaching innovations, regional
projects, etc.
In France, hundreds of these spaces exist, and
throughout the world there are thousands. Some are
already remarkable (and remarked) reinvention spaces,
such as the Woelab in Togo, launched in 2012 by archi-
tect Sename Agbodjinou, who made news headlines with
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a 3-D printer the lab constructed from European elec-

tronics waste dumped in Africa.
But Woelab’s purpose goes beyond this. Agbodjinou
has stated that everything the Woelab does is driven
by an urban project called HubCité (“hub town”). Its
premise is that, today, the start-up is the best way to
change the face of cities, working faster than an urban
planner ever could.xlviii Woelab operates as openly as
possible, and technology is only part of the wider project.
It’s an all-inclusive space where everyone can realize their
potential. Like in all tech hubs, there’s a lot of technology
there, but they’ve also recycled concepts from traditional
African society to the tech world, e.g., the initiation enclo-
sure, where young people go in traditional, rural initial
ceremonies. They try to create an open community. There
are carpenters, fashion designers–there was once even a
homeless person. It’s really a sociology people aren’t used
to in that kind of space.xlix We can create third places of
practically any size and in any environment in order to
meet the challenges in a given community.
In the Lorraine region in northeastern France is a
fab lab for high school students with disabilities called
FabUlis, ULIS being the acronym for spaces in French
schools where disabled students have access to inclu-
sive education. Since 2014, FabUlis has been located at a
high school in the region. At first it accommodated only
students with disabilities, but today all students can have
access to the space.
The organizers of the space call this reverse inclusion,
meaning that, rather than integrating students with
disabilities into spaces reserved for the able-bodied, it
invites the able-bodied into a space designed primarily
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for people with disabilities. As an example of the space’s

success, cofounders Baptiste Melgarejo and Alexandre
Benassar recount how, after only two months in FabUlis,
students with cognitive disabilities put together a video
presentation of their special education program, and it
was shown to classmates, parents, and others who came
to learn about the space.l The two have also remarked
that, since the program started, attitudes in the high
school toward students with disabilities have completely
changed. Certain teachers have even changed lessons
plan to bring students to FabUlis for class. Other teachers
“exchange” their general-education students for students
from FabUlis, giving general-education students the
opportunity to work at FabUlis and bringing special-edu-
cation students into the general-education setting.li
The total original cost for all tools and materials at
FabUlis was only €40,000. How can a space like this
transform a region? By being open to everyone, as
recommended by MIT’s Fab Charter.lii Say a local busi-
ness owner wants to prototype an invention that would
require a laser cutter and a 3-D printer, which she doesn’t
have. She can have access to these tools at the fab lab, get
help from some of the young people there if need be, and
perhaps along the way even find some recruits for intern-
ships or jobs. There’s a dynamic that gets created, first
within the maker space, then in the community. Over
time, this dynamic can expand to the whole region. Other
people will hear about it, come check out the space,
and be a part of the emerging ecosystem that’s centered
around what in physics is called a nucleation point,
i.e., the point where atoms start to crystalize. These are
self-catalyzing and exponential dynamics.
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One of the Savantuiers projects called Savanturiers

du cerveau (“Savanturiers of the brain”) got to collabo-
rate with FabUlis. The goal of the project was to provide
students with an introduction to how neurons work and
illustrate the basic principles of brain plasticity, meaning
how neural connections rearrange themselves to find
alternative solutions. It’s the basis of learning. It helped
the students also understand that sleep deprivation,
stress, and consuming alcohol and drugs can negatively
affect brain function. At the end of the year, students
held a conference attended by fellow students in which
they discussed the value of the brain and the importance
of taking care of it.
This example is a perfect illustration of the incredible
dynamic we have yet to tap into in order to “learn” in the
21st century. The Savanturiers program took inspiration
from the mission of the CRI. Reverse inclusion at FabUlis
took inspiration from teaching principles developed in
the early 20th century by American philosopher John
Dewey and his method called “learning by doing.”liii Fab
labs were invented in Boston by Gershenfeld. The launch
of FabUlis was driven by the energy of two teachers in
northwest France who placed the well-being of their
students above all else. Thanks to digitalization, all these
education initiatives can converge and connect.
a learning planet festival
Temporary third places can also catalyze these ener-

gies. For example, on World Music Day hundreds of
musicians in cities all over the world play music on the
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same day. Why not create a learning-planet festival? The

CRI is working to do just that. We’ll talk about it in more
detail in chapter 6. There already exist local versions of
this throughout the world, both general celebrations of
learning and events that target specific sections of society.
In Singapore, the Lifelong Learning Festival is a month-
long celebration of the joys of learning (#lovelearning).liv
Every September in the Netherlands, the Van het Leren
Festival is specifically intended for seniors, minorities, the
unemployed, people with disabilities, and people without
high school diplomas.lv Australia has the Sydney Learning
Festival for 5- to 8-year-olds.lvi The Danish Learning
Festival brings together 8,000 attendees from the world
of education.lvii
Let’s look at Singapore’s festival again. At the 2017
festival, four major themes were talked about: learning
for a digital future, learning together, DIY learning with
technology, and lifelong learning. All learning spaces
were invited to open their doors and present projects they
were pursuing. Yet if you think about it, any space can
be a learning space. A baker could open up her bakery, a
banker the bank’s trading room, a nurse one of the hospi-
tal’s wards or research labs, etc. In Singapore, the festival
is family-oriented and intergenerational, which helps the
city develop as a learning territory and embodies the fact
that learning is a lifelong adventure.
Such initiatives exist everywhere. All that’s still missing,
unfortunately, are bodies that let us document these
disparate projects, to bring together the different initi-
atives so that other teachers in other regions can dupli-
cate a system like FabUlis without having to start from
scratch. We need to create mechanisms that help us create
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these kinds of projects as well as give them visibility, make

them easy to understand, and give others the opportunity
to adapt them to fit different community settings. So far
we have observed a state of mind. Now we need to make
it a culture that will allow for this revolution to break out
of its inner circles.
There are other mechanisms for mobilizing commu-
nity energy on specific issues. One example is creating
prize. In 1919, hotel owner Raymond Orteig wanted to
award $25,000 to the first person to make a nonstop
transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. Eight years
later, Charles Lindbergh successfully completed the
flight in the monoplane Spirit of St. Louis and collected
the money. More importantly, however, is that a total of
$400,000 was invested in aeronautical research by the
nine teams competing to win. This same idea was used
by Greek American Peter Diamandis, a successful busi-
nessman, who created the X-Prize. In 1996, Diamandis
announced he would award $10 million to the first team
to build a space vessel that could take three people
100 kilometers from the Earth and back two times in
two weeks. The X-Prize foundation didn’t have all $10
million, so they took out insurance against the risk that
someone actually succeed in their somewhat crazy chal-
lenge. Eight years later, a team from Mojave Aerospace
Ventures did it. Here again though, the important piece
is the overall investment. Twenty-six teams from seven
different countries took up the challenge, investing a
total of $100 million in research! The X-Prize founda-
tion has launched several other challenges, one of which,
currently active, seeks to revolutionize education. The
goal is to design autonomous-learning software for chil-
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dren in the developing world, where education systems

are often unable to handle increasing numbers of chil-
dren. Five finalists were picked in 2017, each one given
$1 million to prototype their ideas.lviii These initiatives
could be developed anywhere in the world as a way to
face the growing number of challenges in our time.
working on transitions to cope

with transition
Third places provide yet another benefit: They can be

the place where we work collectively on systemic changes,
on transitions, whether these are social or between
compartmentalized institutions. In most societies, inter-
faces between institutions either don’t exist or are ineffec-
tive, yet often it doesn’t take much to make major changes.
In the city of Rennes in western France, just as there’s
the office of the city treasurer, there’s an office of time,
which sees to efficient scheduling of services throughout
the region, namely with regard to the city’s transit system.
The office found that simply by changing the start times
of some classes at one of the major university campuses
in the city, rush hour in city could be eased considerably.
The start of classes for first- and second-year students
was pushed back 15 minutes, and the entire city felt the
change.lix All it took was creating an interface between
the transit company and the university.
And yet, for every successful example, how many exam-
ples of dysfunction could we name? And not just in
transportation.
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Working toward systemic changes is a major challenge

in our world, especially as more and more aspects of
our lives are systematized by algorithms, reducing us to
bits of data to be “processed” in the most rational way
possible. The more these algorithms invade our lives–and
what we’re seeing now is only the beginning–the more
we’ll need places that remind us that we’re not data or
mechanical cogs, that we’re multidimensional beings that
deserve to have a say.
So, let’s learn everywhere.
And let’s learn at all ages.
We’ve already spoken at length about children learning
at school and adults learning in the learning society. Let’s
look at two other periods in life that receive little to no
attention in education policy debates: preschool learning
and learning in retirement.
Preschool is absolutely critical. We’ll come back to
psychologist Alison Gopnik, who investigates how babies
think. Psychology is not the only science right now that’s
confirming how important it is to begin education as early
in life as possible. Economics confirms this as well, namely
the work of Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and
his pilot project in Colorado called the Perry Preschool
program. His initiative invested in early-childhood
education for underprivileged children starting at birth.
Heckman showed that return on that investment was 7 to
10 percent per year, i.e., a $100 million investment would
yield between $107 million to $110 million, both in reduced
costs in health care, remedial education, and criminal-jus-
tice-system expenditures, as well as direct benefits, namely
in increased school and career achievements and greater
contributions to society through taxes.lx The short-term
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SUMMARY
costs are small compared to mid- and long-term benefits.

We need to be able to make that initial investment, which
is what social impact bonds, i.e., investors help the public
pay for better social outcomes and then receive the savings
later on, seek to do, and we’re seeing these develop more
and more.
Don’t think I’m underestimating how difficult it is to
really change things. Just in early childhood, the issues to
be addressed involve both many scientific disciplines that
are each compartmentalized (pediatrics, psychology, etc.)
and equally diverse and compartmentalized institutions
(health, social affairs, etc.).These formal institutions must
be linked with the informal institutions, beginning with
the family, the first place where a young child is educated.
Who, for example, informs parents that international
studies show that reading stories to children is one of the
best predictors for their future educational success? And
how do they inform parents? If parents can’t read, or read
very poorly, who will read to the child? Who explains to
parents that screens in general and television in particular
are not allies to learning unless their time is supervised
and only specific programs and applications are allowed?
Who explains to parents that there are addictions to
social media and games in the same way there are addic-
tions to drugs? Who informs parents that sleep is essen-
tial for learning but that screen-based light affects sleep?
Even though the most dramatic gains in learning are in
early childhood, public action in this area is at its most
fragmented and least organized. Day cares, for example,
could be great laboratories for participatory science on
early childhood and contribute to forming a child-cen-
tered learning community, with the transfer of informa-
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SUMMARY
tion between postnatal- and pediatric-care services, the

child’s day care, the child’s preschool, and where appro-
priate, assistance programs for certain demographics and
families. At the CRI, we decided to launch a parents and
babies lab, an open third place for drafting new policy
ideas in order to allow parents and future parents to
contribute to advancing knowledge and technology on
these topics.
Retirement is also neglected, even though these days it
can last longer than years spent working! Serge Guérin
and Pierre-Henri Tayoillot remind us in their book
La guerre des générations n’aura pas lieu,lxi translated
approximately as “there will be no generation war,” that
retirees keep the responsible-citizen machine running.
Humanitarian organizations and advocacy groups are
largely comprised of people in retirement, a third of
mayors in rural areas in France are retirees, and in France
four million retirees are caretakers for older retirees. Do
our societies invest enough in professional training and
support for those who work with children? No, clearly.
But they’re losing out all the more so by not tapping into
what our oldest citizens can contribute. Retirement homes
and palliative-care facilities could also be great places for
research.
And this would be first and foremost for the benefit
of residents and patients in these places. Studies done
in these types of facilities show that ideas about quality
of life are actually much more subjective than you think
when you’re in good health. For example, one way of
looking at it that you hear when talking to these individ-
uals is lining up what we want with what we’re actually
capable of doing. Expectations must be adjusted to take
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into account limitations, but so long as we can continue to

enjoy strong interpersonal relationships, we can have real
quality of life despite those limitations.
Sharing these experiences can be beneficial for
everyone. People who care for the elderly say that the
elderly don’t worry over things most people worry about.
The elderly don’t talk about money or power. They talk
about love, values, relationships, even spirituality. How
are these people remembered? What are we putting in
place to allow them to transmit their ideas, values, stories,
and emotions? If, at the end of life, what matters isn’t what
society pushes us to chase after in our studies and profes-
sional lives, then doesn’t it make sense to focus on what
really matters before reaching the end of our journey?
American author John Izzo documented the wisdom
the elderly have to offer. With help from a few colleagues,
he asked dozens of people, “Who do you feel is the wisest
person you know?” He came away with the names of 235
people ages 60 to 105, each one described by friends and
acquaintances as someone who had found happiness and
meaning in life. Among them are a town barber, a Holo-
caust survivor, an Aboriginal chief, a CEO of a company,
etc. All 235 of them, with a cumulative 18,000 years of
life experience, were asked the same questions: What
brings you the most joy? What matters in life, and what’s
unimportant? Their answers are the subject of Izzo’s
book The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You
Die,lxii in which he illustrates five tenets common to all of
their wisdom: Be honest with yourself, leave no regrets,
become love, live in the moment, and give more than you
take.
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SUMMARY
In the same line of thinking, the Japanese have devel-

oped a concept called ikigai, a philosophy postulating
that your purpose, your raison d’être are at the inter-
section of what you feel for, what you’re good at or can
become good at, what the world needs, and what can
empower you.
Finding the answers to these questions helps us find our
passion, mission, profession, and vocation. We can ask
these questions individually and collectively, for ourselves
or for our organization, the society we’re living in, or
even the whole planet we’re living on. We can consider
these questions at any stage in life and help young people
consider them as they try to figure out what studies they
want to pursue. In traditional societies, elders fulfilled
the role of passing down the values of empathy, caring,
wisdom, and respect for nature. It was facilitated by the
fact that the family unit was the unit of life at all ages.
Our societies are no longer organized to allow us to learn
from one another, no matter our stage of life.
Some people, such as Mary Gordon, have understood
the importance of teaching empathy so that children
can learn to take care of themselves, others, and the
planet. Her program involves having a local parent make
regular classroom visits with his or her young infant, and
students learn empathy by observing the little vulnerable
being and trying to identify its feelings.lxiii International
evaluations of these programs have been very positive.
The programs can prevent people from experiencing a
lack of empathy at school, as one young man described
it in a TED Talk that garnered a lot of attention on
social media in France.lxiv Another approach, developed
in Canada, is a school of emotions,lxv where the oldest
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students look after the younger ones, which teaches

older students responsibility and empathy. The Dalai
Lama encourages these kinds of educational program
that teach compassion. He has been involved in research
on understanding the role the emotions and empathy
play in brain development and education. In the book
A Force for Good,lxvi New York Times journalist Daniel
Goleman interviews the Dalai Lama as well as several
researchers from around the world who are working on
these same questions and creating knowledge on the
science of compassion. It’s a science that’s being inte-
grated in more and more schools today, particularly in
Canada.
We also need to be able to take care of those who take
care of others, whether they’re children or adults. Here,
I’m thinking namely of teachers, who, like doctors, are on
the front line to help others, which makes them susceptible
to emotional exhaustion and burnout. Océane Cordesse
is a recent PhD graduate from the CRI who, after going
to business school at the HEC Paris and then getting her
master’s in cognitive science, became a primary school
teacher. She wanted to overcome emotional exhaustion
in her own way and created an app that aims to provide
support for people who work supporting others.
the best of all possible worlds
I’m well aware that you probably think I’m naive to say
humans are inherently good and wise, especially if you’ve
recently read a newspaper or watched the news. But I’m
far from alone in thinking that there are more reasons to
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be hopeful than to despair and that it’s not in vain to bet

