Absolutely nothing could go wrong with the most wealthy running the education system
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Elon Musk as educator
- Thread starter MoireBass
- Start date
I'm absolutely no fan of Musk. What's in question here, though, is not him running the education system, but him endowing a private school/university. That's a venerable tradition; a great many US private schools, colleges and universities bear the names of their tycoon donors, people who often are forgotten except in the names of the schools they launched. Not many people today know much about Leland Stanford, Elihu Yale, or John and Moses Brown, though Andrew Carnegie and John and Andrew Mellon may be slightly better known. If anything, I'd take it - cautiously - as a positive sign, that one of our contemporary tycoons might actually launch a project for the common good like that.
"Cautiously," though, because I don't have a whole lot of confidence in Musk to carry this off well. He may be good at tech and entrepreneurship; that doesn't make him good at everything, and he doesn't seem the type to really grasp what's needed for a great educational institution. The same attitude that makes a tech innovator successful, the conviction that their doodad is the "wave of the future" and breaking the mold of existing ways of doing things, can also lead to a very narrow-minded focus on their own preoccupations, and difficulty taking into account the rich diversity of views, experiences, methodologies and disciplines that make for a thriving learning community. The whole concept of the term "university" is precisely that universality - that it brings together in one institution so many different pursuits and approaches.
I cringe a little at the prospect of STEM-focused schools like the primary/secondary school that's reportedly supposed to grow into a university here. Two reasons for the cringe; one is that I'm an historian and narrow-minded obsession with STEM education can undercut valuable humanities education, that IMO are absolutely essential to cultivating a lifelong learning attitude and general humane understanding of life.
The other is that, when I was in grad school, I taught Latin in a charter school (this was early 2000s). I believed in the vision of that school and in the potential of the charter school movement to improve education with greater flexibility and variety. However, when I learned more about how the movement was actually playing out, I became more skeptical. An overwhelming proportion of the schools were sponsored by tech companies, and - surprise surprise - dedicated to the premise that what students needed was MORE TECH! in their learning. These tech charter schools (which I think were something like 80-90% of the institutions founded) hired fewer teachers and bought more computers and software than conventional schools, with NO actual evidence that this was a formula that led to better-educated students. The whole thing began to smell to me like a scheme to funnel taxpayer dollars into captive markets for the tech companies' products.
All in all, there's too little information to be able to tell what the prospects are for this new project of Musk's. It could be a useless vanity institution, it could be a for-profit scam passing itself off as a school, it could be a high- but narrow-minded vision that won't deliver what Musk imagines it will, it could be an odd little niche of the American education world that does its niche thing just fine, or it could actually become a meaningful and viable institution of learning. Wait and see.
I had to double check, but he has degrees in Physics and Economics - not Engineering.
A charlatan that started with daddy's money and has done a good job convincing people he is some kind of visionary and not just a narcissist infantile a-hole. And yeah, this was my opinion way before the twitter/etc debacle. The guy's a charlatan, but a hefty percentage of our population seems attracted to these types, with their agendas and overly simplistic world view/solution for everything. I view him more as a symptom than the actual disease.
It'll probably work out about as well as Kanye's/Yeezus's/Ye's/Whatever-The-Hell-He-Calls-Himself-These-Days "Donda Academy"...
No. What's really scary and weird is so many people wanting to see an education project fail. Especially one that could help underprivileged but bright students.
He's certainly taught me that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Well, he was successful at a couple of things, surely he can be successful at everything, right? And surely he knows how everything should be?
Those of you with Teslas, don't forget to take it in for the recall!
Those of you with Teslas, don't forget to take it in for the recall!
This is an excellent post.
My quick take on this is that it's an experiment. It might succeed or it might fail, or something in between.
Wait and see is right.
At the risk of making a political statement, the last thing this world needs is a whole bunch of unaccountable Mini-Musks going around thinking they run the place (IMHO).
Indeed. Autonomous safety-critical software is regulated and certified for a reason - something that is frequently lost on folks that prefer to mark their own homework!
I don't know where this idea comes from that Musk started off by inheriting his wealth, but it's completely untrue. He came from a middle class family and made his fortune after graduating college and starting up his own software company with a small bit of borrowed capital.
Actually, I do know where this idea comes from. Because of the latest fad of petty sociopolitical reasons, it's cool to despise Elon Musk and certain other well known individuals who say things that offend the wrong people. Those individuals then get their reputations tarnished, often by exaggerations or lies if enough real dirt can't be dug up from their past.
I'm no fan boy of Musk, but it's pretty obvious that he's angered a lot of people for having the audacity to alter the way Twitter operates and therefore he must be professionally and personally destroyed.
The guy is to electric cars what Henry Ford was to the automobile itself, while at the same time leading the world at building commercially viable rockets for space travel, beating out many state government sponsored programs in innovation.
If you don't like the guy for whatever reason, then fine. But to label him a "charlatan" is just bizarre. @hrodbert696 said it pretty well. We don't know if the abilities that made him successful with electric cars or space rockets will translate into success at teaching. But maybe it would be wise to withhold judgement on the eventual outcome until we see actual results.
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I don’t think anyone would wish for a school to fail. But it’s safe to assume a self-imagineered school disconnected from normalcy will have its hurdles.
It’s not as if he’s going to trust his teaching staff to do their jobs any more than he trusts his engineers.
You make a good point. Musk's two biggest challenges will be
1) Translating his personal aptitude for technological innovation into teaching students how to succeed on their own after they graduate.
2) Finding the right balance between making your own ideas part of the school's teaching model, and letting your school's teachers and staff run the school with some autonomy.
This is a blinding gloss of what Musk has done since buying Twitter. Musk's actions at Twitter/X have demonstrated plainly that he is NOT a genius, unless tanking a company's value by billions of dollars and losing users in droves is genius (maybe it is, I'm sure he's going to take a massive tax write-off).
I guess you haven’t seen the Tesla truck yet, but given it’s stealth design cues, maybe it’s just flying under the radar.
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It's going to date really quickly, like a brutalist DeLorean, but it's supposedly pretty good.
I’ve little doubt it will be a great EV, but when was the last time you heard a pickup fanatic say they didn’t care how their truck looked.
Given I could not care less about styling of rolling cages, it’s a WHOGAS situation for me, but I’m the exception which proves the rule, so if if it’s cobby enough for me to think it’s goofy looking, your typical truck fetishist is going to gag when they see it.
slobake
resident ... something
Elon Musk's luck has finally run out
"Last month, Tesla threw a launch event to celebrate the delivery of 10 Cybertrucks. Ten. The least expensive model, priced at $60,000, will not be available until 2025, according to the company."
"Last month, Tesla threw a launch event to celebrate the delivery of 10 Cybertrucks. Ten. The least expensive model, priced at $60,000, will not be available until 2025, according to the company."
