Elon Musk learning method

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 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 um so i think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning 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 john was pretty smart he dropped out you know larry ellison smart guy he dropped out like obviously not needed 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 three thing from the subjects allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or interested in in each subject it seems like a really obvious thing i mean i think like most teaching today is is a lot like vaudeville where um and it's and as a result it's 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 do you agree

with peter thiel about the unnecessariness of university higher education a university education is often unnecessary that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people but i i think you probably learn about as much or the vast majority what you're going to 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 someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end 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 uh college um 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 uh but but people are not objects on an assembly line that's a ridiculous

notion 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 um 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 i know um you know because some people love english or languages some people love math some people love music and and different abilities different times it makes more sense to 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 a more traditional

approach would be to say we're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches and and you're going to 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 going to 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 um and then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of

the tools because 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 um so the fact that they like they actually think vacations are too long like they want to go back to school wow yeah exactly weird i 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 tour like the more you can gamify the uh the process of learning the better like and i think unfortunately like a lot of education is very bored billion um you've got uh someone standing up there kind of lecturing at people um 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 because they never use them in the future you