on humanity.
Canadian-American psychologist and professor at
Harvard Steven Pinker makes the case in his book The
Better Angels of Our Naturelxvii that, contrary to what
you may expect, we’re likely living in the best of all
possible worlds. This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep
working to improve it, but all the evils that humans have
combatted since our species first emerged have been on
the decline: wars, famine, homicides, poverty, disease,
illiteracy, etc.
In his book Homo Deus,lxviii Yuval Noah Harari makes a
similar point when he reminds us, with his typical caustic
humor, that today obesity is more of a threat to humanity
than malnutrition. The main dark spots in today’s world,
which are by no means negligible, have to do with our
propensity for negatively affecting the planet, whether it’s
eroding biodiversity, sapping natural resources, or causing
climate change. We can no longer ignore the fact that
ecological, agricultural, societal, and economic balance
is under threat, and we need this in order to survive. As
we become aware of these new global challenges, it’s my
hope we’ll be able to face them collectively the way we
have faced more personal and local problems in the past.
for a “learning public service”
The fact remains that humanity is better off now than

it ever has been and that there are, as I have shown, a
wide array of initiatives confronting today’s challenges.
The learning society is not a pipe dream. Joseph Stiglitz,
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winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, even goes so far

as to say that the learning society is essential to economic
development and the health of our democracies.lxix If
the printing press brought about the first phase of the
learning society with knowledge circulating in the form
of books, a new phase is now on the horizon. How to
organize it? By creating a great “learning public service.”
The first pillar of a learning public sector is guaranteeing
that everyone can access their own data. Today, the big
tech companies, both the GAFAM in the West (Google,
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and the BATX in
China (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi) know things
about us that we don’t even know. The same goes for all
the apps that we download on our smartphones because
we accept the user conditions that, if anyone ever took the
time to read, we wouldn’t agree to. In a world in which
algorithms will be making more and more decisions in
our lives, it’s essential that we establish easy-to-understand
and transparent regulations on the ownership and use of
our personal data, and these regulations should be subject
to a democratic approval process. We should be the ones
looking for relationships between measurements of our
sleep habits, eating habits, education, health, modes of
transportation, etc.–not the tech companies.
The second pillar should be developing data-processing
tools that serve the public interest. Take how we consume
culture, for example. Today, Amazon will make sugges-
tions of books we may like based on our online activity
and that of “similar” Internet users. But Amazon’s ulti-
mate goal is commercial. Their aim is not to help us to
be more cultured, it’s to sell us books and lots of other
things. Facebook’s aim is not to bring us more fulfillment
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by creating more social bonds, but to collect a maximum

of data on us to then sell to advertisers.
These companies will not regulate themselves, as many
have pointed out. Sandy Parakilas is among them. She
pointed out in a piece for the New York Times that a
company such as Facebook gains access every day to
more and more strikingly intimate personal data, yet the
company has no incentive to protect its users or signal
abuses.lxx “Facebook needs to be regulated more tightly,”
she concluded, “or broken up so that no single entity
controls all of its data. The company won’t protect us by
itself, and nothing less than our democracy is at stake.” I
forgot to mention that Sandy Parakilas is not an anti-dig-
ital activist. She knows perhaps better than anyone what
she’s talking about, as she worked at Facebook from 2011
to 2012.
We also know that, as if making tens of billions of
dollars weren’t enough, which is the ultimate aim of a
corporation, the GAFAM is determined to pay the least
amount in taxes as possible through complex tax avoid-
ance schemes. If there’s one thing that can prove defini-
tively their lack of concern for the public good, this is it.
The learning society must come up with alternatives
that takes into account our needs as citizens and respect
for our privacy without selling our personal data. The
goal should essentially be to increase opportunities
for us to learn about ourselves and our environment or
about issues in which we have a personal, professional, or
humanitarian interest.
Think of a highway system where the only road signs
are for private interests. Signs for the nearest shopping
center would be very clear, while those for a 12th-century
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monastery would be less so. This is what today’s infor-

mation highway is like. In the world of information on
the Web, we continue to use Google, thereby making
ourselves dependent on its goodwill, algorithms, and
ultimately the way it decides to make money on a given
day. If you’re able to find your way to the monastery, it’s
because either you already knew how to get there or some
business enterprise wanted you to find out about it, e.g.,
a shopping center near the monastery. The road signs
on the information highway are set up either by website
owners or advertisers. The results are sometimes in our
best interest, but our best interest is certainly not at the
heart of this system.
Putting our best interest at the center of the system
doesn’t mean entrusting everything to the government.
Education institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries were
primarily public, but the state nonetheless allowed private
schools to thrive, subject as they are to certain inspec-
tions and regulations. It’s perhaps too late to construct an
Internet search engine as powerful as Google or a social-
media platform as powerful as Facebook, but it’s not too
late to raise questions about national and European sover-
eignty when it comes to possession of our data, i.e., our
e-mails, private lives, search history, etc. Likewise, it’s not
too late to create systems for openly sharing knowledge
and experience, “maieutechnology” or “socratechnology,”
as I talked about previously. If civil society and politics
don’t take up these issues, they’ll continue to be debated
and decided by the huge Silicon Valley tech companies.
And is that really what we want?
I strongly believe that we can and must create alterna-
tives to these commercial services in the form of public
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services that are focused on people and our ability to

learn. Who knows, one day we may even find ourselves in
a position to negotiate with the GAFAM!
Take for example the subject of relevance for content we
find online. As more and more fake news proliferates on
the web, how can users know how much credibility to give
to information, especially if users are young or new to the
issue being talking about? Traditionally, we have simply
relied on our critical thinking. Yet scientists and journal-
ists over the years have refined the critical approach to an
art form, verifying sources, quality of evidence, standard
procedure in experiments, and peer review by experts in
a given field. These processes of holding information to
account are what brought about the enlightenment.
On the Web, it’s only a small fraction of users who
take the time to verify the truth of what they read before
sharing it in one click across social media. This is what
creates epidemics of fake news, especially when fake
news plays with our cognitive biases and causes us to be
blinded by our emotions. Today it’s clear that bad actors
on the Internet know how to manipulate us, and they’re
able to undermine democracy, the media, and scientific
institutions, relying only on our credulity and the bias of
social-media algorithms.
How can we immunize ourselves against these social
pathogens without creating another censorship bureau?
Let me take another example from our distant cousins,
bacteria. They have been fighting against viruses and
parasites for billions of years, developing a defense
strategy from which we can draw inspiration. When
viruses attack bacteria, they introduce viral DNA into
the bacteria. The bacteria who survive the infection use
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SUMMARY
this viral DNA to help them know when a new attack is

coming and suppress it, and they pass on this ability to
their descendants. The most interesting thing here for
us is that the resisting minority of bacteria transmit the
information that allows others to resist in turn.
Applying this strategy to the Internet, here’s what we
could do collectively. Imagine that you have a browser (or
a browser extension or plug-in) that lets you flag content
that you feel may be questionable. The browser then flags
that content and makes the flag visible to others using
the browser. This way, we collectively report unreliable
content among the content getting the most traffic and,
that way, slow down epidemics. We could even alert the
people spreading the misleading content to help them to
be more wary in the future.
Obviously, this kind of system would take time to refine.
Intuition would tell you, especially if you’ve ever been
witness to standoffs at the microscopic level between
host organisms and parasites, that bad apples will use
the defense system against itself, in this case besmirching
the quality of information and jeopardizing the system’s
effectiveness.
In reality, there is no system that can resist all forms of
attack. What we could do, though, is add another layer to
this defense system by having users list their full names,
professions, education background, and even their CV
when they flag content and, along with this, have them
present their arguments for why they feel the content
deserved to be flagged. For example, they could say, “I was
an eyewitness to such and such event, and I can prove it,”
“I found a fault in the logic,” “I found proof that refutes
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such and such claim,” etc. We can then hope to have more
constructive debates.
Conversely, we can also use this system to recommend
good content, e.g., a particular medical article. We can
picture a positive form of annotating texts, an idea we’ve
discussed at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris Descartes
University. The university noticed that, beginning in the
second year of study, the numbers of students attending
lectures barely reached the 20s out of 500 students in a
class. Despite this, however, the majority of students got
passing grades at the end of the year. Dean Gérard Fried-
lander is thinking about closing the lecture halls to save
time and energy for both his students and teachers. Along
with wondering what to do with the extra time (I think
more mentorship opportunities would be beneficial),
he wants to know where it is students are learning and
how one can be sure, apart from end-of-the-year grades,
that the information they’re getting outside the lecture
hall is of good quality. Today’s medical students may use
handouts just like students in the past, but they likely use
digital resources as well. Mapping what future doctors
learn on the Web, from their peers, or from patients,
doctors, and nurses during hospital internships could
help rethink their training.
With the augmented browser I was talking about, a
student could point other students to a resource she feels
could be helpful to others. Her classmates, as well as
their professors and other medical professionals, could
then confirm whether or not the content was helpful. If a
majority of those involved give their approval, for example
giving an A to certain content, we then can have triple-A
resources that will undoubtedly be more reliable than
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the content patients typically consult, easily influenced as

they are. Ideally, among the many resources patients share
with one another, medical professionals and researchers
will be able to help them know which ones are the most
reliable and steer them clear of hacks and quacks.
To give a last example of the benefits of distributed,
expert content review online, let’s look at education mate-
rial on the climate. If the same website gets approval from
children for its games, teachers for its educational value,
and scientists for its accuracy, that’s another form of
triple-A rating, and the site would then get recommended.
As you can see, this is different from Facebook Likes.
On social media, all opinions have the same weight.
You can argue that it’s better that way because it’s more
democratic, but in the sciences this is not enough, even
though obviously debate must always be a possibility. In
the sciences, not all opinions are equal, whether it’s the
question of if the Earth is several billions of years old or
only several thousands of years old or whether a certain
treatment for a disease is effective or not. The system
detailed above is only a rough sketch, and it would have
to be fine-tuned and tested by a scientific trial-and-error
process. The ultimate goal would be to take into account
the particulars of everyone’s opinion without nullifying
them by giving them all the same weight and to adapt the
system to be able to withstand whatever the next genera-
tion of online manipulators has in store.
To create these “learning public services,” the best
comparison I can think of is transport regulation,
ensured by governments, whose necessity it would never
occur to anyone to dispute. Transport regulation lets
us move about as we wish, so long as we respect traffic
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laws–or aviation or maritime laws. And different rules

apply for different modes of transportation. A train can
travel at 300 km/h whereas a car cannot. Pedestrians are
encouraged to use pedestrians crossings, but using them
is not mandatory in all cases. Moreover, all these rules
are in line with international regulations; for example,
flying in international air space requires compliance with
international standards for air-traffic control and aircraft
operations. All these rules together are meant to make
it easier to travel together, which is a key part of living
together.
These rules do not mandate how you should travel.
You can go from Paris to Stockholm by train, plane,
or car, and if traveling by car, you can take freeways or
country roads. And of course, you don’t have to travel
directly either. You can take breaks, stop to take in the
scenery, go to a good restaurant, visit a historic site, etc.
The learning society should offer such freedom, particu-
larly in higher education and lifelong learning such as the
example of degrees in unsolicited majors, which would
make it possible to move away from the routes imposed
by pre-designed degree programs. As it is today, everyone
takes the same train from September to June.
Only this kind of approach would endow our educa-
tion system with the agility it would need to allow for
the emergence of new fields of knowledge, new inter-
sections between disciplines, and new skills. Nonethe-
less, people tend to think that a uniform system means
an equal system. Does uniformity reduce inequality? Not
even close. In fact, inequalities have a tendency to grow,
certainly when it comes to elite and the underprivileged,
as shown by, among others, the OECD’s PISA study,
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which assesses the skills of students of various demo-

graphics across dozens of countries.lxxi
Let’s look at a comparison. We’re all different, thus not
identical, based on our genetic makeup. For example,
some of us are more at risk of contracting certain diseases
than others. Although gene editing could reduce such
an inequality, we don’t practice it in humans, at least not
yet, and this would not be without raising serious ethical
questions. Rather than edit our genes, doctors recom-
mend we change certain habits, eat specific foods, take
certain medicines, engage in physical activity, etc. Some
things the entire population should do to reduce risks,
while others specific populations should do.
The learning society lets us apply this notion to educa-
tion. Technically, teachers can already adapt their
teaching methods in the name of their right to “pedagog-
ical freedom,” but to what degree can they really exercise
that right when their profession is constrained by nation-
ally standardized schedules, class sizes, and curricula that
leave little time for anything else?
Did you know that there’s no scientific evidence that says
learning is more effective in classrooms or, for that matter,
in class sizes of 25 to 35 students, or with a single teacher,
or for 50 minutes per subject? Did you know this system,
standard most everywhere in the world, was developed
by Jesuits in the 16th century? That is, according to Jesuit
Dominique Salin, who says that his religious order created
the educative model for secondary school such as it func-
tions in Europe and throughout much of the world today.
Students are grouped together by skill level in classes and
spend an identical amount of time at school every day going
through each subject successively, alternating between
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lectures and exercises, and getting graded through a stand-

ardized system that was borrowed from the Chinese.lxxii
Whatever the virtues of this system may be, do you really
think an education model that’s five centuries old can be
so effective and universal that it can meet the challenges of
the third millennium?
Let’s start really offering teachers the “pedagogical
freedom” that the law grants them. But let’s document
it so that it does not become, as happens too often, a
freedom to reproduce forever and ever the pedagogical
systems and approaches of the past.
making the future possible
I’m aware of the magnitude of the task. Most parents and

teachers default to reproducing the system they grew up in,
which is tempting not only because it’s easier that way but
also because for them the system worked. For a long time
while the world changed slowly, educating future genera-
tions the way previous generations had been educated was
an effective formula for meeting the basic challenges of the
time. But this is no longer the case. Changes in the world
are happening too rapidly now. Perhaps you think rapid
change is not a good thing, but do you really think you
can stop it? No one has the wrong intentions. Parents want
what’s best for their children, and teachers want what’s best
for their students. But in a changing world, the biggest
boost you can give students is providing them with the
intellectual tools and habits that will allow them to be the
change. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “As for
the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”
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This change won’t come from the top. The educated

elite were educated in a system whose aim is to, well,
create elites. It’s not easy for them to admit that this
system is imperfect, as that would call into question their
legitimacy. There’s a rift forming between on the one
hand the elites, who believe they know what decisions to
make for others, and on the other everyone else, who are
becoming increasingly educated.
How can we get the system to evolve? We start by
allowing those who are already doing things differently
to continue to do so, and we invite those who are willing
to dare to do likewise. Then we evaluate their work and
spread it. From here, virtuous cycles can emerge such as
seen in countries that have already successfully reima-
gined their education systems. International studies have
identified constants among all these countries: believing
in the innovative capacity of teams and high-quality initial
teacher training and continuing professional development
for teachers.
I shared my transportation analogy, but we can also
look to public-health policy, too. There’s a movement in
health care that advocates for thinking about action with
regard to four P’s: predictive, preemptive, personalized,
and participatory. In other words: What genetic risks are
there for certain individuals? How can we treat the disease
before it starts? How can we tailor aspects of treatments
to individual patients? How can the community benefit
from a specific treatment? In terms of the learning society,
I could certainly add two more: peers and permanent
progress. Peers refers to horizontal collaboration among
students, among teachers, and among parents, and among
all these groups. Permanent progress highlights the fact
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that solutions and systems should never be thought of as

fixed but always progressing.
By relying on research and cross-fertilization between
disciplines, the medical field has been able to inform
ambitious public policy hinged on compulsory policy
(vaccinations, for example) and large margins of freedom
for practitioners. No doctor would recommend treatment
to patients without taking into account the latest research
findings, and likewise no patient would accept them,
especially since with the Internet everyone has access to
medical information. Yet this is what we do in education.
Comparing education and medicine can show us three
things. First, both fields are as interested in individuals as
they are in the community, e.g., both individuals and the
community are in jeopardy when it comes to the spread
of viruses and fake news. Next, both fields deal both in
what’s innate, e.g., genetic diversity, and what’s acquired
in one’s environment. Lastly, every international study
shows direct, causal links between health and education.
The most educated populations have the best health, and
vice versa. If you provide an extra year of education to a
young girl in a distressed part of Africa, it increases the
likelihood of survival of her children.
predictive, preemptive, personalized,

participatory
Let’s see what the four P’s would look like applied to
education.
Predictive medicine involves looking at epidemiologic
studies to try to determine the risks associated with such-
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and-such genetic predisposition or environmental factor.

