Educational Insights - Elon Musk

Elon Musk's views on education  Elon Musk started the "Ad Astra" school which came to be in high demand and which then converted to Astra Nova, an online school for students ages 10-14.

Elon Musk Wants To Revolutionise our Education

Most teaching today is a lot like Boredville. As a result, just not that compelling. It's like

somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you, and they've done the same lecture

several years in a row. They're not necessarily all that engaged.

People learn and are interested in different things at different paces. Some people love English or languages, some people love math, some people love music. And different abilities, different times.

You really want to disconnect the whole grade level thing from the subjects. Allow people to

progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in in each subject. From like fifth

grade to sixth grade to seventh grade. Like it's an assembly line. But people are not objects

on an assembly line. That's a ridiculous notion. That seems like a really obvious thing.

We generally want education to be like as close to a video game as possible. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling, far easier to do.

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. You could start by a more traditional approach. You would really say, "Well, we're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches." And you have a course on screwdrivers, a course on wrenches, and all these things. This is a very difficult way to do it.

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?" "Ah, 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 tools becomes apparent. When you see something like the Khan Academy and stuff like that,

it's probably going in the right direction.

Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I just wanted to give a huge shout out and thank you

to Elon Musk and everyone at the Musk Foundation for their incredibly generous support for

Khan Academy. They just recently gave a 5 million dollar donation to Khan Academy.

So, how would you educate your five boys? Actually, I created a little school. They liked it.

Going to keep them away from regular schools. No, I just didn't see the rigorous rules. They

weren't doing the things that I thought should be done.

You're maybe creating a school will be better. And I actually hired a teacher from the school

they were at who also agreed with me that there was a better way to do it. What kind of

school could you subscribe to? Sure, it's only got 14 kids now, and it'll have 20 kids in

September. It's called Ad Astra, which means "to the Stars."

That's maybe a bit different from most other schools. Is that there aren't any grades? There's

no like grade one, grade two, grade three type of thing. I'm making all the children go in the

same grade at the same time.

Do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessariness of university higher education?

I do agree with Peter's point that a university education is often unnecessary. That's not to

say it's unnecessary for all people, but you've probably learned about as much or the vast

majority of what you're going to learn there in the first two years. It introduces you to

concepts you would otherwise have to learn empirically. There are examples of successful

entrepreneurs who never graduated high school, those that have PhDs. So, I think the

important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is

in school.

A lot of companies, they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking

for someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end, and that's actually what's

important to them. So, it really depends on what somebody's goal is if the goal is to start a

company.

I would say, no point in finishing college. Any advice? What could we as citizens do? What

could the US government do to make this a better place, to support business, make America an

even better place to start a business?

And I think the United States is pretty great, honestly, definitely the best place in the world to start a business. I think certainly we need to take a look at our immigration laws. There are really talented people doing graduate courses in Engineering at our universities. We really don't want to send them home. We want to try to do everything we can to keep them here because for every one person who's like an ace engineer, there are probably like 10 jobs that will be created if that person stays here. It's a huge multiplier effect. And conversely, if you're missing that special ingredient, it's very difficult to create them.

I think you can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business, either in school or out of school. Schooling theory should help accelerate that process. But I think people can choose to be not ordinary. I think it's possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.