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.
Another Muskian educational innovation is having “all the children go through the same grade at the same time, like an assembly line”. It seems he is pleased with how his assembly line has been going, as he has plans to open a university – probably one where students will learn to fight what he has described as the “woke mind virus”.
Musk isn’t the first celebrity to dabble in education. A bespoke school seems to be the new status symbol, with Mark Zuckerberg, Will Smith, Pitbull and Oprah Winfrey all trying their hand at educational endeavours.
Many of these schools, however, have been a lesson in how not to approach teaching. Kanye West’s controversial Donda Academy, for example, where reportedly kids could eat only sushi and had to sit on the floor, has been the subject of numerous lawsuits.
WeGrow, a $42,000-a-year vanity project posing as a private school launched by Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, and his wife, Rebekah, didn’t fare much better. It abruptly shut down around the same time WeWork imploded. Still, there are plans for it to relaunch as Student of Life for Life, or SOLFL, pronounced “soulful”. Which sounds OLFL, pronounced “awful”.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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