At the very moment when Russian parents finally breathed a sigh of relief after learning that children were returning to normal education, and residents of many other countries were still waiting with hope for the opening of children’s educational institutions, at the online school Astra Nova School, which grew out of the one created by Elon Musk Ad Astra School, the selection of students for the 2021/22 academic year was ending.
Any child from 8 to 14 years old could try to enter Astra Nova, which some experts call a breakthrough in the American education system – no matter from which part of the world he sent his answers, what his IQ level and what school he attended before. And it’s for good reason: Musk, the father of six children, five of whom are school age, is known for his negative attitude towards the American education system.
In numerous interviews and speeches, he has said many times that the current test system is disastrous, as is the curriculum for compulsory subjects, which he considers outdated. “Teachers do not explain why children study this or that subject. And is it important. And only by disassembling the engine and assembling it back, you learn everything about keys, screwdrivers and other tools, you understand their meaning, “he said at the ISS R&D conference in 2017.
From school to Youtube
In 2014, Musk opened the Ad Astra School on one of SpaceX’s campuses, where his children and the children of some of his company’s employees studied. The main principles of the school are the absence of division into classes (everyone studies together, each student has his own strengths, so even a 14-year-old teenager can use the advice of an eight-year-old), teamwork, the development of strategic thinking, the use of gaming platforms that turn routine activities into fun the process of cognition and accumulation of experience, disciplines other than recruitment in ordinary American schools, the possibility of their choice (no one forces the student to attend subjects that are not interesting to him), a specific assessment system (points are awarded for the work done, but do not matter for the end of the semester), an attempt explain the essence of things, and not simple memorization (“why?” and “why?” – the main questions in the learning process). In the first year, Ad Astra had eight students, by the end of 2019 there were already 50 people, of which only half were family members of SpaceX employees. The tuition was free, which made this school even more attractive.
$ 31.5 thousand
will cost an annual course of study (five days a week for 6 hours a day) at Astra Nova
Six years of funding the school and observing the progress and results of the educational process allowed Musk to start saying more radical things. “You don’t need college to study,” he said at the 2020 Satelite conference. And in February this year, in an audio chat at Clubrooms, when asked about his children, he said that they mainly studied through YouTube and Reddit: “Lessons too were, but judging by the amount of time they have spent online, most of their education comes from the Internet. “
“Elon Musk is not a teacher and never will be,” says Mikhail Mokrinsky, director of the Russian school Letovo, founded by Rusagro’s owner Vadim Moshkovich. – As a product developer, he has the right to say: I want to rebuild the education system like this. And he has the right to formulate a maximalist slogan, to indicate the direction of movement. But then it is already time to expect answers from technologists and teachers, whether his ideas are correct, whether it is possible to implement them, to what extent it is real and when. Ad Astra, like many other private schools, look at the education system as visionaries, ideologists. In fact, their approach triggers other challenges, rethinking learning priorities and finding answers to new questions. “
From Ad Astra to Astra Nova
When the time of the Ad Astra School experiment came to an end, it was time to bring the product to market. This is how Astra Nova School appeared – an online school, the first recruitment of students to which took place in the fall of 2020. True, Musk himself no longer has a direct relationship to it – he made only an initial donation to open it. But the first persons in the school administration are still the same. This, for example, is Joshua Don – the ideologist of the “new system”, director of Ad Astra and the creator of the Synthetis platform, with the help of which students on simulators solve problems that are not at all childish (for example, they compete with other teams of two or three people in successful space exploration). Astra Nova also continues its collaboration with ClassDojo, which has developed puzzle videos that encourage children to think globally and calculate the consequences of their steps.
Take the Dinosaur Conandrum exercise, for example. In the desert, a dinosaur skeleton was found, a species that has not yet been encountered. Which business solution will be more effective in terms of benefits and benefits? Maybe it is worth building a museum nearby, which will attract tourists to the desert and allow the excavation to continue? Or is it better to take the skeleton to the scientists at the research center? But then no one but them will see the dinosaur. Or maybe you should send the skeleton to the Dinosaurus Universe adventure park, where tens of thousands of tourists come? Or sell the skeleton to a private collector, and use the proceeds to create copies of it and send it to all interested museums? In such problems, there is no one correct answer, any of the options has the right to exist, you just need to choose your own path and justify why it is the best.
The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, played an important role in the fact that training at Astra Nova will take place exclusively online. This segment is growing very rapidly: according to research by TalentTech, Netology and EdMarket, in 2019 the worldwide online education market was estimated at $ 6.5 trillion and by 2025, according to the forecast, should have reached the level of $ 8 trillion , however, already in 2020 due to the coronavirus, it grew by an impressive 60%. But the point, of course, is not only the growth rate. The online format makes it easy to unite talented children from all over the world at school and offer them not so much an alternative education as completely different life skills that are so important in a rapidly changing world.
“I think that going online is not a solution to a good life,” Mokrinsky argues. – Let’s imagine three types of schools. An ideal offline school with great teachers, great kids, and a great learning situation. The same ideal online school – with the same teachers and the same children, but with all the variety of virtual possibilities. And the third type of school – with the ability for all the same participants in the educational process to cross the boundaries of the worlds, go from offline to online and back. I think the reaction in case of such a choice would be unambiguous: we want to cross the boundaries of the worlds and use the advantages of each of them. And it is on this principle that the schools of the future will be built. The combination of online and offline is strategically correct forever. “
From algebra to magic
Not everyone can afford to study at Astra Nova. An annual course (five days a week for 6 hours a day) will cost parents $ 31,500. For $ 7,500, you can take a course only on Fridays (6 hours a day, four compulsory subjects are included in the course and one or two to choose from). Finally, there is a special session for $ 2,250 – once a month, on Saturdays, for 3 hours. The list of disciplines changes every year, in 2020/21 the curriculum includes: algebra, geometry, chemistry, astronomy, rocket science, robotics, bioethics, neurobiology, work with literary texts, Shakespearean studies, poetry, design, applied statistics based on 3DM (Data-Driven-Decision Making), Synthetis platform, informatics (Html, CS, artificial intelligence, VR). There is also a magic course (whatever that means).
The high cost of studying at Astra Nova caused a negative reaction from many – they say, the online school, in theory, should be more accessible. But this school is not going to become a mass product, in its plans, rather, the creation of a kind of brotherhood of like-minded people, more prepared than other peers to solve complex problems.
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