Last week, I have attended the 50th anniversary of the Creation Industrielle departement of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliques et Metiers d' Art in Paris - the first design school I have studied back in the last century. Sadly, everything is still in the last century from education to facilities to organization. For those of you that are not familiar with the French education system, it is free. And that's the problem. How can you compete in an international market with no budget?

The students are smart and they have potential but they are being ripped off.
They are being ripped off by a mafia of teachers that have been there forever and are totally out of touch of today's needs and skills;
They are being ripped off by the French Education ministry, which is not enabling its most valuable resources to be competitive in a global market;
They are being ripped off by the French design industry (if that exists) for not pressuring design schools to change their curriculum to meet today's needs.

French design education needs to change from a "star designer" mindset and craft skills training to a multi-diciplinary user-centered design process and entrepreneurship/leadership mindset.

Back to the event. Note to the organizer. When you gather 500 alumini that have graduated from 1956 to today, the least you can do to give people name tags to facilitate discussions. Isn't the point of such event to get people to "meet" and do business together? Obviously it was not. Instead, they decided to give us a 1-hour lecture on French design! FFS. Luckily Anne Asensio (Director of Advanced Design at GM) gave a rather inspiring concluding 15 minutes talk, which was really difficult to hear due to the poor acoustic of the hall...

Concluding thoughts? After attending several events at UIAH in Helsinki and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, I can't help thinking that French design education and schools are obsolete.