Isegoria

I’ve mentioned Elon Musk’s Ad Astra school before, and now word is slowly spreading:

Ad Astra has a lower profile than most start-ups in stealth mode. Its website is just a logo and an email address, and the school does not market itself to parents. Musk himself has said virtually nothing about Ad Astra, and both SpaceX and Ad Astra declined our requests for comment. Currently, the only glimpses of Ad Astra available to outsiders come from a 2017 webinar interview with the school’s principal (captured in an unlisted YouTube video) and recent public filings like the IRS document referenced above.

Despite this mystique, demand among families in Los Angeles is astronomical, says Christina Simon, author of Beyond the Brochure, a guide to private elementary schools in the city. “There are people who could afford any of the private schools in LA but want that school in particular,” she says. “It’s very much about Elon Musk and who he is.”

The last admissions cycle in 2017 saw up to 400 families visit in the hope of securing one of just a dozen open spots.

In December, an online application form purportedly for Ad Astra starting popping up in Los Angeles parenting forums and Facebook groups. The form asked for details of grades, test scores, and personal information about families, but it had no affiliation or contact listed.

“I talked to several parents who were going to take a chance and apply, even though it was impossible to verify that it was an Ad Astra application,” says Simon. “That’s the level of interest in this school. I cannot imagine that happening with any other school, public or private.”

The school is even mysterious within SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company that houses Ad Astra on its campus in the industrial neighborhood of Hawthorne. About half Ad Astra’s students are children of SpaceX employees, and the school is touted during recruiting, says Simon. “I’ve heard from various SpaceX families that they have tried and failed to get information about the school, even though they were told it was a benefit during the interview,” she says.

The lucky few who succeed in applying, pass a reasoning test, and are admitted ultimately enter a school quite unlike any other. For a start, Ad Astra’s location inside a working company is unconventional to say the least. “We started with eight kids in a really small conference room with transparent walls,” says Joshua Dahn, head of the school, speaking in conversation with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis last year. “Engineers [would] always come drop by and peek on it.”

That first year, Musk’s children accounted for nearly two thirds of the student body. “It was really small,” remembers Dahn. “Especially when five [students] from the same family… go on vacation and you have three kids [left].”

It is not unusual for parents to have a grassroots effort to build their own school, according to Nancy Hertzog, an educational psychology professor at University of Washington and an expert in gifted education. “But money talks in terms of how that school is directed and supported,” she says. “The worry would be, are these schools preventing kids from other populations getting in? Are there strict test scores, and can they support kids with disabilities?”

A non-discrimination policy quietly published in the Los Angeles Times in 2016 stated that Ad Astra does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but the document made no mention of disabilities.

Although Ad Astra now has dedicated classrooms and a chemistry lab at SpaceX, its start-up chic still includes whiteboard walls, a Mac laptop for every student, and food trucks for after-school sessions. These, like everything else at school including tuition, are paid for by Elon Musk. He gave Ad Astra $475,000 in both 2014 and 2015, according to the IRS document, and likely more in recent years as the school grew to 31 students.

“[Elon] is extraordinarily generous,” says Dahn. “And it allows us to take any kid that sort of fits… We don’t have unlimited resources but we have more resources than a traditional school.”

The anti-college is on the rise, Molly Worthen (Apostles of Reason) notes, in the New York Times:

A small band of students will travel to Sitka, Alaska, this month to help reinvent higher education. They won’t be taking online courses, or abandoning the humanities in favor of classes in business or STEM, or paying high tuition to fund the salaries of more Assistant Vice Provosts for Student Life. They represent a growing movement of students, teachers and reformers who are trying to compensate for mainstream higher education’s failure to help young people find a calling: to figure out what life is really for.

These students will read works by authors ranging from Plato and Herbert Marcuse to Tlingit writers. The point is to “develop and flex a more rigorous political imagination,” according to one course syllabus. They will take on 15 to 20 hours a week of manual labor in Sitka, and set their group’s rules on everything from curfews to cellphones. Last summer’s cohort discouraged the use of phones during class and service hours and ordered everyone to turn off the internet at 10 p.m.

This is Outer Coast, one of an expanding number of educational experiments born out of a deepening sense that mainstream American colleges are too expensive, too bureaucratic, too careerist and too intellectually fragmented to help students figure out their place in the universe and their moral obligations to fellow humans.

There are alternative colleges that replace traditional courses with personalized study; gap-year programs that combine quasi-monastic retreats with world travel; summer seminars devoted to clearing trails and reading philosophy. They aim to prove that it is possible to cultivate moral and existential self-confidence, without the Christian foundation that grounded Western universities until the mid-20th century. They seek to push back against the materialism and individualism that have saturated the secular left and right, all at an affordable price. It’s a tall order.

[...]

Outer Coast, founded in 2015, offers one partial solution. Bryden Sweeney-Taylor, who is 38, helped found the program in order to give young people a taste of the education he received at an older countercultural experiment, Deep Springs College, which was founded in 1917. Deep Springs — a tuition-free, highly selective two-year liberal arts college and working ranch near Death Valley in California — combines intense study, manual labor and intimate community to give students “a sense of the purpose of education not just being for oneself but for something larger than one’s self,” Mr. Sweeney-Taylor told me.

