You know Musk’s mindset: If he doesn’t like something, he builds his own versions — cars, rockets, highways, energy companies. Musk replied: “

Elon Musk Disliked His Kids’ Schools — So He Started His Own

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2021-05-30 10:30:05

You know Musk’s mindset: If he doesn’t like something, he builds his own versions — cars, rockets, highways, energy companies.

Musk replied: “I just didn’t see the regular schools weren’t doing the things I thought should be done. I thought, let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school would be better.”

In 2014, Elon Musk asked Josh Dahn, a former Teach for All Fellow and his kid’s teacher at the time, if he’d start a better school with him at SpaceX. Dahn agreed. The school Ad Astra, Latin for ‘to the stars,’ was born.

Musk reimagined education on First Principles thinking: boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there instead of reasoning by analogy.

Instead of accepting the prices of rockets, Musk asked himself, “What’s a rocket made of?” He listed the components and calculated the costs. He found that raw materials were nearly 100 times cheaper. He decided to build his own rockets instead of buying some.

Regular schools batch children by age, assuming it’s is the most important denominator. Traditional school systems expect students of the same age to learn at the same speed. Musk disagrees with age segregation:

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