Reading this article, I couldn’t help but think of a song from “Camelot,” called “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” about Royalty speculating on how the peasants amuse themselves when they are feeling down. In the last stanza, Richard Burton and Julie Andrews agree that the simple folk sit around and wonder what the Royalty do.
What do the billionaires do when they educate their own children?
Elon Musk invented a school for his children.
In a corner of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company’s usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs.
Those at Ad Astra still find time for a quick game of dodgeball at lunch, however, because the average age within this group is just 10 years old.
Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk’s sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his sons’ teachers, the CEO founded Ad Astra to “exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences,” according to a previously unreported document filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“I just didn’t see that the regular schools were doing the things that I thought should be done,” he told a Chinese TV station in 2015. “So I thought, well let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better.”
In an atmosphere closer to a venture capital incubator than a traditional school, today’s Ad Astra students undertake challenging technical projects, trade using their own currency, and can opt out of subjects they don’t enjoy. Children from 7 to 14 years old work together in teams, with few formal assessments and no grades handed out.
Ad Astra’s principal hopes that the school will revolutionize education in the same way Tesla has disrupted transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry. But as Musk’s sons near graduation age, the future of Ad Astra is unclear. Will Musk maintain interest in the school once his children move on? And even if he does, can a school of fewer than 40 students ever be anything more than a high-tech crèche for already-privileged children?
Read on. If money is no object…the first things to go are grades and tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Funny You Should Mention It (FYSMI), some years ago I created a Facebook page for exploring variations on that theme —
☞ I Wonder What The Unco Rich Are Doing With Our Money Tonight
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Project based learning is real learning. Musk has a good idea that will engage “selected” students that reflect Musk’s own proclivities including “some of Musk’s more idiosyncratic views. The school says it has a “heavy emphasis” on science, math, engineering and ethics.” While these are all legitimate subjects, the humanities and social sciences fall short. With a myriad of topics addressed, the school runs the risk of producing semi-educated dilettantes. I do not believe Musk is interested enough to try to make his school scalable, but it would be fantastic if, as Diane suggests, if he spoke out against testing.
My son attended a magnet school that emphasized project learning, but it also stressed competing for grades through testing. The school had a longer school day and year, and students could select from a variety of electives in addition to the regular academic subjects. All students were required to do an in depth year long senior project and work under the guidance of a mentor. My son’s project was with the Riverkeepers. During they year he collected water samples from the Hackensack River and brought them over to Pace University for analysis. He then wrote up a plan to remediate conditions in the water and shared it with representatives in New Jersey where I doubt it had much impact. My son enjoyed the project, and it taught him how to organize and analyze data. The highlight of the year was he got to meet RFK, Jr. at Pace.
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“The school says it has a “heavy emphasis” on science, math, engineering and ethics.” While these are all legitimate subjects, the humanities and social sciences fall short.” — maybe, maybe not, how do you know? Maybe he wants to combine humanities with quantitative sciences via something like science fiction? Five hundred years ago it was normal to be a mathematician and a poet. These are not mutually exclusive. 150 years ago everyone was enamored by Jules Verne’s stories.
From MSNBC:
“At age 14, Musk was a book-loving teenager struggling to find a sense of purpose. Grappling with the meaning of life, the preteen read philosophy books usually reserved for college students, including titles by Arthur Schopenhauer.
“You should not read books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer at age 14,” Musk told journalist Alison van Diggelen. “It is bad; it’s really negative.”
He turned to science fiction instead, picking up Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “
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I’m not sure if this school is the best idea, but it could be a start in the right direction. At least Elon is using his own children as the experiment and keeping it small. As for allowing children to opt out of certain learning?…..well, I have a problem with that as I believe that every child should have a well rounded education so that they become better citizens.
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Wealthy people have the right to set up a home-school, just like everybody else. See Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925)
I wish him well.
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This is an unpopular opinion, but I’m on a school committee and I think parent’s opinions about how schools should be are not in any way reliable as good advice.
I’m frankly shocked at the number of REALLY bad ideas I hear from parents. Ideas that are unfair to any students but their own, gimmicky. unworkable in a public setting with open enrollment or just clueless. I’ve heard everything from recess all day to a strictly Bible based curriculum with paddling.
Running a public system based on what 50 million different people think is a perfect fit for their child seems to me to be a recipe for disaster.
A lot of our parents were themselves terrible students, and I don’t think this is unusual in working and middle class schools. There’s a lot of blaming the school and the teachers and some of it seems to go back to their own childhoods. It’s not your household, a public school. It has to accommodate more than your child. It has larger goals than whether you’re “happy” at any given moment in the child’s school career. I mean, it’s NICE if you’re happy but if you’re demanding things that are not good for students then maybe that can’t be accommodated. Maybe it shouldn’t be, Maybe you’re wrong and you have bad ideas.
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I’ve worked with many parents over the years. Some were sophisticated and savvy about education. My mostly poor, barely educated parents were wonderfully supportive, but they had no idea about our education system. They were very trusting and lovely, but they came with their own notions about school. For example, I had a Haitian parent that offered to flog his naughty son in front of the whole school. We politely declined his offer and told him flogging is illegal. Then, he told us we were being too weak as flogging would teach children who the boss is.