This approach should be handled with caution in educa-
tion, as it carries the obvious risk of stigmatizing some
children and suggests that risk factors will prevail in all
circumstances. Beyond this, the preventive approach can
be extremely effective because it lets us focus on precise
risk factors for students.
Preemptive medicine looks at treatments and behav-
iors that limit risks, e.g., not being a smoker. Education
research has already pointed out abundant ways to limit
risks. It has showed that encouragement and empathy
work better than punishment and humiliation, especially
when it’s in front of other people. Education research has
also shown that, as I’ve mentioned, high-quality initial
teacher training and continuing professional development
is the best predictor for a successful education system. Yet
both of these examples are still relatively unknown and
not widely implemented.
Personalized medicine takes into account the fact that
each of us reacts differently to treatments, be they physi-
ological or psychological or depending on how treatment
is administered. Applied to education, research confirms
what common sense would tell us: We don’t all learn the
same way and we don’t all learn at the same speed.
Participatory medicine means asking patients’ opin-
ions and, more and more, inviting them to work with
health professionals in participatory research. Participa-
tory research is without a doubt the notion that would
seem the most foreign to education systems. While some
schools now ask students their opinion on conditions in
the school, their teachers rarely ask what students think
about pedagogy. Teachers who use digital and online tools
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in their classrooms can collect fascinating information on

how their students learn, thereby giving themselves the
opportunity to then adapt their lessons accordingly. A
basic and popular system based on learning-analytics is
the Khan Academy.lxxiii Depending on the results of your
work, the system recommends videos adapted to prob-
lems you’ve encountered. If those videos then help you
advance, the platform takes note of this for future refer-
ence, as students in the future may encounter the same
problems that you did.
As for now, learning analytics is limited but growing
fast for predictive and preemptive education. Predictive
meaning they can calculate that if a given student comes
from such-and-such high school and gets such-and-such
grades in the beginning of the semester, that student may
be at a high risk of dropping out. Personalized, preemp-
tive education makes it possible to offer mentorship
programs catered to his particular situation.
Others will even choose to forgo traditional schooling
altogether if they feel the system is defective or doesn’t
pay sufficient attention to the specific needs of certain
students. We can already see this in schooling in the US,
where rates of homeschooling have doubled from 850,000
children in 1999 to 1.8 million in 2012. That’s 3.4 percent
of school-age children.lxxiv In France, only 0.2 percent
of children were homeschooled in 2014, but that’s an 83
percent increase from 2007!lxxv Contrary to what was the
trend for a long time, homeschooling is no longer chosen
for reasons of faith or a lack of alternatives, for example
when a child has a fear of going to school or has severe
disabilities. And contrary to what you may think, home-
schooled children don’t necessarily lack social contact.
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Parents find opportunities for their children to interact

with other children, primarily through sports and cultural
activities.
Once the digital tools reach a certain level of maturity,
they will be used in private schools both to reduce costs
and improve the quality of education. If public schooling
doesn’t get up to speed with these digital tools and spread
them, we’ll be looking at a completely different type of
learning society, one that’s more and more dependent on
market forces, offering greater and greater advantages to
families that already have strong finances, cultural advan-
tages, and social ties.
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
6
A how-to guide
for a learning planet
The first signs of the learning society, the one I’ve been
calling for, are already here. The preceding pages have
offered numerous examples of them. But how can we go
take the initiatives of an individual, an organization, or
an institution and network all of these? This is the ques-
tion we try to answer with our plan to cocreate a learning
society,i which, together with inspiring colleagues Cathe-
rine Becchetti-Bizot, Marie Cécile Naves, Gaell Mainguy,
and Guillaume Houzel, we submitted in April 2018 to the
French Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of
Labor, and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research,
and Innovation.
We recommended drawing inspiration from the model
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), which was established in 1988 to study the
climate and provide the world with scientific consensus
on the issue. We proposed creating an IPCC of intel-
ligence, learning, and skills. In the same way that the
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SUMMARY
IPCC is pursing the 13th sustainable development goal of

the United Nations, i.e., urgent action to combat climate
change, the IPCC of intelligence, learning, and skills
would undertake the 4th development goal for the planet:
ensuring quality, equitable education for all. As with the
other Sustainable Development Goals, we will make that
much more progress since we’ll be able to draw on the
best research and innovation from around the world.
Then we can educate today’s generation and the next in
the skills they’ll need to deal with these issues.
The organization’s mission will be to think of how
to get individual, artificial, and collective intelligence
to coevolve. Animal brains coevolved over millions of
years, and culture has been coevolving for a very long
time thanks to our individual intelligence. The coevolu-
tion of various forms of intelligence is happening at an
unprecedented rate thanks to breakthroughs in artificial
intelligence, and this is as much a source of fear as it is
a source of hope for building a bright future that will
benefit everyone. As we have seen, the 21st century is
shaping up to be the century in which artificial intelli-
gence emerges. This will have an impact on all the ways
in which people and organizations learn.
By presenting our action plan, we hope to have demon-
strated that the experiences, convictions, and thoughts
that this book defends can be translated into concrete
measures, which we have even calculated.
The learning society is not just a concept. It’s a reality that
we have to bring about collectively and without wasting
time if we want to respond peacefully to the challenges of
this century. Inequalities in knowledge and understanding
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SUMMARY
A how-to guide for a learning planet
are widening, feeding fear and rejection of “foreigners,”

who have become scapegoats in the political sphere.
We need to unite our strengths, both nationally and with
partner countries abroad, those in Europe particularly, so
that we can all develop our potential and contribute to
co-constructing tomorrow. Our future and the future of
our democracies depend on it.
Since the first edition of this book appeared a year and
a half ago, I have seen several signs that make me think
that creating a learning planet is not as unlikely as it may
seem. Several readers have voiced support for the learning
planet through posts on social media and messages I have
received. We created a MOOC called Toward a Learning
Planet, and of those who enrolled in it, thousands shared
with us how much they loved learning and how they
organized their own learning communities. This MOOC
was shot as a documentary (MOOD, massive open online
documentary), the purpose of which also being to facil-
itate research (MOOR, massive open online research).
These new formats allowed us to gather thousands of
testimonies and opinions on the dynamics related to the
bringing about the learning planet. The feedback from
the first community of stakeholders interested in these
perspectives has enriched our perception and we have
been keen to integrate their vision into a new version
of this more international MOOD, which is available in
English.
In the future, we hope to be able to make the content
and tools that we develop available to learning commu-
nities. Little by little, all those who wish to do so will
be able to benefit from the CRI’s GPS of knowledge
WeLearn, a database of open-source projects that
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SUMMARY
enables learners to discover open-access resources to

train themselves in the SDGs as well as find peers and
mentors to create collectives, places to get involved, and
events to meet and celebrate progress. The CRI, with all
our partners who wish to contribute to this open project,
is already working toward this, and without a doubt
the content and tools will improve over time thanks to
contributions of collective intelligence. To acknowledge
everyone’s contribution to this collective intelligence,
it’s so important at the same time to create new forms
of acknowledgement, i.e., open portfolio, open badge,
new ways of validating prior learning. Recent pledges
from universities supporting the Sustainable Develop-
ment Goals also moves in this direction, as does the
willingness shown by research funders, e.g., the Euro-
pean Union, to support projects contributing to SDGs
as a priority. Youth protests for the climate are growing
bigger and bigger, and I love how creative their slogans
are: “Make the Planet Greta Again,” etc., and their
taking action in the name of science shows us they won’t
stand idly by on this issue. The convergence of institu-
tional actors, speeches from certain leaders at the United
Nations, more and more business owners, the electorate,
and the will of young people prove that awareness is
gradually spreading. Nevertheless, this still needs to be
amplified and transformed into concrete actions that
meet the challenges. One of the challenges is knowing
how to take action and getting educated to understand
their complexity. Judging by the number of stakeholders
at all levels talking about these issues in the media and
on social networks, it seems to me that we can find some
optimism.
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SUMMARY
In an effort to mobilize more and more people on this

issue, we signed in March of 2019 a partnership agreement
with Audrey Azoulay, director general of UNESCO, that
lays the groundwork for an open alliance for the future
of learning. UNESCO is preparing a new report on the
future of education that, like the Faure report in 1972
and the Delors report in 1996, can serve as a reference
for rethinking education. Ms. Azoulay has been gracious
enough to invite me to contribute to the report. I hope it
will help us amplify the voices of people both young and
old on the future of education. It would be interesting to
have their opinions on the recommendations of previous
and future reports as well as current obstacles and ways
to overcome them in order to implement the desired
transformations. Because it’s the people on the ground
who are ultimately the actors of change, it’s important
that they get invited to reflect locally and globally on what
they want to do to contribute to the future of education,
an education that will empower learners to prepare for
the future.
On December 3, 2018, the General Assembly of the
United Nations created an international day of education
(January 24), and this also is a hopeful sign. We hope
to catalyze the organization of a learning-planet festival
during that week so that everyone can celebrate what
they’ve learned, document it, and share it. As the festival
will likely start very small, we can hope that, like World
Music Day, the festival will mobilize more and more
people over time. The festival in particular could draw
from all the various networks committed to Sustainable
Development Goals and education. To go even further,
we have begun to discuss how we can highlight the best
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ways to overcome the challenges of the Sustainable Devel-

opment Goals at major international events like world’s
fairs and the Olympic games. That way, we would cele-
brate the contributions of teams of young people, educa-
tors, artists, scientists, and business owners taking action
on these issues and ready to share their progress in open
source. As sports championships are the ultimate dream
of the young people active in sports clubs all throughout
the world and these events mobilize a lot of resources, we
hope that the Sustainable Development Games would
have the same effect.
In July 2019 at the Learning-Planet Assembly, co-or-
ganized with our partners at UNESCO and the French
Development Agency, we were able to share the best ways
to teach the Sustainable Development Goals. At the event,
the CRI and Deputy Director General of UNESCO
Stefania Giannini had the pleasure to present awards
to students from all over the world who had invested in
finding solutions to the challenges of sustainable devel-
opment. When you see what these students were able to
do in the span of a few weeks, you can imagine what they
would be driven to do in the span of a few years with
support from knowledgeable teachers and drawing on
what others who came before them have achieved. To
meet the United Nations’ 2030 agenda, the sky is the limit
if we can mobilize the creativity and activism of millions
of young people throughout the world and catalyze and
channel those forces.
For example, it would be interesting to collaborate
on a list of actions that are good for individuals, good
for others, and good for the planet all at the same time.
Riding your bicycle, for example. It’s good for your health
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SUMMARY
as well as that of others and the planet, as it reduces

CO2. We can also look at smoking, which is bad for
the smoker, anyone in the smoker’s vicinity because of
second-hand smoke, and for the planet, as cigarette butts
are a pollutant to the soil and water. Fast food is another
example. It increases the risk of obesity and contributes to
deforestation in the Amazon and methane emission from
cows. There are other important topics as well, such as
speeding, excessive screen time, addiction to gaming or
alcohol, etc., but on the issues listed above we can specifi-
cally align the interests of individuals, those around them,
and the planet. The only thing left to do after that is gain
awareness and change behavior, which is of course easier
said than done.
Here again, we would need to be creative and mobi-
lize collective intelligence to grow awareness of SDGs,
which are known by less than 10 percent according to a
September 2019 survey. As artists are often ahead of the
curve and able to mobilize imaginations, I think they
have an important role to play, too. A good example is
Yacine Ait Kaci, creator of Elyx, who later became digital
ambassador to the United Nations. He’s able to convey
the SDG message through his simplicity and humor. You
could go even further and acknowledge the best books,
the most emotional films, most inspiring games, and most
uplifting songs are on the themes of care for the self,
others, and the planet. We can also imagine viral commu-
nication campaigns, such as one that was filmed in Times
Square in which a teenage girl stood in a wedding gown
with a man who was five times her age, or one from Thai-
land where a child of 6 with a cigarette in hand is seen
asking a smoker for a lighter. These videos were made to
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speed up consciousness-raising, and they can inspire us

to create new campaigns that will facilitate discussions
on the transitions we need to undertake. Research also
has to be mobilized to understand how end addictions.
Drawing on decades of research in the neurobiology and
sociology of addictions, we can also develop projects for
education-through-research and participatory-science
projects in order to understand the warning signs for
addiction in young people and help them escape from the
trap. Sometimes addiction traps are in fact ambushes, as
some companies try to create addictions to their products,
something Robert Lustig speaks out against, as we’ve
already mentioned. In an effort to combat these addic-
tions, Lustig is collaborating with the CRI, Cergy-Pon-
toise University in France, and Tristan Harris’s Center for
Humane Technology. Tristan Harris is a whistleblower
who left his position as a design ethicist at Google to
advocate for reorienting tech companies’ core values such
that they try to help us spend our time well rather than
demand more of it.
More and more, businesses want to respect the rules
of the game and reflect on their missions. The Pacte law
(“action plan for the growth and transformation of busi-
nesses”) signed by the French parliament in April 2019
calls on businesses to reflect on their core values, their
social and environmental impact, and their economic
models. There’s another law that seeks to ensure that
all tech companies, namely the big ones, pay taxes and
contribute to the common good. This search for their
values, which harkens back to the concept of ikigai, shows
that deep changes are underway among more and more
individuals and collectives.
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Confucius said that our second life begins once we

understand that we have only one life. As environmental
degradation becomes the primary concern of more and
more people, we can ask ourselves if awareness of the
fragility of our planet couldn’t function in the same way.
If the citizens, voters, and consumers that we are became
aware of the fact that we have only one life and one planet,
we would think more about the impact of our choices on
ourselves, others, and our earthly ecosystem. Then we
would insist that businesses, politicians, and others act as
environmental custodians. If on a learning planet we each
celebrate and document our growing awareness and tran-
sitions and share these experiences, this can facilitate the
transformation of individuals, collectives, public institu-
tions, and businesses. It may seem like a utopian idea, but
it seems to me that it’s a necessary one, as it invites every
one of us to live by Gandhi’s precept: “Be the change you
wish to see in the world.”
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
Conclusion
Toward a more humane humanity
We started this journey together in New York City on

