Elon Musk’s Incredible Speech on the Education System | Eye Opening Video on Education

there's no need even to have a college degree at all or even high school the i mean if somebody graduated from a great university that may be an indeed that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it's not necessarily the case you know if you look at say people like bill gates or larry ellison steve jobs these guys didn't graduate from college but if you had a chance to hire them of course that would be a good idea so you know just looking just for evidence of exceptional ability and

if there's a track record of exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue into the future well first of all you don't need college learning learn stuff okay everything is available basically for free you can learn anything you want for free it is not a question of learning um there there is a value that colleges have which is like you know seeing whether somebody's is can somebody work hard at something including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments uh and and kind of soldier through and and get

it done you know that's that's like the main value of college and then also you know if you you if you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce so i think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning i want to make sure tesla recruiting does not have anything that says requires university because that's absurd but there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability like you just can't if you're

trying to do something exceptional they must have evidence of exceptional ability i don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability in fact ideally you dropped out and did something i mean obviously you know you look at like you know gates is a pretty smart guy he dropped out uh jobs pretty smart he dropped out you know larry ellison smart guy he dropped out like obviously not needed did shakespeare even go to college probably not so how would you educate your five boys actually i created a little school yeah what kind of school could you

subscribe to us sure it's i mean it's small it's only got 14 kids now and it'll have 20 kids in in september it's called ad astra which means to the stars that's maybe a bit different from from most other schools is that there aren't any grades there's no there's no like not grade one grade two grade three type of thing and making all the children go and in the same grade at the same time like an assembly line um you know because some people love english or languages some people love math some people love music

and uh and different abilities different times it makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities i think that's one principle another is that it's important to teach teach problem solving or teach to the problem not to the tools so this would be like let's say um you're trying to teach people about uh how engines work or you know you could start by a more traditional approach would be to say we're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches and and you're gonna have a course on screwdrivers or caution wrenches

and all these things and it's this is a very difficult way to do it a much better way would be like here's the engine now let's take it apart how we're gonna take it apart oh you need a screwdriver that's what the screwdriver is for you need a wrench that's what the wrench is for and then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of the tools becomes apparent so we are five boys in that school yes until when this is from pre-school so far it's only one year old they like it they

like it yeah and you want to keep them away from regular schools no i just didn't see that the regular schools just they weren't doing the things that i thought should be done like you know those two principles they weren't uh adhering to those principles so i thought well let's see what we can do maybe creating a school will be better and i actually hired a teacher from the school they were at who also agreed with me that there was a better way to do it seems to be going pretty well i mean the kids

really love going to school i think that's a a good sign you know i mean i hated going to school when i was a kid it was torture so the fact that they like they actually think vacations are too long like they want to go back to school wow yeah exactly i mean it's actually kind of funny like like um you know if you think you're like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education because like it shouldn't be like this huge

chore like the more you can gamify the uh the process of learning the better like for my kids i do not have to encourage them to play video games yeah okay i have to like pry them from their hands like like crack and i think unfortunately like a lot of education is very bored brilliant um you've got uh you know someone's standing up there kind of lecturing at people and they've done the same lecture 20 years in a row and they're not very excited about it and that lack of enthusiasm you know is conveyed to

the students that they're not very excited about it they don't know why they're there like why are we learning this stuff we don't even know why um in fact i think a lot of things people learn probably there's no point in learning them um because they never use them in the future well we have to say like people i think don't stand back and say well why are we teaching people these things and we should tell them probably why we're teaching these things because a lot of kids just in school kind of puzzled as to

why they're there and i think if you can explain the why of things then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation and they understand they understand purpose so i think that's pretty important uh and just make it entertaining but i think just in general like conventional education should be massively overhauled and i'm sure you very much agree with that but it's a it's like i mean the analogy i i sometimes use is like you've seen like batman like like the chris nolan movie like the recent one and it's pretty freaking awesome right um and

you've got incredible special effects great script multiple takes amazing actors and great sound and it's very it's very engaging um but if if you were to instead say okay that even if you had the same script so at least it's the same script and you said okay now that script instead of having movies where we're gonna have that script performed by the local town troop okay and and so every in every small town america if movies didn't exist they would have to then recreate the dark knight right you know with like home like home sewn

costumes and like you know jumping across the stage and not not getting their lines quite right and not really looking like you know the people in in in the movie and and no special effects i mean that would suck [Music] be [Music] [Laughter] generally you want education to be like as close to a video game as possible like a good video game like you do not need to tell your kid to play video games they will play video games on autopilot all day so if you can make it interactive and engaging then then you can

make education far more compelling and far easier to do so you really want to disconnect the whole grade level through the thing from the subjects allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or interested in in each subject [Music] it seems like a really obvious thing um i mean i think like most teaching today is is a lot like vaudeville where um and and as a result just not not that compelling it's like somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row they're

not necessarily all that engaged or in doing it a university education is often unnecessary that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people but um i i think you probably learn about as much or the vast majority what you're gonna learn there in the first two years and most of it is from your classmates now for a lot of companies they they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for um someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end and and that's actually what what's important to them

so it really depends on what somebody's goal is if the goal is to start a company i would say no point in finishing college so i think that's how it should be and it shouldn't be that you've got like these grades where people move in lockstep and so everyone goes through you know goes like normally you know we'll go through english math uh science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it's an assembly line but but people are not objects on an assembly line that's a ridiculous notion they're

definitely some good schools out there but i think the some of the mistakes at least in my opinion that i see being made in education is that the teachers do not explain why kids are being taught a subject um you know just sort of get dumped into math and like well why are you learning math what's the point of this it seems like some you know for some people like maybe it's like i don't know why i'm being asked to do these strange problems but you know the why of things is extremely important because you

know our brain has evolved to not to discard information that it thinks is has no relevance so then if on the one hand you you're being asked to memorize or learn say formulas but you don't not know why this is the case then you have this cognitive dissonance of it seems irrelevant but i'm being told to remember it so i'll be punished so so i better remember it but so the why of things is very important and picking kind of a problem and then using various educational tools to solve that problem like using math or

physics or economics to solve that problem is far more engaging than teaching the tools