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I am glad that we school boards, legislatures,etc, to “sort out” the varying opinions and desires of the parents/citizens. I was a bit shocked, to hear that a parent would go to a school board/committee meeting, and request a Bible-based curriculum, with paddling. WOW!
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What do you mean “we”? Are you on a school board?
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My mistake! I should have typed “I am glad that we HAVE school boards,legislatures,etc”. I have never been on a school board.
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My middle son was a poor student. He’s grown now and fine- he took a trade and he’s good with his hands and he likes his job, but I have to say I got better advice from his teachers than my opinions at the time. I thought they were coddling him and he was snowing them and he SHOULD have been as good at academics as his older siblings were and teachers told me he was really struggling and it wasn’t laziness.
They were right. I’m glad no one let me run the school. I was wrong about my own kid. I can’t imagine how badly I would have done if I had been in charge of all of them.
I think some humility from parents is in order, and way overdue. Maybe people who do this work year after year actually know something and my opinions are just that- opinions.
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Yes, in the real world you’re never tested or graded. Companies and corporations never put pressure on you to perform and pay raises are just handed out no matter what. Do the kids get a participation award for breathing also?
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Employers do not give written tests or grades, true. That’s the point of doing away with them in schools.
It is the product, the work, the quality of relating with others to accomplish common goals that matters in the workplace and life. That is why standardized tests and letter grades should be discarded.
Assessment based on performance toward goals, clearly established in a rubric for each project, course, or system, more closely parallels the real world. States adopt academic standards, most of which are similar across the nation, that experts believe every learner should master.
Project based learning is designed to build towards achieving those standards in smaller bites. Assessment of each project reveals what concepts, skills, and abilities have been mastered and to what level. Those that still need work can be emphasized in subsequent projects.
Allowing learners say in what they study, what is relevant to them, brings a commitment, a desire, to learn. Creative, VERY hard-working educators build all the necessary skills and various content areas (including arts, humanities, social sciences…) into their lessons. People learn voraciously and naturally because they WANT to or NEED to. Watch infants and pre-schoolers. How many people have been stymied from learning what they were capable of – from being the best they could be – because the joy of learning, that self-driven hunger, was beaten out of them by testing, letter grades, and irrelevant subject matter?
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Watch infants and pre-schoolers. How many people have been stymied from learning what they were capable of – from being the best they could be – because the joy of learning, that self-driven hunger, was beaten out of them by testing, letter grades, and irrelevant subject matter?”
I’m not sure rubrics make it any better. Most of them are thinly disguised rankings, the text almost identical except for qualifiers that rank the activity/process/… to be ranked. So they use a few descriptive sentences to describe a letter grade. For young children, there is no need for adults to be telling them that they need to “color inside the lines better.” Let them find the joy in doing that needs no correction. When a certain quality of work becomes an essential element of “production,” then it is time to add an element of expert critique. I am a little tired of this push to always be preparing children for adult tasks when they haven’t even mastered the most basic of life activities.
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We spend a great deal of time with our children, and we don’t expect the public schools to be everything for our child. We ensure that our work with the children is meaningful and productive. I don’t spend anytime worrying about what rich people, charter schools, home schooling do, I worry about my own children and their education. The world is very unfair and no matter how well educated you are the rich will always have more opportunities than the average educated person. So I don’t really care about the rich who are responsible for taking away the rights of the average person.
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Using 40 high achieving students of privilege with well educated and supportive parents as a case study for revolutionizing education? The principal of Ad Astra needs to spend some time with low achieving, underprivileged students with single mothers struggling to get by. When you live and work in a bubble you lose sight of life’s much darker and desperate side. So pump the brakes on your revolution and focus on fixing an economy that fosters hopelessness in far too many Americans.
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Boy, am I with you, RATT. Just from my own experience, I know how easy it is to be intolerably provincial (me). Working in a low socio-economic community showed me a side of life that forced me to reexamine my own prejudices even I’m not sure quite what to do with that knowledge.
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cx: even if I’m not sure
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The reform movement is made up of mostly wealthy, white, and well educated non-educators. They are trying to fix problems that they do not understand. Smart, highly motivated children from affluent two parent families make any teacher look like a genius; they make innovative ideas like the Ad Astra school look like it will revolutionize education; they will jump through any hoop, complete every homework assignment, attend school every, pay close attention to instruction, and rarely ever misbehave – even in large classes.
Struggling students from dysfunctional single mother families living in crime ridden, drug infested, impoverished neighborhoods have lost all hope that education is the ticket out. Institutional racism, generational poverty and dependence, and a $7.25 minimum wage have destroyed all hope for too many. Education reform is not the answer when all hope is lost. But the economic reform, such as a massive jobs program providing meaningful work at a living wage, must come first. When there’s no reason to work hard in school, no light at the end of the K to 12 tunnel, why would you?
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I actually feel sorry for Musk’s children.
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