September 11, 2001, scarred by the attacks, the dead-
liest terrorist in history. We asked a question that I ask
myself still to this day: “How do you work toward a more
humane...humanity?”
Throughout these pages I’ve shared with you my
personal journey, how much I’ve loved exploring and
exploring new ways to explore, traveling, reading,
discussing, playing, making, researching, sometimes
alone, but most often in collectives that have helped us
make progress more quickly with all the diverse points
of view, the richness of what different disciplines bring,
and different cultures as well. I’ve talked about going
from being a scientist specializing in the evolution of
cooperation to a mentor to students who aspire to learn
through research and work across disciplines to come up
with new ways of tackling fascinating problems. I’ve also
talked about how I’ve gradually understood that if scien-
tists are good learners, all good learners could become
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scientists or at least use scientific research methods to

progress, no matter what age they are or where they’re
from, so long as there’s a subject in which they’re really
interested. I’ve talked about how starting from a young
age we can learn faster by satisfying our curiosity. I’ve
talked about how, through researching and cooperating
with learning collectives that help us to go beyond our
limits and some of our biases, we can make progress
more quickly by participating in a collective culture.
I’ve talked about how I convinced myself over time that
these collectives could self-organize and teach others to
build the learning planet piece by piece. I’ve talked about
how, if we all could come up with new digital tools that
could catalyze the emergence of global collective intel-
ligence, each one of us could do our best individually
to cooperate and thereby contribute to overcoming the
challenges of our time. I’ve talked about how, if we learn
how to unite ethics, technology, and collective intelli-
gence–human intelligence and machine intelligence–
together we can build futures in which all of us can
benefit from future progress, and we can learn to take
care of ourselves, others, and the planet.
I hope I was able to convince you–if you needed
convincing–that it’s only by revolutionizing our ways of
learning, anywhere and at any age, that our collective
ambition can take root. We have seen that accelerated
progress in technology, genetics, nanotechnologies, and
the cognitive sciences have changed the game entirely, for
better and for worse.
Worse being the invasion of the Internet with bad
actors, the mass diffusion of fake news, radicalization of
political opinions, large-scale intoxication of opinions,
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SUMMARY
threats to democracy, developments in technology that

contribute to the destruction of ecosystems and to manip-
ulating life with no ethical consideration–the list goes on.
Better being the thousands of initiatives and examples
of awareness-raising, which across the globe give us a
snapshot of how to use these same technologies for good.
This book has shown only a representative sample, which
is nonetheless very small.
It’s still to be decided, collectively, what this more
humane humanity will look like.
Even in humanity’s darkest, most hateful moments, we’ve
been able to work toward a more humane humanity. The
first tiny sparks of the Enlightenment shone at a time of
religious wars and the Inquisition and a time when there
was no structured education system. Gradually, liberating
ideas began to emerge, on the fringe at first, but they came
to center in a context that were much more difficult than
ours today. These brought about the Encyclopedia, or the
Systematic Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by
Diderot and d’Alembert. A few years later, the monarchy
fell, and democracy took its place.
Back then, there was a real dialogue between the
different fields of knowledge, what today we call interdis-
ciplinarity. There were networks of informal communica-
tion, the “invisible colleges,” third places such as cafés and
salons where new ideas would be exchanged and tested.
And of course, there were books and printed materials,
which American historian Elizabeth Eisensteini describes
as so central to the “unacknowledged revolution” that
preceded the very open revolutions in the US and France.
Eisenstein explains how Gutenberg’s printing press
reduced the cost of access to and sharing of information,
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SUMMARY
which would bring about changes in politics and law. But

already back then, like the languages in Aesop’s fable,
this technology could be used for evil, such as we see in
books printed at the time that explained how to prove that
independent women were in fact witches. On the Internet
today we see an overwhelming amount of sexism being
propagated, yet thankfully we also see instances of eman-
cipation such as the #MeToo movement, in which women
are encouraged to express themselves and get involved in
larger movements that fight for equality and respect for
women’s rights. The printing press, which at first was a
simple communications technology, became over time a
powerful catalyst for change. The Internet has the same
role today, but to use another example from Eisenstein,
whereas in the era of the printing press it took botanists a
century to go from 500 classified plants in Europe to 5,000,
today it takes only a few years for groups of citizen scien-
tists to mobilize their collective intelligence to chart the
earth’s biodiversity. And it takes artificial intelligence only
a few seconds to process all the data from those efforts.
The same can be said of the possibilities of crossing
disciplines, thanks largely to big data, the energy of
third places, or the expansion of “invisible colleges.”
Everything is in place for us to reinvent the Enlighten-
ment for the digital age and answer the three questions
T.S. Eliot asks in the poem “The Rock”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?ii
We know that we have a major asset that’s bringing

about a paradigm shift similar to what was experienced
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SUMMARY
in the Enlightenment era. That’s digitalization, which is

also a communications technology like the printing press,
as well as a data technology, one that’s autonomous. It can
make decisions, model a genome, build robots, etc.
We’ve gone from a stage in history in which the only
way a machine could operate was if a human acted upon
it to an intermediary stage where information and action
coevolved to now, when more and more autonomous
agents use information to make autonomous decisions.
And we continue to confer more and more autonomy to
them. Prior to machine learning, there was no doubt that
a machine would do only what humans had programmed
it to do. Now, machines are partially capable of program-
ming themselves. Even prior to machine learning, 7
percent of global financial assets, some $15 billion, were
managed by artificial intelligence.iii What will happen in
the future when machines set their own criteria for buying
and selling? And if their decisions earn more, at least in
the short term, we may be tempted to let it happen.
Digital is all about exponential technology. Its impact
will be so much greater than that of the printing press,
which means that we’re facing scientific, social, ethical,
and political questions that are, in my humble opinion,
unprecedented.
Of course, we can only hope that the more machines
can perform repetitive and dehumanizing tasks, the more
time human beings can devote to being human, i.e., devel-
oping our potential for creativity, empathy, self-under-
standing, understanding others, searching for meaning in
life and what makes life good, caring for oneself, others,
and the planet, etc. This is the relatively optimistic view
for which we can hope. But it’s far from a guarantee.
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SUMMARY
Other, darker scenarios, the ones Hollywood relishes

in, are nonetheless possible. Machines could take control,
enslaving or even eradicating humanity. On the table
today is the question of rewriting our own genome and
thus changing the status of our species.
If T.S. Eliot were alive today, he may have added one
question: “Where is the information we have lost in
data?” He would likely want us to ask ourselves: How do
we stitch back together the fabric of meaning? How can
we go from data back to information, information back
to knowledge, knowledge back to wisdom? And how can
all these benefit life? How can we manifest in everyday
life what German philosopher Hans Jonas demanded we
do in his 1979 work The Imperative of Responsibilityiv:
“Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with
the permanence of genuine human life.” This imperative
founds the basis of today’s questions of sustainable devel-
opment. This book proposes ideas for reflection but does
not claim to bear any truths. Can it help get people to
ask themselves questions and encourage collective debate
over what our common future will look like?
SUMMARY
Annex
CRI ACTIVITIES IN 2020
(to find out more, visit https://cri-paris.org)
The CRI develops and promotes new ways of learning,

teaching, researching, and mobilizing collective intel-
ligence. Our mission is to help bring about a learning
society in which people learn how to learn, both individ-
ually and collectively; to care for themselves, others, and
the planet; and to confront the major challenges of our
time. We’re doing this by exploring topics at the intersec-
tion of life science, learning science, and digital science.
We’re developing new education methods rooted in
experimentation, digitalization, interdisciplinarity, collec-
tive intelligence, learning through research, civic engage-
ment, and serious games. The CRI is an open platform for
innovation and creativity where students find peers and
mentors as well as a positive environment and a wealth
of knowledge. The CRI is a unique space for exploring
new ways to explore that’s becoming more and more
renowned throughout the world.
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SUMMARY
The CRI has moved 10 times in the past 15 years

because we’re constantly doubling in size. For the next
50 years, however, the CRI will have its location in the
picturesque Marais district in Paris, housed in build-
ings that are newly renovated and refurbished thanks to
the generosity of the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.
The renovation won a prize for innovation, the result of
a fruitful and close collaboration among everyone who
was involved, i.e., architects, builders, users, and owners.
The building is a jewel, drawing in more and more visi-
tors eager to collaborate with us or simply those who
are drawn in by the diverse events and projects that the
communities at the CRI are undertaking.
As previously stated, the CRI seeks to be a middle
ground or an intermediary space that catalyzes interac-
tions between institutions and the underground. What
middle grounds have in common is that they are inno-
vation communities in facilities specifically designed to
empower change makers, and their members create and
learn through projects and organizing events. In order
for middle grounds to be successful, they should be like
gardens where lots of initiatives can flourish so long as we
provide fertile ground for them to take root.
Student initiatives are what drive evolution at the
CRI. We encourage students to create clubs for devel-
oping projects that are open to everyone, and our degree
programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels are
open to people of all ages. With the Savanturiers, the CRI
offers opportunities for education through research from
preschool through high school. The Savanturiers-Ecole
de la Recherche (“Savanturiers-research school”) is an
education program cocreated with Ange Ansour that
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SUMMARY
Cri activities in 2020
aims to develop a model for education through research

with three focuses:
—— developing research projects in preschool, primary
and secondary school, high school, and in afterschool
programs;
—— offering professional development for educators;
—— and carrying out research and development in educa-
tion.
The program mobilizes and brings together educational

and scientific communities that cocreate and innovate
for the benefit of schools. They aim to create rigorous,
productive lessons that develop critical-thinking abilities,
a desire to explore the unknown, and the ability to work
with others. They also seek to develop the expertise of
teachers as knowledge workers and education-research
engineers within their classrooms.
Behind the Frontières du vivant (“frontiers in life
science”) undergraduate program are Jean-Chris-
tophe Thalabard (who’s also dean of all our peda-
gogy programs), Vincent Dahirel, Patricia Busca, and
Mahendra Mariadassou. Being both a general and inter-
disciplinary program, this is much more than a biology
degree. Its learning-through-research program aims to
provide students with solid scientific skills and knowl-
edge, both disciplinary and transdisciplinary, focusing
on life science in combination with physics, chemistry,
mathematics, computer science, and social science. The
three-year curriculum is strongly focused on the Sustain-
able Development Goals, i.e., learning through research
and undertaking research that seeks to achieve these
goals. It asks how can we mobilize scientific knowledge
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SUMMARY
to understand the complexity of the SDGs? And how can

we outline innovative solutions that are capable of being
scaled up?
Our graduate school, the EURIP (for Ecole univer-
sitaire de recherche interdisciplinaire de Paris, or “the
interdisciplinary research grad school of Paris”) seeks to
provide opportunities to students who want to explore
the interfaces among life sciences, learning sciences, and
digital sciences. Specifically, it seeks to ask questions
about how biological, individual, collective, and artificial
intelligence will coevolve.
At the heart of the graduate school is the master’s
program Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research
and Education, directed by Sophie Pène, Jean-François
Bonnet, David Tareste, and Franck Zenasni. The
program is for students who want to pursue interdisci-
plinary education at a high level. There are three tracks:
Learning Science, Life Science, and Digital Science. The
Digital Science track began in September 2019 and has
already received praise both from students and several
businesses.
The FIRE doctoral program (Frontières de l’Innovation
en Recherche et Éducation), directed by David Tareste
and Muriel Manbrini, promotes projects that require
transdisciplinary approaches to problems that bring
together questions from life science, learning science,
and digital science. These projects cover a large area of
study, from molecular and cellular interactions to large
ecosystems, including human societies, cognition and the
coevolution of different types of intelligence–be it human
or machine, individual or collective. It’s a new format for
doctoral programs in France. Usually a university labo-
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SUMMARY
ratory will be designated for one disciplinary PhD, for

example, a physics lab for a physics PhD. We slightly
modified this rule in order to let, say, a mathematician
study in the dermatology lab if she wants to model skin
development. PhD projects at the CRI are selected by a
scientific committee chaired by Andrew Murray.
The CRI is also a key player in reflections on lifelong
learning. We currently offer six university and interuni-
versity continuing-education degrees. In France, some
institutions offer postgrad students the opportunity to
pursue certification in the form of what’s called a DU
(for diplôme universitaire, “university diploma”). Unlike
master’s and doctoral degrees, DUs are not national
degrees but rather unique to that institution. The CRI
offers several DUs. One of them, called CREER (for
Créativité, entrepreneuriat et recherche, “creativity, entre-
preneurship, and research”), was launched by Vincent
Dahirel to meet the needs of those who want to get out
of their comfort zone in the context of a learning collec-
tive. Another DU is Philosophie pratique de l’éducation
et de la formation (“practical philosophy of education”),
directed by Sophie Audidière, concerned with strength-
ening educators in their professional environments. This
program focuses on sharing resources to create experi-
mental education and training tools. Acteurs de la transi-
tion educative (“key players in the education transition”),
started by Florence Rizzo and Sophie Pène, is a DU that
seeks to give educators the means to innovate in order
to build the school of the future. Médiation scientifique
innovante (“innovative scientific mediation”), a program
headed by Jean-Marc Galan, seeks to provide a toolbox
full of innovative approaches to mediating scientific
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SUMMARY
disagreements. Apprendre par le jeu (“learning through

games”), created by Antoine Taly, seeks to the explore
the potential of serious games in the areas of education,
health, innovation, marketing, civic engagement, human-
itarianism, culture, industry, and research. These DUs
are complemented by the DU FAIRE (“DU do”), created
by Franck Zenasni and Ange Ansour to build bridges
between research and teaching.
In France, the basic building block of research is the
Joint Research Project, or UMR for Unité mixte de
recherche. This an administrative structure created
when higher education and research institutions enter
into a five-year contract whereby they collaborate by
pooling resources and funding. The CRI is part of a
UMR between the Inserm and the University of Paris and
is directed by CRI cofounder Ariel Lindner. We call it
the Collaboratory (collaborate + laboratory), as we bring
in researchers who, in the spirit of open source, want to
explore interdisciplinary frontiers in a positive research
environment where ethics, activism, and mobilizing
collective intelligence are the focus. The Collaboratory
can host 60 short-term fellows for periods of three to
five months depending on their projects. The program
allows them to do things that are much harder to pursue
elsewhere, as many of the projects are very much in line
with ideas laid out in this book. Among these projects
is Marc Santolini’s research on the science of science.
He has shown that emerging trends in science are often
discovered by small groups made up of young, interdisci-
plinary researchers. Another interesting project is Ignacio
Atal’s research to help teachers become more conscious
of the fact that teachers, when they conduct experi-
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SUMMARY
ments and observe the impact of these experiments on

their students, are researchers, and they can benefit from
networking and adapting methods from other teachers to
help their students to progress.
We can also mention the Motion Lab, created by Joël
Chevrier. It’s a laboratory for experimenting and proto-
typing ideas in the sciences of human movement, with
the potential to benefit areas of general health, rehabilita-
tion, disease prevention, early childhood, and education.
Roberto Toro, a long-term research fellow, is working
on autism. Anirudh Krishnakumar, a PhD student at
CRI Research, worked with the Child Mind Institute to
develop apps, wearable devices, etc., that allow citizens
to contribute to gathering field data to help assess mental
health disorders. The Collaboratory also hosts student
research projects, such as the iGEM project we talked
about, whose research on tuberculosis is ongoing, now
being extended by a team directed by Jake Wintermute.
Students can define a collective research project where
they can develop their creativity and carry out new exper-
iments. Another example is a project by last year’s gradu-
ating class that sought to give art and design students an
opportunity to envision future applications of their work
in biotechnology. Winning teams in the project showcased
their work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The CRI’s research activities have also benefited from an
AXA Research Fund Chair called “A systems approach to
individual differences in longevity,” as well as the Orange
Research Chair on finding bridges between developments
in technology and biology.
Along with these research projects developed within
the CRI, we have also developed participatory-science
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SUMMARY
projects, such as Doing-It-Together Science (DITOs).

