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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
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?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday June 29 2018, @02:40PM (9 children)
At least it's better than what certain other wealthy technocrats are doing. The Gates Foundation seems to exist primarily to make education more dependent on technology companies regardless of how effective the tech actually is. And unlike Musk, who is trying to make a school fit for his own kids, Gates is most interested in tinkering with kids so far beneath his class he will probably never be close enough to see the consequences.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @03:11PM (1 child)
IMHO, the one saving grace of Musk's school is that it's not available to very many people. So, unless something is working very well and gets shared, it's unlikely to have much of an impact on society at large the way that the Gates' foundation and the rest are.
Technology can be great for education, I'm going to an online college right now, but it can also be a huge hindrance to proper education when abused.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 29 2018, @06:13PM
As opposed to the daily abuse built into the public school systems in most countries, which exist mostly for the benefit of union teachers, and public indoctrination, while occasionally spotting a particularly bright child in time prevent soul crushing meritocracy from taking over, but also blindly breed such despondency and desperation that dozens commit suicide or mass murder?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday June 29 2018, @03:48PM (4 children)
I think Gates is the bigger visionary here. The Gates foundation is leveraging new technology to reach many more pupils on subjects previously unavailable to them.
Elon is demonstrating something already known: the ratio of teachers:students affects the quality of education. That, and hand picking the educator (and most likely doubling their salary) is pretty reliable at providing a quality education.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:00PM
I have serious issues with that. Technology doesn't automatically translate into better educational access. Books and audio recordings are just as easy to distribute as computer based instruction. One of my instructors when I was in college last time learned English primarily via books and a record player as it wasn't possible for the school she attended to get an actual teacher that was qualified to teach the subject in China at the time.
It really is true that technology applied to an efficient process makes it more efficient, but technology applied to an inefficient process makes it less efficient.
Technology at this point is nowhere near the point where Gates seems to think it is. A properly produced book and somebody to answer questions is still leaps and bounds above what technology can do. And in many cases, if the material in the book is properly broken down, you don't even need somebody to answer questions most of the time.
The main point of technology right now is to further undermine the pay that teachers receive. In the future, I have no doubt that technology will improve, but right now computer based courses have an abysmal pass rate. It's not uncommon for those MOOCs to have only a couple percentage of the students passing and for smaller courses, you're still talking about a substantially decreased pass rate. I know because I regularly work with those students and I wind up doing most of the work of teaching the content even though I'm supposed to just be assisting the students with what they've already learned.
In the future, technology will be crucial, but we're at least 10-20 years away from that point. At least for important subjects that most people need to learn. For niche topics like hobbies, computers are just fine.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday June 29 2018, @06:59PM (1 child)
My university education was much better than my grade school education and the student to teacher ratio there probably averaged 300 to 1.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @07:53PM
You're comparing apples and oranges. University level you expect students of a certain level who have already learned how to study for themselves. Lower grades many students require more one on one instruction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @08:04PM
From that WaPo article link:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 29 2018, @05:24PM
Always copying Apple, even in their charitable endeavors.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @07:55PM
Hot off the press!
Bill Gates Spent Hundreds of Millions of Dolalrs to Improve Teaching and it was a Bust [washingtonpost.com]