Education & Elon Musk's School Startup
One of my “later in life” goals has always been to start my own school. A “School Startup” rather than a Startup School, if you will. The school would be radically different than traditional education. Charter schools, Montessori education, and AltSchool are steps in the right direction but don't go far enough. (See my post a year ago on mental model education as an example.)
Once again, Elon Musk has stolen my idea. Running two revolutionary billion-dollar companies just wasn’t enough. But of all the people who have and will try something like this, I think Musk has much higher odds of pulling it off. (Then again, the same could be said about a lot of undertakings...)
I hadn’t seen this news before, but Eric Jorgensen linked to a video from a May interview with Beijing News where Musk discusses creating Ad Astra, a private school in L.A for his 5 kids and 15 or so others (primarily kids of SpaceX employees).
“I created a little school,” Musk began. “It's small, it's only got 14 kids now and it will have 20 kids in September. It's called ‘Ad Astra’ which means ‘to the stars.’” He continues:
What's a bit different from most other schools is that there aren't any grades — there's no grade 1, grade 2, grade 3 type of thing — and not making all the children go in the same grade at the same time like an assembly line. Because some people love English, or languages, some people love math, some people like music, and have different abilities at different times. It makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities. So that's one principle.
Another is that it's important to teach problem solving -- or teach to the problem, not to the tools. . . . Let's say you're trying to teach people about how engines work. A more traditional approach would be to say we're going to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenches, and you're going to have a course on screwdrivers, a course on wrenches . . . A much better way would be like "Here's the engine, now let's take it apart. How are we going to take it apart? Oh, you need a screwdriver. That's what the screwdriver is for. You need a wrench -- that's what the wrench is for. And then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of the tools becomes apparent.
I think the problem solving aspect is key. Having kids work alone or in teams to solve problems, with a teacher to guide and review after. As they get older, using a "case study" approach to learning can supplement this as a way to learn multidisciplinary mental models.
Imagine learning about the space race in the 1960s. For 1 or 2 weeks students can learn (through a mixture of lectures, media, internet research, experimentation, etc.) about a whole range of disciplines: history of the space race & cold war tensions, politics, math & science of getting to space, reading chapters of "The Right Stuff", engineering by building model rockets, and so on.
I'm sure there are schools/teachers who already do this but I wish it was the norm rather than the exception.