This is a project through the European Commission in
which 11 partner scientific or professional institutions
throughout Europe work to elevate public engagement
with scientific research and innovation, namely with
regard to biodesign and protecting the environment. At
the CRI, the project was coordinated by Imane Baïz.
To make these activities easier and to help catalyze new
projects, the CRI hosts labs developed in the framework
of the CRI’s Institute for Innovative Teaching through
Research, directed by Amodsen Chotia, with funding
from the Investments for the Future (PIA) program.
Game jams and hackathons, which are ways of teaching
through rapid prototyping, games, and trial and error, are
key components of the institute, which is open to students,
scientists, teachers, and citizens. Its labs include a space
for developing science and education games. There’s a
maker space started by CRI alumnus Kevin Lhoste desig-
nated for prototyping 3-D and electronic objects as well
as developing activities based on development, design,
and using low-cost, high-tech sensors for various appli-
cations. The VR Frontiers LAB is directed by Philippe
Bertrand, a current doctoral student at the CRI, and the
lab seeks to develop VR tools with educational applica-
tions through serious games. The CRI has a multimedia
production studio coordinated by Xavier Desplas in
which we develop education tools such as Massive Open
Online Courses and documentaries on specific topics
we’re interested in: education through research, leaders
of learning, leaders in health, etc. MOOCs work toward
making science and education accessible to the greatest
number for lifelong learning via a remote-education plat-
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SUMMARY
form. To complete this wide range of initiatives, we also

have a Health Lab, coordinated by Olivier Bory and Cloé
Brami, and a parents and babies lab called Premiers cris
(“first cries” with wordplay on the abbreviation CRI),
cofounded by Lisa Jacquey and Marion Voillot. These are
our newest labs, just as hosts of other student initiatives
that are now well established were once themselves brand
new.
The CRI’s digital team, directed by Éric Chérel, is
developing various innovative digital programs like the
Augmented Gymnasium, which lets several users interact
in augmented reality as a way to learn how to immerse
themselves collectively in the digital universe. It mixes
innovative pedagogy, technological experimentation,
and research on human movement and ergonomics. Led
by Jean-Marc Sevin, a data scientist and expert in artifi-
cial intelligence, the digital team is also developing the
WeLearn platform, a kind of GPS of knowledge that
indexes and annotates learning resources to help teachers
on their learning paths when looking for reliable peda-
gogical resources that are relevant to them, as well as to
make the skills-learning process easier. Julien Joubin is
developing the Projects platform, an online directory of
all the projects within the CRI community and outside
the CRI with our partners.
New modes of learning must be applicable to everyone
in order to be able to slow down, if not stop altogether, the
growing inequality that negatively affects certain popu-
lations. The Right to Repair project, an initiative started
by CRI professors Franck Zenansi and Vincent Dahirel,
seeks to lend a hand to vulnerable individuals referred to
as NEETs (“not in education, employment, or training”).
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SUMMARY
The goal of the program is for them to reconnect with the

labor market through a sustainable, open-source project
for fabricating and repairing objects, offering the poten-
tial to eventually start a business.
One of the foundational principles of the CRI is being
open to international talent, which adds to our creativity,
energy, legitimacy, and recognition. The diversity of the
CRI’s students, teachers, researchers, scientific advisers,
and teams is evident, as 54 different nationalities are
represented.
Under the leadership of Gaëll Mainguy, the CRI
organizes several international events every year. To
name a few, there was the Towards a Learning Planet
international conference in 2017, the World Innovation
Summit for Education in 2019, and the first-ever Learn-
ing-Planet Assembly, organized with UNESCO and the
French Development Agency, marking the launch of
our partnership with UNESCO to create the Alliance
ouverte pour l’avenir de l’apprentissage (“open alliance
for the future of learning”). This event helped strengthen
the CRI’s visibility internationally, and we are already
developing an annual cycle of interdisciplinary programs
during the winter and summer breaks with our interna-
tional partner institutions: Tsinghua University in China,
Tadeo Lab in Columbia, Maker’s Asylum in India, the
EPFL engineering school in Switzerland, and Paris
summer-school program in collaboration with Rob Lue
from Harvard University and Yann Algan from the
School of Public Affairs at Parisian university Sciences
Po. These intensive courses encourage learning through
doing and let students develop entrepreneurial projects
that try to tackle UN Sustainable Development Goals.
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SUMMARY
These programs bring together international students

from all different academic backgrounds. They are
experts in medicine, the sciences, the environment, 3-D
printing, or education and come together at hackathons,
workshops, and master classes to develop inspiring,
impactful projects.
The CRI also supports the development of spaces
inspired by its education principles and designed and
executed by people who have studied at the CRI. Exam-
ples are the Open Fiesta at Tsinghua University in
China and the Tadeo Lab in Columbia. We also have a
UNESCO Chair for Learning Sciences through UNES-
CO’s initiative to promote interuniversity cooperation,
making it easier for us to work even more closely with
these partners and with UNESCO. Also through our
partnership with UNESCO, we have an initiative led
by the CRI’s latest staff addition, Olivier Bréchard, to
organize the Learning Planet Festival and the Sustainable
Development Games for exchanges around new learning
pathways and innovative education initiatives that foster
the ability to solve the SDG challenges.
To help us recruit researchers and assess their research
projects, the CRI has an internationally renowned scien-
tific advisory board presided over by Helga Nowotny, who
you’ll recall from earlier was the first female president of
the European Research Council and is also a professor
emeritus of social studies of science at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich. The board guarantees
that quality work and science training is done at the CRI,
and its others members include Andrew Murray, professor
at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of
the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard; Leland H.
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SUMMARY
Hartwell, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, director of the Biodesign Institute, codirector of
a sustainable health center, and Piper Chair in Personalized
Medicine at Arizona State University; Samir Brahmachari,
former director general of the Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) in India and Chief Mentor of
the Open Source Drug Discovery Project; Stephen Friend,
former researcher on Apple’s health team, and president of
Sage Bionetworks; Nadia Thalmann from the prestigious
Singaporean university NTU; Stephan Lewandowsky from
the University of Bristol; Rob Page, Provost of Arizona
State University; Grace Neville, emeritus professor in the
French department at University College Cork; and Rob
Lue, faculty director of the Harvard-Allston Education
Portal and founder of HarvardX and LabXchange.
The CRI encourages students to create clubs, which
allow students to:
—— discover new fields of knowledge, such as virtual
reality with the VR club or cognitive science with the
SCALP! club
—— take action in concrete, positive ways, such as on
energy and climate issues in the group Avenir Climatique
(“climate future”)
—— help train dual professor-medical practitioners in
France’s university hospitals with the Association méde-
cine pharmacie science (“the medicine, pharma, and
science association”), which brings together PhD students
in medicine and pharmaceutical studies to look into
biomedical research
—— take up real-world issues such as gender parity in the
sciences with Wax Science, or help refugees integrate into
society through education with the CRI For All program
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SUMMARY
—— and find purpose, such as with the Ikigai club, which

educates individuals and collectives to think in terms of
the design of their existence.
We also encourage students to adopt a hacker/maker
attitude as we guide and challenge them to develop their
projects in addition to their class load. Beyond clubs, the
Ecole dynamique (“dynamic school”), Science Ac’, Rhizi,
and the Atelier des jours à venir are projects that were
started by CRI students. We strongly encourage students
to register officially as student-researchers, and like-
wise, we support all entrepreneurial initiatives, whether
it’s finding ways to improve an organization within the
CRI or creating a start-up or an association. Numerous
start-ups have been created by students at the CRI, some
of which have gone on to be very successful. Among
these are Unibiome, cofounded by Sophie Gontier; Hello
Tomorrow and Eligo Bioscience, mentioned previously,
founded by Xavier Duportet; and Just One Giant Lab,
PILI, and La Paillasse, founded by Thomas Landrain.
Last but not least, the dozens of dedicated teachers and
help from our other fantastic staff members are what
make the CRI possible day in and day out, helping run
all the CRI’s activities. It’s not like the credits at the end
of a movie as I can’t list everyone’s name, but it’s people
in our secretarial offices, logistics, accounting, legal,
human resources, partner institutions, student services,
CRI events, IT, institutional advocacy, and of course
the fundraising development. Fundraising is directed by
Véronique Giacomoni and is a huge part of the CRI’s
success, allowing us to keep developing our programs.
We’re preparing our next major fundraising campaign
with the support of our experienced adviser Gabriel
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SUMMARY
Hawawini, a former dean of the INSEAD business school

and current trustee of the University of the People. An
agile executive team ensures that the CRI runs smoothly.
The team includes CRI cofounder and head of research
Ariel Lindner, Chief Facilitation Officer Jean Grellet,
General Secretary Bénédicte Gallon, who manages the
legal and financial aspects of the CRI and was responsible
for monitoring the work on our new campus, and Gaëll
Mainguy, who works to develop new projects and interna-
tional relations. In a place growing as rapidly as the CRI,
it is a permanent challenge to ensure a balance between
existing and emerging projects, and this is possible thanks
to passion and know-how of all CRI’s actors. The CRI
has a role to play as an incubator that must preserve what
works and allow for the emergence of new ideas capable
of contributing to tomorrow’s world.
SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
The reason I dedicate this book to all those who have

taught me so much is because I couldn’t have become
what I am today without them. I couldn’t have acquired
the least bit of knowledge, wisdom, love of life, or skill,
and I wouldn’t have been able to write about the topics
I discuss in this book, let alone know how to write it or
even want to write it.
I will not be able to thank all those who have contrib-
uted to my learning since the day I was born, particularly
my family and loved ones, but also all of my teachers,
students, teammates, study partners, colleagues, mentors,
friends, and those who helped create and develop the
CRI. There are also many people whom I’ve never met
other than through digital interfaces or through their
writings and projects, and I would like to thank them as
well.
I did not become a researcher alone, nor did I become
one magically. In addition to the episodes I recount
in this book, I want to emphasize the role of Miroslav
Radman, my doctoral-dissertation adviser, and Ivan
Matic. Together, the three of us created the TaMaRa lab,
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SUMMARY
named using the first letters of each of our last names. I

owe them so much for what they have taught me about
being a scientist and about being a human. They were
the ones who told me to concentrate on research, ideas,
experimentation, and results and to not waste time quar-
reling with tiresome, uninspired people. We worked
together for years on the bacteria everyone’s heard of,
Escherichia coli or E. coli. For our dissertations, Ivan and
I worked on the evolutionary mechanisms of bacteria,
he more so on recombination and genetic exchange
between bacterial species, and I on mutagenesis. During
that time, a new project was created with a postdoc in
our lab, Eric Stewart, along with Richard Madden from
the French Institute for Higher Scientific Studies (IHES)
and Gregory Paul. Using a time-lapse microscope system
with automated software that lets you follow and analyze
10 generations of bacteria–i.e., 1,000 individual cells–we
detected aging in E. coli, whereby we could then explore
new molecular mechanisms of aging that were potentially
applicable to all forms of life.
Miro would later talk me into testing some of my more
far-flung theories, saying, “François, experiments are like
love: You can think about it, watch how others do it, and
listen to what they say about it, but so long as you haven’t
tried it, you won’t know what it is.” And he was right.
What would follow were moments of doubt, of course,
and making frequent mistakes, but also moments of pure
flow, intense pleasure in science, in searching, discov-
ering, and sharing ideas.
Because I was a pure product of the competition-based
system, research was a discovery of both diversity and
complementary ways of learning. In research, you’re
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Acknowledgements
enriched by everything and everyone, be it interns

or Nobel Prize winners, lab technicians or postdocs,
bacteria or literature, experiments or failures. You learn
by doing, discussing, and collaborating, sometimes alone
late at night or in heated debate, at conferences or in lab
meetings, at lunch or in the library, in front of a computer
or at the lab bench.
Each lesson learned is essential if you want to have a
chance of finding a new piece of the puzzle and see a new
result, propose a new hypothesis. Every team, every lab is
a learning collective, fine-tuning how it learns, learning
from other collectives, other labs, whether these are in the
same field or not, because in their own way they all help
us progress by sharing their discoveries, questions, and
results. Learning through research is so enriching and
relevant, I wanted to give the greatest possible number
of people the opportunity to do it. If learning through
research is the secret weapon of the best universities in
the world, why not give everyone the chance to partake
in it, especially now that technology allows us to break
down so many barriers?
This is the core mission of the CRI. It hasn’t always
been easy for us, and of course we’ve had to overcome
a lot of resistance and entrenched conservatism, so it
seems important to me first of all to pay tribute to the
courage and audacity of those who joined us at the outset.
Namely, I would like to thank those who, like Ariel
Lindner, joined us before we had an established name
and reputation in the scientific community. Today, Ariel is
Director of Research at the Inserm. He trained in Israel,
England, and the US, and as a postdoc he joined the lab
where I worked after he spent an entire day with Miro-
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SUMMARY
slav Radman, talking biology, education, and research.

I couldn’t have known back then that a long friendship
was beginning, one that would help us through a lot of
difficult times, for him especially during those early years,
as most of the adversaries of our unconventional project
would focus their attacks on him.
A number of other academics and scientists were also
instrumental in helping the CRI see the light of day.
Mathematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, former pres-
ident of the European Research Council, was a former
professor of mine at Polytechnique. It was he who, with
Misha Gromov, suggested that we put together an inter-
disciplinary conference on innovation in biological
systems. This was while Bourguignon was director of
the IHES, founded in 1958, of which none other than
physicist Robert Oppenheimer was a lifelong member.
Among other great scientists who put their faith in us
from the very beginning, I must also sincerely thank
Helga Nowotny, first female president of the European
Research Council; Bruce Alberts, former president of the
American National Academy of Sciences; Robert Tjian,
former president of the Howard Hughes Medical Insti-
tute, the largest biomedical foundation in the US; Leland
H. Hartwell, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine; and mathematicians Cédric Villani, Fields
Medal winner, and Misha Gromov, Abel Prize winner.
I also can’t forget the support of Elias Zerhouni, former
director of the American National Institutes of Health, or
Éric Karsenti, CNRS Gold Medal winner and researcher
at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Éric was
the first to accept being director of the CRI’s interna-
tional scientific advisory board for our doctoral program,
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SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
and similarly I can’t forget to thank his successor, now

vice president of the board, Andrew Murray, director of
a program at Harvard that’s similar to our own who also
spent a sabbatical year at the CRI. These individuals have
made it possible for us to avoid falling into a common
trap in French academia: insularity.
But the CRI would of course not exist without its
students, all the “ugly ducklings” who have agreed to
come splash around in our pond. Some of our very first
students have never left, Samuel Huron among them.
He’s the one who dropped out of high school at age 15
but found his way back to education through a largely
underutilized public program in France that lets people
earn diplomas by validating knowledge and skills they’ve
acquired in the professional world. Samuel did his
master’s at the CRI and cofounded our hackerspace Fabe-
lier (fabrication + atelier, or workshop) with classmate
Antoine Mazières. They acquainted me with the virtues
of hacker ethics and have since attracted hackers to the
CRI in droves. Kevin Lhoste would later team up with
them to create the CRI’s first maker space, where I would
discover 3-D printing and homemade drones. Samuel
Huron went on to defend a prize-winning doctoral
dissertation on data visualization, and today he is an asso-
ciate professor at the engineering school Télécom Paris.
And like many of our alumni, he also continues to help us
develop new projects. I will likewise thank Pascal Hersen,
who joined us as doctoral student with Stéphane Douady,
and Amodsen Chotia, who joined us while pursuing two
master’s degrees in physics and biology. I’d like to thank
Gregory Paul for his initiative to organize with friends
at the ENS to devise interdisciplinary research projects.
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SUMMARY
All these first-generation CRI-ers played an important

role in the genesis and development of the CRI, espe-
cially Stéphane, who continues to aid first-year students to
create new projects, and Ariel, Pascal, and Amodsen, who
each direct a key program for our activity in research,
education, and catalyzing new projects.
But even the strongest motivations are nothing without
funding. We receive public funding through the Invest-
ments for the Future program and from the La France
s’engage foundation. We’re also fortunate to benefit from
support from a number of public institutions such as
the Inserm; the Faculty of Medicine of Paris Descartes
University, thanks over the years to deans Even, Berche,
and Friedlander; universities Paris Descartes, Paris
Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, which today all are incor-
porated under the University of Paris, whose presidents
Christine Clerici, Frédéric Dardel, and François Houllier
have each shown us wonderful support in their succes-
sive tenures. The University of Paris awards the diplomas
that the CRI designs and teaches (see Annex for infor-
mation on these). The incorporation of these foundational
universities under the University of Paris umbrella won
the University of Paris an IDEX project, i.e., a govern-
ment-funded award for excellent initiatives, which will
be piloted by its vice president for research, Édouard
Kaminski, and its first president, Christine Clerici. The
uniting of the universities will strengthen their standing
in the world and perhaps enable the CRI to work even
more effectively at transforming universities. I would
like to stress the fact that presidents Frédéric Dardel and
François Houllier were members of the CRI’s doctor-
al-program board, thus they support us all the more so
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SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
as they know our internal structure and have seen the

