This is exclusive video of Elon giving a lecture at his home in Bel-Air. Is everybody listening? He didn't think regular schools were doing a good enough job of preparing kids.
He’s a big proponent of teaching people to think based on First Principles, which is figuring out how things work by boiling them down to the basics. For example, it used to be that people thought a radical improvement in rocketry was impossible. Space agencies and private companies tried to build reusable rockets but failed.
The only one that “kind of” worked was NASA’s space shuttle - but the cost of refurbishing the boosters by fishing them out of the ocean was so great that it didn’t make sense. You look at what others are doing. And say, ‘Well, others didn’t make it work, so therefore it doesn’t work.
’ That has no basis in reality. A first principles foundational approach would be to say, ‘Let’s look at the physics and economics of a rocket,’ and say, ‘If we can analyze the physics of the rocket, is it physically possible? ’ First principles thinking would break down the cost of the rocket’s materials and figure out how to reassemble the materials to produce a more affordable rocket…which is SpaceX’s mission.
Ad Astra school originally began out of SpaceX’s rocket facility in Hawthorne, California, to teach Elon’s own children and the kids of some employees. Then it moved to his house for a couple of years, the one that formerly belonged to Gene Wilder. Elon was a guest lecturer.
The teacher who helped create the curriculum was Josh Dahn. Hi Josh Hi Cindy Dahn taught one of Elon’s sons at a private school for gifted children in LA. The SpaceX CEO then approached him to start an experimental school at his rocket factory.
If Elon’s directive was to make the school great. Okay, what does great look like? It looked like a totally different experience than a typical school.
Instead of classes in languages, music, or sports, kids focused on critical thinking, solving the types of problems SpaceX employees tackle. Imagine how the grid fin can be redesigned. He’s referring to the fins that come down when the Falcon 9 lands.
Could you imagine other designs and how would you know if those designs would be more efficacious than the designs that are currently being used. The lesson of first principles is to not be bound by what’s already been done. You don’t have to create grid fins of the same design, size, or material.
You can even go back to the drawing board completely and imagine something totally different that could direct a descending rocket. Can something other than grid fins be better for the successor to the Falcon 9, Starship? There were also questions related to Tesla, as students had exposure to Tesla’s design studio within SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory.
What could the supercharger network in a country where it doesn’t yet exist? What if you created a supercharger network in Argentina? There are many different ways to answer this question.
What Josh was looking for was the ability to reason. Centering superchargers around dense populations is a start. And then the question is, “Where do we go next?
” And the way that they reason through that is really interesting because then they’re seeing the multiple pathways they can approach. And one of the ways you can help them is to limit the number of superchargers they can build. So if you can only build 50 superchargers in the country of Argentina for that first year, where would those 50 be?
This is some high-level thinking at a young age. It’s remarkable what kids are capable of when you give them opportunities where they have decisions to make. Josh now runs Synthesis, an online program applying the same type of thinking at Elon’s school.
Students from around the world strategize in teams as a way to mirror collaboration in real life. We’ll start the first game in about five minutes. Although the students are as young as eight, the problems they have to answer are difficult even for adults.
For example: Imagine that rocket travel is as normal as plane travel. If you had to choose one future, which would it be: Traveling to anywhere on Earth within an hour Going sightseeing on the moon Or 3), starting a city on Mars Again, there’s no right or wrong answer. But the idea is to start wondering which will come first, and which one will change human life on earth most?
It’s about figuring out what the future will look like. And then, building that future. In the way that Tesla is looking to disrupt transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry, Elon is reimagining the future of education.
Although his original private school is no longer running, he’s opened up another Ad Astra school at SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas, with a few dozen students. Will this type of education produce the next, great entrepreneur? There are many ways to learn that can be more effective than sitting in a classroom.
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