In 2014, according to what reported, Musk brought his children out of the Marman elite school in Los Angeles and recruited one of their teachers to help him build an alternative school not linked for conventional curriculum standards. Astra students studied nuclear chemistry in middle schools, completed independent engineering projects and listened to lessons from successful technological managers among classes. Kierra Wang, who claims to have attended Astra’s middle school simultaneously with Musk’s triplets, recalls having entered hackathon at a university level in third grade. He attributed to Astra that he had given her not only the knowledge to compete with children much older than her, but also the “gall and trust” to lie about her age to enter.
With Astra, Musk became a first pioneer in the emerging microschooling movement. Vaguely defined as schools with less than 150 students, microschools often operate for profit and outside the regulatory paintings that regulate traditional public schools. According to a rand estimate of 2024, somewhere between 750,000 and 2.1 million students in the United States are educated in some form of microschool. Silicon Valley is playing a fundamental role.
Since he has had more children, Musk has expanded his educational imprint, financing a company led by a company based in California called Xplor Education to create a Montessori style school in Bastrop, Texas, where different Musk companies are located. His efforts contributed to inspiring other members of the technological elite to follow the example. Xplor also contributed to opening a Montessori nursery school on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, who is largely owned by Larry Ellison, the co -founder billionaire of Oracle. A Lanai club said Ellison’s children are registered there.
In 2023 the investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, according to what reported, went on stage to the exclusive Sun Valley conference in Idaho to solicit the maximum technological weights at their children’s house. The CEO of Openi Sam Altman and the co -founder of Angellist Naval Ravikant have contributed to financing alternative education companies.
Even the billionaires on the liberal part of the political spectrum, such as the co -founder of Netflix Reed Hastings and the Microsoft co -founder Bill Gates, have established themselves as the main donors in the movement of the school of the school, which aims to redirect the tax dollars in addition to the options in addition to traditional public schools. (They would be wise to try to learn from the efforts of other tycoons, such as those of Mark Zuckerberg Attempt from $ 100 million To reform the public school system in Newark, New Jersey or the Imminent shuttering Of the two schools in the Bay of San Francisco he helped to open low -income families)
The push for educational alternatives appeals to the parents of Silicon Valley at different levels. Many are self -taught that have fought with the social expectations of a traditional school environment. Others looked at the shoulders of their children during the Zoom school of the Covidid era and did not like what they saw. The technological elites that have become increasingly alienated by the so -called “awakened” culture have started looking for new options that felt more politically and culturally aligned.
Silicon Valley’s parents are looking at traditional educational institutions and think: “This is ridiculous. Why should we do things in the old way?” Michael Strong, the founder of the alternative education program The Socratic Experience, says. He explains that many believe that their children with a high level are retained by rigid curricula that do not allow accelerated learning. “The idea is that if children can learn faster in two hours, why not?” He says strong.
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