impact the CRI has on students. Along with these univer-
sity presidents and some their predecessors who have also
showed us so much support, I must thank my employer
the Inserm, whose presidents and directors general both
past and present include Claude Griscelli, Christian
Bréchot, André Syrota, Yves Lévy, and Gilles Bloch, with
the help of Thierry Damerval and today Claire Giry. They
have continually supported our commitment to innova-
tive projects.
We also receive support from the City Hall of Paris,
which we first got to know through Guillaume Houzel,
a friend and board member. The city has provided us
with our ideally located premises and supported our
projects in so many ways. We must thank in particular
current Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo and former Mayor
Bertrand Delanoé; deputies Jean-Louis Missika and
Marie Christine Lemardeley; 4th Arrondissement Mayor
Ariel Weil; and Carine Saloff-Coste and her teams in
the city’s Office of Economic Development and Employ-
ment. They have helped us not only with finding the
unique campus we now occupy but also with making our
MOOCs; equipping our classrooms, labs, and offices;
creating our Augmented Gymnasium; starting the Savan-
turiers; and overall helping us become part of the broader
Paris ecosystem.
Support from our innovative patrons has also been
crucial, first and foremost among them being the Betten-
court-Meyers family. Several of our various sites over
the years have enjoyed visits from Liliane Bettencourt,
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, Jean-Pierre Meyers, and
their sons Nicolas and Jean-Victor. Nicolas Meyers’s
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SUMMARY
recent visit to our campus and the interest he showed in

the CRI’s different activities have left their mark on our
teams and testify to the family’s commitment to our work.
We have been able to develop an ever more construc-
tive and friendly relationship with foundation members
and executives, namely secretary general Armand de
Boissière and director general Olivier Brault, whom we
see regularly. Our collaboration over the years with the
foundation’s executive team has driven the CRI’s develop-
ment considerably, namely our work with former Project
Manager Flora Donsimoni, former Audit Manager Béné-
dicte Gallon (now the CRI’s secretary general), and
current chief scientific officer Laura Ferri Fioni.
The quality of our relationship with the Bettencourt
Schueller Foundation, France’s top charitable organiza-
tion, has given the CRI a financial foundation that has
enabled it to develop far beyond what I could have ever
imagined. The foundation finances not only a large part
of our operations as well as our education and research
programs but also all of the important work that went
into building our 5,000-square-meter campus in the
Marais district in Paris. Our campus is in a former private
mansion owned by the City Hall of Paris that the city will
let us occupy for the next 50 years. The location provides
not only classrooms and offices but also 55 dormitories
for students and young researchers.
I once put it this way to foundation director Olivier
Brault: “The unbelievable generosity of the Betten-
court Schueller Foundation allows members of the CRI
to be generous to others in turn.” By financing specific
programs and our transdisciplinary activities, the Foun-
dation allows us to stay true to our values, think outside
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SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
the box, and bring new projects to life that can go on

to find other sources of funding. This is how we’ve
been able to take on projects from students, teachers,
and researchers as well as start-ups and organizations,
working for the common good in the fields of education
and health. Among these are the Savanturiers; SynLab,
working in education; Sapiens, training teachers to be
teacher-researchers; The Conversation, an online media
outlet that works toward developing quality journalism
by reinforcing the link between scientists and citizens;
Hub IA, which brings together experts in artificial intel-
ligence; iGEM, which organizes student competitions in
synthetic biology; Just One Giant Lab, an open-science
platform; and Wax Science, which is involved in ques-
tions of gender.
In addition, the foundation helps us strategize and
works with us in bringing structural ideas to maturity,
and this without meddling in our selection processes
for projects, students, or researchers. They simply invite
us to put in place rigorous, benevolent procedures both
for building an efficient, autonomous organization and
helping prepare for tomorrow’s world.
Some partners from the private sector have also put
their faith in us, believing as well in the CRI’s vision and
missions. Among these are Paul Friedel at Orange Labs
and Henri de Castries, former Chairman and CEO of
AXA.
I must here also share my gratitude for the hundreds
of researchers, teachers, students, and committed staff
who have contributed their energies to help us maintain
the open platform for innovation and creativity that is the
CRI. One of our collaborators from the start has been
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SUMMARY
doctor and biochemist Pierre Sonigo, a pioneer in cloning

and HIV sequencing. Pierre, along with Anne Atlan,
organized the “interdisciplinary spring school”ccxvi on Île
Berder, and among those present were also physicist and
CNRS Silver Medal winner Stéphane Douady and CNRS
Bronze Medal winner for his work in genome analysis
Eduardo Rocha. Pierre Sonigo is also a member of the
CRI’s board of directors, along with Guillaume Houzel,
Christelle van Ham, Ariel Lindner, Grace Neville, and
Armand de Boissière.
I’d also like to thank the group of students and
researchers led by Alice Richard and Livio Riboli-Sasco
who helped us develop not only our children’s programs
Science Festival and Paris-Montagne but also our high
school program Science Ac’, which helps teens in low-in-
come areas get acquainted with scientific research. Of
course, I can’t here thank everyone who has believed in
and taken up our project, giving it energy and helping
it grow, yet without their help, the CRI wouldn’t have
become what it is today.
I’ve learned so much through my work, but it’s with
loved ones that we learn all of life’s most precious lessons,
by turns essential, practical, routine, and foundational:
what it is to live with others, the tenderness and sweet-
ness of intimate relationships, joy in new birth, and pain
in parting. It seems important then that I especially thank
my loved ones: my parents, grandparents, uncles and
aunts, sisters and cousins, my wife Angèle, my children
Bosco and Sophia, our nephews, and all the members of
our big tribe who have taught me so much. Usually one
focuses on the important contributions of one’s fore-
bearers, and while I wish in no way to detract from the
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Acknowledgements
essential lessons my own have taught me, it seems that at

every stage in my life I have also learned a great deal from
my peers, namely my sisters Antonia, Angela, and Julia. I
can say the same of the new generation, starting with my
children, but also the students who have worked in my
lab or at the CRI, who have helped me to better under-
stand how much the world has changed over the course
of the past few years.
Recently I have been getting invited to write official
reports on the learning society, which we can define as a
society in which what you learn can facilitate what others
learn, as we are social beings who enjoy sharing what
we’ve learned and this effort is made easier and easier
with technology. I’ve learned a lot throughout my life, and
especially while writing those reports. I would here like
to thank my coauthors Catherine Becchetti-Bizot, Guil-
laume Houzel, Gaëll Mainguy, and Marie Cécile Naves,
as well as all those who have contributed to collective
reflection on the topics discussed, those whom I inter-
viewed as well as met in conferences, online, through
exchanges thanks to our MOOCs, or who reached out to
me to share stories and thoughts after reading the first
edition of this book.
I want to therefore thank all those who share their ideas
for the purpose of building a learning society. It will
be that much more of a success because we’ll be more
conscientious of the ways we learn and be better and
better able to learn how to learn, both individually and
collectively. Because I’ve learned so much trying to build
the learning society, it’s only natural that I now share what
I’ve learned so that others can learn from it if they find it
speaks to them.
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SUMMARY
I let myself get talked into writing this book because

I wanted to contribute in my own way to this collective
reflection on the new modes of learning in 21st century,
even though I had trouble finding the time to do so. This
book is by nature unfinished because I can have only a
partial, personal vision on the subject. After all, the 21st
century is far from over.
Someone else may have written this book differently,
and I would be glad to hear her approach, as it would
be yet another addition to this complex subject. Like-
wise, at other points in my life I would have written the
book differently because I’m constantly learning more
and more and learning how to learn. It would be inter-
esting perhaps to have others add to this book as they
see fit using our new ways of communication thanks to
technology. Then we could create a collective work where
everyone could be the heroes and heralds of new ways
of learning. New technologies make this easier than ever
to do. As we experienced with our MOOCs, those who
enrolled in the MOOC participate in research on new
ways of learning by sharing their lessons and reflections.
In a similar vein, we’re organizing a learning-planet
festival, which, like World Music Day, invites everyone to
celebrate ways of caring for oneself, others, and the planet.
The festival will take place during the week of the United
Nations’ International Day of Education on January 24.
It will be a place for celebrating what we’ve learned and
the people and things that helped us learn, whether it’s a
grandmother, a friend, a colleague, a game, or an explo-
ration of the beauty of the world. It’s up to each person
how to celebrate. This learning could be within one’s own
family, at school, at a university, at work, or in a neighbor-
322
SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
hood. The celebration will be a moment to reflect collec-

tively and share ideas on the 1,001 ways to learn in the 21st
century. Reflecting on what we’ve learned can help us ask
questions about how we want to learn and to share these
thoughts digitally. Disseminating these lessons can put us
in touch with neighbors who could potentially become
caring mentors. It’s up to each person to decide how to
celebrate and discuss the new ways of learning we have
at our disposal, as well as discuss how these new ways of
learning can complement the traditional methods, which
have shown the full extent of their capabilities. It would
be interesting to be able to organize Sustainable Develop-
ment Games to celebrate all those who are working for
the future of the planet and sharing in open source the
best ways to contribute to the coming transitions.
More and more people kept asking me to write a book,
and so, to do my part to “let a hundred flowers bloom; let
a hundred schools of thought contend,” to use an expres-
sion from Mao, it seemed important to me to get my ideas
out and pass on the knowledge that I have. Film director
Judith Grumbach was the first one to talk to me about
writing a book, during filming for her documentary Une
idée folle, which she invited me to be a part of. She was
involved in the first interactions I had that led to the
writing of this book. Of course, the book wouldn’t have
been possible without the trust, friendship, and profes-
sionalism of Emmanuel Davidenkoff, a master of the
maieutic if ever there was one. He helped give my ideas
shape on the written page, and no doubt had I tried to
write the book on my own it wouldn’t have been nearly
as readable. For this version of the book, I want to thank
Timothy Stone, who translated this book into English. It
323
SUMMARY
was a pleasure to interact with him throughout the trans-

lation process and work to keep the spirit of the book alive
while changing the language and adapting references to
another cultural context. I also have to thank my editor
Philippe Robinet, who was willing to test out new ideas
with us at various stages throughout the process. Further-
more, writing this book was an even greater pleasure
thanks to the careful and caring readers in our test audi-
ence, particularly Mariam Chammat, Judith Grumbach,
Ariel Lindner, Gaëll Mainguy, Marine Montégut, and
my father Dominique Taddei, to whom I owe so much.
Through the process I also discovered all the people
in the publishing industry who make the connection
between the author and the reader possible, i.e., illustra-
tors, printers, editors, marketers, and bookstores. I want
to thank them, as they contribute to the learning society
in their own way.
In the case of this book, we asked them to do something
that is only marginally practiced. Some of you perhaps
noticed on your own that we used both masculine and
feminine pronouns in generic contexts. This is something
that I believe in, as do many other gender-parity activists.
It may be out of the ordinary for some people, and for
those who were seeing it here for the first time, we humbly
thank you for understanding why this choice was impor-
tant to us. It’s my hope that for the good of everyone, this
small practice will become more frequent and contribute
to bringing about a more equal society, not just in our
laws but also in reality.
I learned to be progressive on this issue, as well as others
talked about in the book, thanks to how I was raised. I
grew up in a Corsican family in which this has been a
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SUMMARY
Acknowledgements
topic of debate since before I was born. In many places

in the world, progress on these issues isn’t always smooth
sailing, but Corsican culture holds certain cardinal
values: curiosity about the world and others, thus respect
for others; the marketplace of ideas; and taking action for
just causes, being able to fight injustices, and defending
those who are treated unjustly. I was always told that a life
without responsibility toward others is no life at all and
that we have to work so that others can have a life worth
living. I was so fortunate to learn so much throughout my
life, and this means my responsibility to help others learn
is that much greater.
My roots are in Corsica, my heart is in Avignon, and
my adoptive home is Paris. I’m French, European, and a
citizen of the world. Like everyone, I’m part of a long line
of Homo sapiens and an even longer line of living organ-
isms, and like the rest of the planet, I am made of stardust.
I’m a civil servant and therefore I am paid to contribute to
the common good. I love games, and I’ve been given the
opportunity to bet on the future in such a way that I don’t
have to get angry with myself when I make mistakes. I’m
a researcher, and I have been fortunate to be able to learn
through research and try to share that opportunity with
other learners of all different ages and all different back-
grounds. When I embarked on this path, one that seemed
to be attracting more and more people, I was told that I
was a social entrepreneur. Since these ideas were capable
of being scaled up, I was asked to contribute to several
official reports. Because these topics piqued the interest
of some, I was asked to give lectures and answer more and
more interviews, and then write this book, thus becoming
an author. As much as I am able, I wear all these different
325
SUMMARY
hats and assume all the responsibilities that go along with

