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Elon Musk Establishes a Grade School
HughPickens.com writes with news that Elon Musk has established "Ad Astra," a small, private school for grade-school-age kids. His goal for the school is to eliminate actual differences between the grades. The school had only 14 students for the past year, but will likely expand to 20 next September. Musk says, "It's important to teach problem solving, or teach to the problem and not the tools." As an example, he says teaching kids about tools should be more about taking an engine apart and learning about neccessary tools as the need arises, rather than just dumping information on them about a bunch of tools in an abstract way. "Musk's approach to delete grade level numbers and focus on aptitude may take the pressure off non-linear students and creates a more balanced assessment of ingenuity."
Elon just invented single teacher, country schools with low student numbers!
While I admire his ambition, any school system is going to improve if you bump the teacher/student ratio by a factor 2 or 3
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Honestly, with how important education is; it's probably better that it's more or less off the table. Let the educators teach, let the politicians do.. whatever it is they do.
When politics enters education, you wind up with things like "no child left behind'.
hard to see this as a PR stunt. he's revolutionized online payments, fired rockets into space and built the best car on the market (consumer reports + consumers)...don't think he needs the PR from a 20 person school.
i suspect he's just doing something that he thinks is cool and could help educate.
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Sounds like a prototype. It takes a lot of money and effort to make the first one that usually only works under ideal conditions. The next step is to make it work every time (or at least more than once). You certainly don't want to start out with 50M users because there might be a fatal flaw (i.e. every complex problem has an obvious, simple, and wrong solution). How would you begin a program that eliminates something as fundamental to US education as grade levels?
Honestly, with how important education is; it's probably better that it's more or less off the table. Let the educators teach, let the politicians do.. whatever it is they do.
Musk isn't a politician, and this isn't a new idea. The current, regimented-by-grade system was explicitly invented to train kids to be good little manufacturing workers (back when those were the bast jobs most people could get, it was a good enough plan). But before that, before we twisted the educational system into a manufacturing-job-training system, you didn't divide kids up by age like we do today.
The old way had the teacher directly teach the older kids an the age rage, who would then be responsible for teaching the younger kids themselves. This is a great system: you learn better through mentoring, you develop better critical thinking skills when the person teaching you is sometimes wrong, and you likely develop leadership skills along the way.
There may be a better system for the modern era, but the old-school (heh) system seems vastly better than what we have.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Some people might point to this as a good thing, but I disagree. When rich, influential people begin taking control over key aspects of our society, such as education, even small experiments like this run the risk of being trotted out as the antidote to all those evil government-run schools out there.
Look at political advertising pre- and post- Citizens United decision. Smart people can see though most BS that either side generates. However, the reality is that the masses are definitely swayed by political ads. Now, it's just a matter of who has the most money and can blanket people with their message. A lot of political advertising is "issue advertising" designed not to promote a candidate, but an ideology. Education sounds like a perfect place to get that message in early. (And yes, I'm aware that the conservatives will point out the evil liberal agenda that public schools have...anything that isn't American exceptionalism is an evil liberal plot.)
I'm not saying it would happen, but giving influential people access to educational institutions could just end up creating students in their own image.
The old way had the teacher directly teach the older kids an the age rage, who would then be responsible for teaching the younger kids themselves. This is a great system: you learn better through mentoring, you develop better critical thinking skills when the person teaching you is sometimes wrong, and you likely develop leadership skills along the way.
Having spent part of my time in a system set up like you describe... it's the *ABSOLUTELY WORST* thing you can do to a high achieving kid: take away their opportunity to reach even greater heights, in exchange for keeping them busy by becoming an unpaid teaching assistant.
Thankfully, it really didn't work out (having a 4th grader teach 6th graders math just gets that 4th grader beat up during lunch and after school), and they backed off eventually. Which was fine with me, because I was already working on calculus, organic chemistry, and college level reading that the bookmobile lady snuck me after doubling my number of books checked out quota over everyone elses.
If you want to go back to the "Little House On The Prairie"-style one room schoolhouse, good on you, but please do not drag high achieving kids back there with you, or worse try to "socialize them at their grade level", because I'm telling you, you might as well buy them a T-Shirt with a target on it.
Musk may not being anything new -- and he's really, reading the 3 articles, just describing Montessori with a couple of tweaks, like taking the grade level away -- but at least at his school I don't think you'd be holding back those who are able to vastly outpace the slower learners.