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. I
mean if somebody graduated from a great university 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, everything is available basically for free you can learn
anything you want for free.

It is not a question of learning there is a value that colleges have which is

like you know seeing whether somebody's can somebody work hard at something
including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their
homework assignments, and kind of soldier through and get it done you know
that's like the main value of college. And then also you know 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 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 look at like you
know Gates is a pretty smart guy he dropped out, 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.
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 September, it's called Ad Astra which
means to the stars. That's maybe a bit different from most other schools, is that
there aren't any grades 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. Because some people love English or languages, some
people love math some people love music. 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 problem solving
or teach to the problem not the tools. So this would be like, let's say you're trying
to teach people about 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 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, or
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. 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 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 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. Exactly I mean it's actually kind of funny like if
you think you're like what is education like, you're basically downloading data and
algorithms into your brain and 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 process of learning the better. Like for my kids I do not have to
encourage them to play video games. I have to like pry them from their hands like
crack and I think unfortunately like a lot of education is very bored brilliant.
You've got 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 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. 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. 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 purpose so I think that's pretty
important, 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. The analogy I sometimes use is like, you've seen like
batman like the Chris Nolan movie like the recent one and it's pretty freaking
awesome right. And you've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple
takes, amazing actors, and great sound. And it's very it's very engaging, but 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. 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 sewn costumes and jumping across
the stage and not getting their lines quite right and not really looking like you
know the people in the movie and no special effects. I mean that would suck. It
would be terrible. That’s education. 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 subject, allow people to progress at
the fastest pace that they can or interested in each subject. It seems like a really
obvious thing. I think like most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville, as a result
just 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 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 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'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,
Science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it's
an assembly line. 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, just sort of
get dumped into math and like, well why are you learning math, what's the point
of this. It seems like 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'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, I better remember it. 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.