them, and I am so thankful to everyone who has aided in
each stage of transformation.
I would also like to thank everyone who is taking action
to contribute to making the planet we share, our sole space
vessel for the foreseeable future, a place where present
and future generations can flourish through learning and
through enabling others to learn and find the solutions
they need to move forward. Together, let’s learn to take
care of ourselves, others, and the planet. Then we’ll be
able to find our ikigai, thus give meaning to our lives and
actions. In our MOOC on the learning planet, a number
of educators shared with us that their or their school’s
ikigai was to help other learners find their ikigai as a way
of overcoming the challenges, both present and future,
that they face together. I personally embrace this dynamic
and live by a variant of the inscription on the Panthéon:
“A grateful planet honors its collective intelligence.”
SUMMARY
Notes
1
Why will we learn differently
in the 21st century? 21
i
“Empathy Decline and Its Reasons: A Systematic Review of Studies
With Medical Students and Residents,” Melanie Neumann, Friedrich
Edelhäuser, Diethard Tauschel, Martin R. Fischer, Markus Wirtz,
Christiane Woopen, Aviad Haramati, Christian Scheffer, Academic
Medicine août 2011, volume 86 (8), p. 996-1009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.
nih.gov/pubmed/21670661
ii
Henry C. Plotkin, Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge,
Harvard University Press, 1994.
iii
Christopher Wills, The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human
Uniqueness, Basic Books, 1993.
iv
Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution
of Cooperation, Penguin Books, 1997.
v
Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,
Harvard University Press, 1998.
vi
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harvill
Secker, 2014.
vii
Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith. The Origins of Life: from
the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, c1999.
327
SUMMARY
viii
Tatiana Dimitriu, The Coevolution of Gene Mobility and Sociality in
Bacteria, Agricultural Sciences, université René-Descartes-Paris-V, 2014
ix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann. Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1944.
x
Op. cit.
xi
Op. cit.
xii
Brian Viner, “Can this electric helmet boost your brain power?
Brian Viner puts “brain-hacking” to the test - with some surprising
results,” DailyMail.com, September 2015. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/
sciencetech/article-3251517/Can-electric-helmet-boost-brain-power.html
xiii
James Gordon. “In a First, Experiment Links Brains of Two Rats.” New
York Times, February 28, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/
science/new-research-suggests-two-rat-brains-can-be-linked.html
xiv
Dawn Chan. “The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans.”
The Atlantic, October 20, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
archive/2017/10/alphago-zero-the-ai-that-taught-itself-go/543450/
xv
« Le problème de l’échiquier de Sissa, » Math93.com, mai 2014. http://
www.math93.com/index.php/112-actualites-mathematiques/304-le-
probleme-de-l-echiquier-de-sissa
xvi
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6295/126.full
xvii
http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Boeke_Church_Sci_2016.pdf
xviii
Cheyenne Macdonald. June 1, 2016. “Now robots can have KIDS:
Researchers create machines that ‘mate’ over wifi to create a 3D
printed baby - and experts say they could be used to colonise Mars”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3620314/Now-robots-
KIDS-Researchers-create-machines-mate-wifi-create-3D-printed-baby-
experts-say-used-colonise-Mars.html
xix
https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-
happen-by-2045
xx
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus : A Brief History of Tomorow,
Harper, 2017.
xxi
Ewen Conway. “Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our
species’ history.” June 7, 2017. https://www.nature.com/news/oldest-
homo-sapiens-fossil-claim-rewrites-our-species-history-1.22114
xxii
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,
Ballantine Books, 1997.
328
SUMMARY
Notes
xxiii
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided
by Politics and Religion, Penguin, 2013.
xxiv
Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Meaning and Relevance,
Cambridge University Press, 2012.
xxv
Op. cit.
2
What I’ve learned 55
i
Edward Zwick, Pawn Sacrifice, 2015.
ii
« La “potion” de Miroslav Radman, franc-tireur des études sur le
vieillissement », Le Monde, November 2011. http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/
article/2011/11/12/la-potion-de-miroslav-radman-franc-tireur-des-etudes-
sur-le-vieillissement_1602131_3224.html#ci4MkFQCopMaJ6hM.99
iii
Ibid.
iv
https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheUglyDuckling_e.html
v
Dereck Sivers, How to start a movement (video online), TED, 2010.
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement ?
vi
Daniel Pennac, Chagrin d’école, Gallimard, 2007
vii
Axel Leclercq, « Daniel Pennac : “J’étais mauvais élève parce que
j’avais peur” », +Positivr, mai 2018.https://positivr.fr/daniel-pennac-
education-curiosite/
3
New ways of teaching 79
i
François Taddei, « Pour un enseignement interdisciplinaire. Entretien
avec la revue Hermès », Hermès, La Revue, 2013/3 (n° 67), p. 57-61.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-hermes-la-revue-2013-3-page-57.htm
ii
Take a look at our proposal for the first generation of our master’s
program: http://www.abi.snv.jussieu.fr/people/erocha/aivweb/faq.html
329
SUMMARY
iii
David Kelley, “How to build your creative confidence” (video online),
TED, 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_
your_creative_confidence?language=en
iv
Neil Gershenfeld, “Unleash your creativity in a fab lab” (video online),
TED, 2006. https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_unleash_
your_creativity_in_a_fab_lab/transcript?language=fr
v
Council of Europe. “Anti-Gypsyism/Discrimination,” https://www.coe.
int/en/web/roma-and-travellers/anti-gypsyism-/-discrimination
vi
The RSA, “Everyone a changemaker - Bill Drayton” (video online),
YouTube, May 2, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0w_
o5PAzPQ
vii
https://www.ashoka.org/en-us/ashoka’s-history
viii
David Bornstein, How to change the world: social entrepreneurs and
the power of new ideas. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press,
2004.
ix
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago :
The University of Chicago Press, 2012 (1st Ed. 1962).
x
François Jacob. The Statue Within: An Autobiography. New York : Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1995.
xi
Alison Gopnik, “What do babies think?” TED, 2011. https://www.ted.
com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think?language=en
xii
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell
Us About Truth, Love, And The Meaning Of Life. New York : Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2009 ; Alison Gopnik, The Scientist In The Crib :
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& Co., c1999.
xiii
P. S. Blackawton et al., “Blackawton Bees,” Biology Letters, the Royal
Society Publishing, December 2010. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.
org/content/7/2/168
xiv
TEDx Talks, La maîtresse et la fourmi, une nouvelle fable à l’école :
Ange Ansour at TEDxParis (vidéo en ligne), YouTube, décembre 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXKNto_TOXM
xv
D. D. Guttenplan, “French Scientist Invites Public Into Research
Realm,” New York Times, avril 2013.http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/04/01/world/europe/01iht-educlede01.html
xvi
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing revolution in early modern Europe.
Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2000.
330
SUMMARY
Notes
xvii
J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “High Cognitive Complexity and the
Making of Major Scientific Discoveries, Knowledge,” Communication
and Creativity, Arnaud Sales and Marcel Fournier, p. 129-155, 2007.
4
Before you can learn,
you have to unlearn 113
i
Christopher Lucas, “Japan’s Remarkable Monkeys.” The Rotarian,
Volume 113, Number 5, November 1968.
ii
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Semmelweis. London : Atlas Press, 2014.
iii
Fliegende Blätter, October1892.
iv
Daniel Simons, The Monkey Business Illusion (video online), YouTube,
April 28, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY
v
Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter, “The Elusive Backfire Effect : Mass
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Network, August 2016. https://ssrn.com/abstract = 2819073
vi
https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/weve-been-told-were-
living-in-a-post-truth-age-dont-believe-it.html
vii
Caroline Dumoucel. “Paul Virilio,” Vice, September 2, 2010. https://
www.vice.com/en_uk/article/qbzbn5/paul-virilio-506-v17n9
viii
Robert H. Lustig, The Hacking of the American Mind, Penguin, 2017.
ix
https://business-digest.eu/en/2018/04/04/pleasure-is-not-the-same-as-
happiness-at-work/
x
Jacques Lecomte, Donner un sens à sa vie, Odile Jacob, 2007
xi
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern
Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York : Basic Books, 2006.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are
Divided by Politics and Religion. New York : Pantheon Books, c2012.
Jonathan Haidt, “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives.” TED,
2008. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_
liberals_and_conservatives?language=en
xii
Op. cit.
xiii
https://jcom.sissa.it /archive/13/02/ JCOM _1302_ 2014_C01/
JCOM_1302_2014_C05/JCOM_1302_2014_C05.pdf
331
SUMMARY
xiv
https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2019/03/24/the-pygmalion-effect/
xv
Ibid.
xvi
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why do humans reason? Arguments
for an argumentative theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2011, p. 34
and p.57-111.
xvii
Guillaume de Lamérie, « Recherche scientifique sans connaissance
de soi n’est que ruine de la science », Science... et pseudo-sciences, avril
2014.http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/spip.php?article2299
xviii
Op. cit.
xix
Bruner and Postman, “On the Perception of Incongruity: a paradigm,”
Journal of Personality, volume 18, 2, December 1949, p.206-223.
xx
Coroar, “Red Spade Experiment, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman”
(video online), YouTube, October 2009. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yFYBY_YUH5I
xxi
“The Blind Men and the Elephant.” https://www.peacecorps.gov/
educators/resources/story-blind-men-and-elephant/
xxii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMpeBTuFOKY&t+=+14s
xxiii
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf
xxiv
Pierre Vianin, La Motivation scolaire - Comment susciter le désir
d’apprendre ?, De Boeck, 2006
xxv
https://les-savanturiers.cri-paris.org/
xxvi
Compte Twitter @petitprince33
xxvii
Temple Grandin, “The world needs all kinds of minds,” TED, 2010.
https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_
kinds_of_minds?language=en
xxviii
Temple Grandin. Thinking in pictures: and other reports from my
life with autism. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
xxix
Sharon Terry, “Science didn’t understand my kids’ rare disease
until I decide to study it” (video online), TED, 2016. https://www.ted.
com/talks/sharon_terry_science_didn_t_understand_my_kids_rare_
disease_until_i_decided_to_study_it#t-605893
xxx
https://fold.it/portal/
xxxi
https://www.seintinelles.com/
xxxii
https://lapaillasse.org/
xxxiii
http://www.gamesforchange.org
332
SUMMARY
Notes
xxxiv
Katie Salen, Robert Torres, Loretta Wolozin, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper and
Arana Shapiro, Quest to learn: A Rules of Play Anthology, MIT Press, 2010
Peter Gray. Free to Learn. Basic Books, 2013.
xxxv
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow, the secret to happiness.” TED,
2004. https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_
secret_to_happiness/transcript?language=en
xxxvi
Mélanie Strauss, Sommeil et apprentissage, symposium « Sciences
cognitives et éducation », Collège de France, 2014. https://www.college-
de-france.fr/media/stanislas-dehaene/UPL1489204065771701647_
CDF_13nov2014_Strauss.pdf
xxxvii
“Sleep spindles in midday naps enhance learning in preschool
children,” Laura Kurdziel, Kasey Duclos and Rebecca M. C. Spencer,
PNAS, October 22, 2013.
xxxviii
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ960950.pdf
xxxix
https://www.cscd.osaka-u.ac.jp/user/rosaldo/K_Lewin_Action_
research_minority_1946.pdf
xl
Margaret Davidson, Louis Braille, the boy who invented books for the
blind. New York: Scholastic Book Services, c1971.
xli
https://web.archive.org/web/20071119071934/http:/afb.org/Section.
asp?SectionID=6&TopicID=199
xlii
Helen Keller, The story of my life. New York: Pocket Books, 2005
xliii
Margaret Davidson, Helen Keller. New York: Scholastic, c1969
xliv
Helen Selsdon, “Movie Magic: Helen Keller in Paris to honor Louis
Braille, 1952,” American Foundation for the Blind, March 2016. http://
www.af b.org/blog/af b-blog/movie-magic-helen-keller-in-paris-to-
honor-louis-braille-1952/12
xlv
“Hungry to learn across the world,” BBC News, October 2009. http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8299780.stm
xlvi
http://sylviashow.com/
xlvii
TEDx talks, Let’s make stuff fun! Super Awesome Sylvia at
TEDxSanJoseCAWomen (video online), YouTube, 2013. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=9dTfUiQn-rk
xlviii
TEDx talks, Go out there and make something! Sylvia Todd at
TEDxSanDiego 2013 (video onine), YouTube, 2013. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=YqnB9sP_5lA
xlix
Chris Anderson, Makers: the new industrial revolution. New York :
Crown Business, c2012.
333
SUMMARY
l
Syndia N. Bhanoo, “A science star already, tinkering with the idea
of growing up,” New York Times, April 2013. http://www.nytimes.
com/2013/04/24/science/sylvia-todd-science-star-tinkers-with-the-idea-
of-growing-up.html
li
Adora Svitak, Flying Fingers, Action Publishing, 2005
lii
Adora Svitak, Dancing Fingers, Action Publishing, 2008
liii
Adora Svitak, “What adults can learn from kids.” TED, 2010. https://
www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak_what_adults_can_learn_from_
kids?language=en
liv
https://worldschildrensprize.org/iqbal-masih
lv
Craig Kielburger, Free the children : a young man’s personal crusade
against child labor. New York : HarperCollins, c1998.
lvi
Watch the documentary El Sistema by Paul Smaczny and Maria
Stodtmeier, 2008.
lvii
https://sistemaglobal.org/el-sistema-global-program-directory/
lviii
Kiran Bir Sethi, “Kids, take charge,” TED, 2009. https://www.ted.
com/talks/kiran_sethi_kids_take_charge
lix
http://www.dfcworld.com/SITE
lx
http://www.batisseursdepossibles.org/
lxi
http://worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org
lxii
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/
lxiii
Adam Sage, “Milky Way kid sees his name written in the stars,” The
Times, January 7, 2013. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/milky-way-
kid-sees-his-name-written-in-the-stars-nmmbplwfpqz
lxiv
Ibid.
lxv
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/18/
rsbl.2010.1056.full
lxvi
Beau Lotto and Amy O’Toole, “Science is for everyone, kids
included,” TED, 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_amy_o_
toole_science_is_for_everyone_kids_included?language=en
lxvii
https://w w w.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_
think?language=fr
lxviii
Alison Gopnik et al, “Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis
search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to
adulthood,” PNAS, July 2017. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7892
334
SUMMARY
Notes
lxix
Maria Montessori, Google Founders Talk Montessori (video online),
YouTube, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_DQxpX-Kw
lxx
http://www.ina.fr/video/AFE99000001
lxxi
http://boutique.arte.tv/f11245-revolution_ecole_1918_1939
lxxii
Alexander S. Neill, Summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing.
New York: Pocket Books, 1977, c1960
lxxiii
“Expert Conversation: using open source drug discovery to
help treat neglected diseases,” The Conversation, June 2017. https://
theconversation.com/expert-conversation-using-open-source-drug-
discovery-to-help-treat-neglected-diseases-79318
lxxiv
Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I am Malala: the girl who
stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban, New York, NY:
Little, Brown and Company, 2013.
lxxv
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/satyarthi/facts/
lxxvi
https://www.librarieswithoutborders.org
lxxvii
https://www.librarieswithoutborders.org/ideasbox/
lxxviii
Maryline Baumard, La France enfin première de la classe, Fayard,
2013
lxxix
https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Main_Page
lxxx
Charles Leadbeater. Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers
Around the World, photography by Romain Staropoli, Bloomsbury,
2012.
lxxxi
https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/educat ion /ar t icle/2017/09/08/
u ne -id e e -fol le -u n- d o c u m e nt a i r e -r e s olu m e nt- opt i m i s te - s u r -
l-ecole_5183006_1473685.html
lxxxii
NPR. “The One-Room Schoolhouse That’s A Model
For The World.” June 9, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/
ed/2016/06/09/474976731/the-one-room-schoolhouse-thats-a-model-for-
the-world?t=1572867510038
lxxxiii
Sara Hamdan. “Children Thrive in Rural Columbia’s Flexible
Schools.” New York Times, November 10, 2013. https://www.nytimes.
com/2013/11/11/world/americas/children-thrive-in-rural-colombias-
flexible-schools.html
lxxxiv
Ibid.
lxxxv
Jeremy Scahill. The assassination complex: inside the government’s
secret drone warfare program. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
335
SUMMARY
lxxxvi
Geoff Mulgan, A Short Intro to the Studio School (video online),
TED, 2011. https://www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_a_short_intro_
to_the_studio_school#t-21346
5
Learn to ask (yourself)
good questions 201
i
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1069358
ii
Garry Kasparov and Daniel King. Kasparov Against the World: The
Story of the Greatest Online Challenge, KasparovChess Online.
iii
Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked
Science, Princeton University Press, 2011
iv
https://polymathprojects.org/
v
Davide Castelvecchi, “Problem Solved, LOL: Blog comments point to a
new, faster approach in math,” Scientific American, April 1, 2010. https://
www.scientificamerican.com/article/problem-solved-lol/
vi
Yann Algan et al., “Cooperation in a peer production experimental
experience evidence from Wikipedia,” 2013. http://www.eief.it/
files/2013/08/yann-algan.pdf
vii
Walter Isaacson, The innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses,
and geeks created the digital revolution, New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster, 2014.
viii
Op. cit.
ix
Charles Darwin, The origin of species, New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster Paperbacks, 2009
x
Annie Kahn, « Un gène éthique qui vaut de l’or », Le Monde, November
2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/11/27/un-gene- ethique-
qui-vaut-de-l-or_1272940_3244.html#hkcED0fcVHIQ6Q- 4Z.99
xi
http://www.joursavenir.org/
xii
DrawMeWhy, Science it’s your thing (video online), YouTube, 2012.
http://youtu.be/oWMbnOlwJas
xiii
http://wax-science.fr/
xiv
http://itcounts-app.org/#/home
336
SUMMARY
Notes
xv
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), VGTC
(Visualization and Graphics Technical Community), Doctoral
Dissertation Award.
xvi
http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCC008
xvii
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/tli/article/view/57376
xviii
Nicole Rege Colet, Lynn McAlpine, Joëlle Fanghanel et
Cynthia Weston, « Le concept de Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning », Recherche et formation, n° 67, 2011, p. 91-104.
https://w w w.arcep.fr/uploads/tx_gspublication/barometre_du_
numerique-2017-271117.pdf
xix
Camille Stomboni, « La Sorbonne, méritocrate avant l’heure », Le
Monde, août 2017.http://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2017/07/30/
la-sorbonne- meritocrate-avant-l-heure_5166686_4401467.html#XiBxIx-
G1suh7y16I.99
xx
“Crowd Mapping Geneva Canton’s Soundscape,” https://actu.epfl.ch/
news/crowd-mapping-geneva-canton-s-soundscape-2/
xxi
https://blog.safecast.org
xxii
https://www.seintinelles.com/
xxiii
Hervé Morin, « Sciences participatives: les Français prêts à
participer à la recherche », Le Monde, juin 2016. http://www.lemonde.
fr/sciences/article/2016/05/23/les-francais-prets-a-participer-a-la-
recherche_4924875_1650684.html#v7- KravkpZLDkrILJ.99
xxiv
https://www.fondation-lamap.org/en/international
xxv
“Flying High,” The Economist, June 2016. https://www.economist.
com/international/2016/06/25/flying-high
xxvi
Alec Ash, “Is China’s gaokao the world’s toughest school exam?,” The
Guardian, October 12, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/
oct/12/gaokao-china-toughest-school-exam-in-world
xxvii
ht t ps://w w w.l i n ked i n.com /pu l se /i n novat ion- ouver te- et-
management-dyktiocratique-pour-une-le-metayer/
xxviii
https://www.kaggle.com/
xxix
Claire Cain Miller, “A Site for Data Scientists to Prove Their Skills
and Make Money,” New York Times, November 3, 2011. https://bits.
blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/a-site-for-data-scientists-to-prove-their-
skills-and-make-money/
xxx
https://www.innocentive.com/
xxxi
https://www.innocentive.com/about-us/
337
SUMMARY
xxxii
http://success.topcoder.com/topcoder-videos-customer-success-
community-engagement-and-best-practices/extreme-value-outcomes-in-
open-innovation-harvard-professor-karim-lakhani-discussing-topcoder
xxxiii
https://www.mooc-list.com/course/gse2x-leaders-learning-edx.
Image reproduced with the gracious permission of the president and
fellows of Harvard College.
xxxiv
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R % C3 % A9seau_d % 27 % C3 %
A9changes_r % C3 % A9ciproques_de_savoirs
xxxv
Justin Lahart, “Taking an Open-Source Approach to Hardware,”
Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2009. https://www.wsj.com/articles/
SB10001424052748703499404574559960271468066
xxxvi
Ibid.
xxxvii
ht t p://w w w.le monde.f r/sc ie nce s/a r t ic le /2017/11/13/a r t-
et-science-u n-ma r ia ge-plus-que-de-ra ison _ 5214230 _1650 68 4.
html#hlbRZdpSSc3D073T.99
xxxviii
Ibid.
xxxix
https://www.tomorrow-documentary.com
xl
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
xli
Frédéric Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating
Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness,
Paris: Diateino, 2014.
xlii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk
xliii
Tony Schwartz“Putting Soul Back into Business,”New York Times,
September 19, 2014

