It was back in 2015 when Elon Musk first spoke about the “secretive Ad Astra School” that he had launched. He was speaking to Beijing Television when he let a few details slip:

“There aren’t any grades,” Musk said, explaining that instead of treating school like an assembly line “it makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities.”

You see, he had already pulled his five kids out their prestigious school for gifted children in 2014 and he, along with a few other families, put their kids into Ad Astra – which is Latin for “to the stars”. Obviously.

And so far, they have all remained tight-lipped, explains Business Insider:

 The school has no public website, phone number, or reference of the administrators and teachers who work at the school.

But then came Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

He recently took a tour of the school and shared its ethos:

Diamandis’ unique access to Ad Astra is likely due to the fact that Musk sits on the board of trustees of X Prize.

“One element that is persistent in that small school of 31 kids is the conversation about ethics and morals, a conversation manifested by debating real-world scenarios that our kids may one day face,” Diamandis, wrote for the Huffington Post.

He went on to give an example of a question that teachers posed to students:

“Here’s an example of the sort of gameplay/roleplay that I heard about at Ad Astra, that might be implemented in a module on morals and ethics. Imagine a small town on a lake, in which the majority of the town is employed by a single factory. But that factory has been polluting the lake and killing all the life. What do you do? It’s posed that shutting down the factory would mean that everyone loses their jobs. On the other hand, keeping the factory open means the lake is destroyed and the lake dies. This kind of regular and routine conversation/gameplay allows the children to see the world in a critically important fashion.”

And if you know Musk – intimately, in my dreams – you know those lines of moral and ethical reckoning isn’t uncommon.

Perhaps it’s time we implemented such exercises in our Life Orientation curriculum, if it’s even still a thing.

[source:businessinsider]