Elon Musk is opening another school. Expect a very un-woke curriculum | Arwa Mahdawi
Wednesday 7th August 2024
The billionaire has been obsessed with education since pulling his kids out of ‘regular school’ 10 years ago. And he’s far from the only celebrity to dabble
If you are not quite ready to stick one of Elon Musk’s chips into your brain, you can do the next best thing: send your child to the billionaire’s experimental new school. Applications are open for Ad Astra, which serves kids aged three to nine in Bastrop, Texas, close to one of SpaceX’s facilities. There is space for only 48 students, which, once you factor in Musk’s many offspring, means competition to be part of the “next generation of innovators” is tight.
While this is a new campus, Musk’s experiment with education goes back a decade. In 2014, the tech magnate pulled five of his children out of their prestigious private school in Los Angeles and stuck them in a SpaceX conference room with a few of his colleagues’ kids and a tutor. In a 2015 interview, Musk explained that he didn’t like the way “regular schools” were run and he wanted to try out his far superior ideas. These included a curriculum that involved battling robots with flame-throwers, but no music, sports or languages; computers will do all these things in the future.
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