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/putting-soul-back-into-
business/
xliv
https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2017/05/22/2579337-dominique-
pon-directeur-clinique-pasteur-quand-peut-humaniser-choses.html
xlv
How’s Life? Measuring Well-being, OCDE, 2017. http://www.oecd.
org/std/how-s-life-23089679.htm
xlvi
Ray Oldenburg, The Great, Good Place, Da Capo Press, 1989.
xlvii
Ibid.
xlviii
http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2017/08/13/tout-s-invente-
dans-le-fab-lab-de-lome-meme-la-ville-de-demain_5171989_3212.
html#J2w5hy32DPa0fDHi.99
338
SUMMARY
Notes
xlix
http://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2016/11/15/sename-koffi-
agbodjinou-lire-rimbaud-aide-plus-un-developpeur-que-de-connaitre-a-
fond-java_5031328_4401467.html#vRkyJY2lGF6haMI6.99
l
http://www.cahiers-pedagogiques.com/FabUlis-3-0-Un-laboratoire-de-
pratiques-numeriques-en-ULIS
li
Ibid.
lii
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/charter/
liii
John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York: Simon & Schuster,
1997
liv
h t t p s : // w w w . l i f e l o n g l e a r n i n g f e s t . s g / s m a r t / h e l l o /
LoadMainPage?EventID=w459ofvn
lv
http://www.festivalvanhetleren.nl/pagina.asp?pag=236
lvi
http://sydneylearningfestival.com.au/
lvii
http://danmarkslaeringsfestival.dk/english/
lviii
Dominic Basulto, “New $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE wants
to disrupt education as we know it,” Washington Post, September 22, 2014.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/09/22/new-
15-million-global-learning-xprize-wants-to-disrupt-education-as-we-know-it/
lix
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2013/03/30/a-rennes-la-fac-decale-
les-cours-pour-desengorger-le-metro_892511
lx
https://heckmanequation.org/resource/invest-in-early-childhood-
development-reduce-deficits-strengthen-the-economy/
lxi
Calmann-Lévy, 2017.
lxii
John Izzo, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, San
Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008
lxiii
http://rootsofempathy.org/
lxiv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84mHoLjBpvA
lxv
https://w w w.youtube.com/watch?v=GFgLQOwLClk&feature
=youtube
lxvi
A Force for Good : the Dalaï Lama’s Vision for our World,
Bloomsbury, 2015
lxvii
Steven Pinker, The better angels of our nature: why violence has
declined. New York: Viking, 2011
lxviii
Op. cit.
339
SUMMARY
lxix
Bruce Greenwald and Joseph Stiglitz, Creating a Learning Society -
A New Approach to Growth, Reader’s Edition, 2014
lxx
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulation-
incentive.html
lxxi
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
lxxii
https://www.la-croix.com/Famille/Parents-Enfants/Dossiers/
Education-et-Valeurs/Y-a-t-il-une-pedagogie-jesuite-_NP_-2009-04-28-
534117
lxxiii
https://www.khanacademy.org
lxxiv
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/nonpublic/statistics.
html#homeschl
lxxv
Anne-Aël Durand, « École hors contrat ou à la maison : de quoi
parle-t-on ? », Le Monde, 2016. http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/
article/2016/06/09/ecole-hors-contrat-ou-a-la-maison-de-quoi-parle-
t-on_4945162_4355770.html#UXsh6qOt77dSmE2Y.99
6
A how-to guide for a learning planet 281
i
https://cri-paris.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Un-plan-pour-
coconstruire-une-societe-apprenante.pdf
ii
Op. cit.
Conclusion
TOWARD A MORE HUMANE HUMANITY 291
i
Eliot, T. S., The Rock, London, Faber & Faber, 1934.
ii
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/business/dealbook/blackrock-
actively-managed-funds-computer-models.html?emc=eta1
iii
Hans Jonas, The imperative of responsibility: in search of an ethics for
the technological age, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
iv
Op. cit.
340
SUMMARY
Table
Prologue.......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 13
1. Why will we learn differently

in the 21st century?................................................................................................. 21
All living organisms learn............................................................................................................... 22
Transition always creates conflict......................................................................................... 27
Cooperating and teaching............................................................................................................... 29
The new frontiers of evolution.................................................................................................... 34
Transition = conflict............................................................................................................................. 37
Sequential to exponential............................................................................................................... 39
Technology wins in the long term........................................................................................... 40
Rethinking the foundations of the education system.......................................... 42
Ethics and the future of intelligence.................................................................................... 43
Viruses are always one step ahead......................................................................................... 46
To reread and to unite......................................................................................................................... 49
Is there a planet of ideas?............................................................................................................... 52
2. What i’ve learned............................................................................................ 55

From primary school through university, following codes
of conduct is as valuable as work ethic and intelligence............................ 56
There’s nothing more serious than play............................................................................ 57
Humans can dominate machines............................................................................................ 58
Overly competitive environments don’t necessarily
produce better results................................................................................................................. 60
A grateful planet honors its collective intelligence............................................... 61
I am incapable of submitting to dogmatic authority............................................. 62
341
SUMMARY
We should learn to ask the right questions rather

than mechanically memorize answers......................................................................... 64
We all need caring mentors........................................................................................................... 69
Scientific truths are only temporary.................................................................................... 70
Barriers between disciplines are made to be broken down............................. 70
Mistakes are not (always) bad...................................................................................................... 72
“It takes a village to raise a child”............................................................................................ 73
There is a need for ethics everywhere................................................................................. 74
Ugly ducklings need a duck pond............................................................................................. 76
3. New ways of teaching.......................................................................... 79

Not taking risks can be risky......................................................................................................... 83
Taking talent to the top..................................................................................................................... 87
A cooperative, evolving ecosystem........................................................................................ 89
Fairy godmothers.................................................................................................................................... 91
Social entrepreneurs are heralding the world to come....................................... 93
We are living through a paradigm shift.............................................................................. 95
We’re born scientists, yet so soon we forget................................................................. 97
Travel broadens the mind, both for the young
and those who stay young at heart...............................................................................102
Collective intelligence is more powerful than artificial
intelligence..........................................................................................................................................104
Where there is evolution, there is tension–and that’s normal.................106
Three idiots trying to dream up the future of education.................................107
“Know thyself”.........................................................................................................................................110
4. Before you can learn,

you have to unlearn....................................................................................113
Our brains will have us think the moon is made of green cheese...........116
The allegory of the “alle-gorilla”...........................................................................................117
342
SUMMARY
Notes
The power of cognitive biases..................................................................................................119

Popping our filter bubbles...........................................................................................................120
(Un)learn from experience...........................................................................................................122
In search of pleasure, happiness, and meaning........................................................124
Experimentation beats intuition............................................................................................126
Shedding your own ideologies.................................................................................................127
Learning to say “i don’t know”..................................................................................................130
I think like they do, therefore I am........................................................................................131
So many whys..........................................................................................................................................135
The fable of the blind men and the elephant.............................................................137
Getting out of your silo...................................................................................................................140
There’s no age requirement for interdisciplinarity..............................................142
Impatient patients..............................................................................................................................144
Social sci-entrepreneurs...............................................................................................................145
Serious games.........................................................................................................................................147
In favor of participatory science and citizen science.........................................149
Competence without ethics is only ruin of the soul............................................151
To flow or not to flow........................................................................................................................154
The teacher-researcher.................................................................................................................156
The singapore method....................................................................................................................158
Action-research.....................................................................................................................................159
1%.........................................................................................................................................................................161
Taking children seriously..............................................................................................................161
Confidence and transmission...................................................................................................164
“Trust us and expect more from us!”.................................................................................167
Unleashing children’s creative potential.......................................................................169
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world”...............................................171
When children search–and find..............................................................................................174
We never see what’s there; we only ever see what was useful
to see in the past.............................................................................................................................176
Errare humanum est.........................................................................................................................178
You said “new” teaching methods?.....................................................................................181
343
SUMMARY
Innovating for everyone or creating an elite?..........................................................184

Better acknowledgement............................................................................................................187
Getting away from hierarchy.....................................................................................................189
Thousands of hummingbirds....................................................................................................191
Humanizing the system.................................................................................................................192
Learning to learn..................................................................................................................................195
Humanity at the core........................................................................................................................198
Empathy in the education environment.........................................................................199
5. Learn to ask (yourself)

good questions.........................................................................................................201
From maieutic to “maieutech”.................................................................................................202
Knowledge and acknowledgement.....................................................................................204
Candles of knowledge and acknowledgement........................................................207
What “hands-on” can teach the bookworms...............................................................209
A map of possibilities.......................................................................................................................210
The monitorial system....................................................................................................................211
Wisdom of the crowd vs. collective stupidity............................................................212
Failing to move forward is moving backward............................................................213
On the shoulders of giants...........................................................................................................214
Unsolicited-studies majors.........................................................................................................215
More ugly ducklings...........................................................................................................................217
The cri: the crossroads of research interests............................................................222
The three freedoms of universities.....................................................................................224
Toward a project culture...............................................................................................................224
The mobile university.......................................................................................................................227
Open science.............................................................................................................................................229
Toward open-research communities................................................................................231
From open science to a learning society........................................................................234
Major challenges..................................................................................................................................235
Everyone’s a scientist.......................................................................................................................241
344
SUMMARY
Notes
Mentor-teacher......................................................................................................................................244
Making “mistakes” in order to survive...............................................................................247
Open platform for innovation and creativity...............................................................249
Learning to question yourself as an individual, learning
to question ourselves as a collective...........................................................................250
A learning planet festival.............................................................................................................254
Working on transitions to cope with transition.........................................................257
The best of all possible worlds................................................................................................263
For a “learning public service”.................................................................................................264
Making the future possible..........................................................................................................274
Predictive, preemptive, personalized, participatory...........................................276
6. A how-to guide
for a learning planet.................................................................................281
Conclusion.
Toward a more humane humanity............................291
Annex. CRI activities in 2020 ....................................................................................................297
Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................................311
Notes................................................................................................................................................................327
SUMMARY
In 1997, reigning world-chess champion Garry Kasparov lost in a match against IBM
supercomputer Deep Blue. “It is a depressing day for humankind in general,” noted
The Guardian. Twenty years later, Kasparov hammered the point home, saying,
“Unlike in the past, when machines replaced farm animals, manual labor, now they
are coming after people with college degrees.” Right now, we are living through a
major evolutionary transition. Developments in artificial intelligence and discoveries
in genetics are presenting challenges that our species has never had to face before.
How can we make sure that education and research keep pace in this rapidly evol-
ving world? What role do humans play in a world of machines? How can we work with
technology to develop both our individual abilities and our collective intelligence?
François Taddei makes a case for (r)evolution in knowledge. He takes us through the
inner workings of the brain—our best friend and at times worst enemy when it comes
to learning—and explores the best ways to start asking if not the right questions, then
at least good questions.
Taddei likewise calls on us to create learning societies in order to face the major tran-
sitions underway. He investigates ways we can learn with one another through coo-
peration, drawing on how living organisms have cooperated since life began. Close to
home, this means creating learning communities and learning cities while on a global
scale he calls for the advent of a learning planet.
François Taddei is an engineer, biologist, and

researcher at the Inserm where he received the
Inserm Research Prize. He founded the Center
for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI)
in Paris for exploring new ways of learning,
teaching, and doing research. In April of 2018,
he submitted to the French government a plan to
cocreate a learning society.
SUMMARY

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FRANÇOIS TADDEI

© Version française, Calmann-Lévy, 2018

Translated from French

1. Why will we learn differently

2. What i’ve learned............................................................................................ 55

3. New ways of teaching.......................................................................... 79

4. Before you can learn,

5. Learn to ask (yourself)

Annex. CRI activities in 2020 ....................................................................................................297

Where are we going? I couldn’t tell you any more than

Who knows? Perhaps humans will in fact be able

I had just gotten to sleep after a long night of jetlagged

year of attacks; I was 19 and going to college there. In

been convinced I was out buying shoes at the World

what should we do? Migrate to another planet? Face the

and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in central Paris, I felt once

profoundly and rapidly changing the outlook of my task.

Aristotle said there were three types of knowledge:

and political action as in our individual behavior as

all living organisms learn

Since the first cell appeared, the complete set of genes of

But for billions of years, this genome remained unaware

successive forms of life increasingly e­laborate ways to

Thus the dominance of the human race is due primarily

knowledge. Or for those who feel “artificial” and “intel-

transition always creates conflict

These transitions–we could even say upheavals–are not

try to see if any slightly more complex molecules get

another’s point of view, but they can take up too much

cooperating and teaching

Within these societies, the next stage of evolution was

at the bacterial level. We see it, for example, when billions

night, you’ll have billions to work with when you return

The others help their sister or their mother reproduce

desert. As we all know, the sting of a scorpion is lethal,

the new frontiers of evolution

What will the next phase of evolution look like, when

Machines do not have consciousness, but they do have

enables direct brain-to-brain connections. The possibilities

eventually observed that the encoder rat adapted its cere-

As we see our current transition through, are we

and mentally repetitive tasks continue to be taken over

work. Indeed, their professions effectively disappeared

Similar worries are felt today. The most in-demand jobs

For those who have studied math, the total number of

technology wins in the long term

The legend demonstrates how difficult it is for us to

100 years for the Industrial Revolution to produce the

rethinking the foundations

Today’s cars are so full of electronic components and

impact artificial intelligence will have on the ways we live,

ethics and the future of intelligence

To put it simply, scientists know that, even if they’re still

selves? Can we program ethical standards into robots? If

an ethical debate should precede such a project rather

viruses are always one step ahead

Their next frontier is in developing brain-machine inter-

are broken into by hackers who steal the protected data

researchers started coming to my lab from backgrounds

successive forms of life increasingly elaborate ways to