Outer Coast — which was co-founded by Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, an Alaskan who dropped out of Yale to serve in the Alaska Legislature — plans to eventually expand into a two-year undergraduate program. The aim is to recruit Alaska Natives and other students from underrepresented backgrounds, but also to develop a program that reformers elsewhere might copy — which means “being as financially lean and economically efficient as possible, creating a replicable model for these micro-institutions,” Mr. Sweeney-Taylor said.

[...]

After graduating from Yale in 2010, Ms. Marcus founded a Deep Springs-style program for women: the Arete Project, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. She has recently opened a second, coed program in rural Alaska.

The Arete Project — the Greek word means “excellence” in the broadest sense — calls itself “education for citizenship, stewardship and leadership.” It operates on a “pay what you can” model and bans alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and recreational drugs. The project began as a summer seminar with plans to grow into a yearlong undergraduate program (participants can earn college credit). Like Outer Coast, it immerses a small group of students in the demands of self-governance, study and manual labor. Students read a mix of “classical texts and contemporary texts,” Ms. Marcus said.

The curriculum has been a source of contention. “Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man,” she told me. Moreover, romanticizing the pursuit of the pure “life of the mind” risks alienating working-class students. “For organizations that want to be accessible to students in all walks of life, as we do, that means having some kind of value proposition that translates into other parts of their life.”

[...]

A second set of new programs — the humanist individualists — owe more to the experiments of the counterculture era: schools like Evergreen State College, founded in Olympia, Wash., in 1967; Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, founded soon after; or the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded in Boulder, Colo., in 1974 by the poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. These schools combined an interest in Eastern spirituality with the principles of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement, which emphasized the goodness in all humans and their gift for self-actualization.

In the 1960s, psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers challenged the dark, animalistic portrait of human beings advanced by behavioral psychologists and disciples of Freud — not to mention the grim vision of original sin in traditional Christian theology. Their ideas caught on among educators at a time when students were already in revolt against traditional curriculums. The result was the further collapse of eroding general education requirements in favor of radical student choice, which may have felt empowering in the short term, but added more confusion and doubt to universities’ sense of mission.

[...]

The trends that inspired Kresge and Evergreen State have only accelerated. Michelle Jones taught organizational behavior for 15 years in mainstream academic institutions, and in that time “higher ed became more of a business — all the administrators, all the K.P.I.s” (key performance indicators) “all detached from student experience,” she told me. After she got tenure, she said, “I paused to reflect, and I said, ‘I don’t think this is the job I thought it was going to be.’ ”

In 2015, she founded Wayfinding Academy in Portland, Ore., which offers a two-year associate degree in “self and society.” The curriculum is less conventionally academic than those of Outer Coast or the Arete Project, and more personalized.

Students shape their coursework with tutor-counselors called guides. They receive narrative evaluations instead of grades and design independent projects that help them learn “what it takes to do something epic” and how to “find their way back to their purpose when they feel lost,” according to a syllabus for a course on “Making Good Choices.” In that class, assigned readings and videos ranged from interviews with Noam Chomsky to a handout on “Anti-Oppressive Facilitation for Democratic Process” by a group called the Aorta cooperative.

University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves:

The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.

Before you tsk-tsk today’s kids for their lack of bookishness, note that the trend lines are sliding southward for graduate students and faculty members, too: down 61 percent and 46 percent, respectively, at UVA. Overall, across its entire network of libraries, UVA circulated 525,000 books during the 2007–08 school year, but last year there were only 188,000 loans — nearly 1,000 fewer books checked out a day. The Association of Research Libraries’ aggregated statistics show a steady decrease of the same proportion across its membership, even as student enrollment at these universities has grown substantially.

Maybe students aren’t checking the books out but are still consulting them regularly within the library? This also does not appear to be true. Many libraries also track such in-house uses, by tallying the books that need to be reshelved, and the trends are the same. At my library at Northeastern University, undergraduate circulations declined 50 percent from 2013 to 2017 — before we decided to do our own book relocation — and our logged number of books removed from shelves but not checked out also dropped by half.

[...]

A positive way of looking at these changes is that we are witnessing a Great Sorting within the library, a matching of different kinds of scholarly uses with the right media, formats, and locations. Books that are in high demand; or that benefit from physical manifestations, such as art books and musical scores; or that are rare or require careful, full engagement, might be better off in centralized places on campus. But multiple copies of common books, those that can be consulted quickly online or are needed only once a decade, or that are now largely replaced by digital forms, can be stored off site and made available quickly on demand, which reduces costs for libraries and also allows them to more easily share books among institutions in a network. Importantly, this also closes the gap between elite institutions such as Yale and the much larger number of colleges with more modest collections.

David Epstein’s The Sports Gene was excellent. In Range he argues for generalism and against specialization:

I do find the Tiger Woods story incredibly compelling; there is a reason it may be the most famous tale of development ever. Even if you don’t know the details, you’ve probably absorbed the gist.

Woods was 7 months old when his father gave him a putter, which he dragged around in his circular baby-walker. At 2, he showed off his drive on national television. By 21, he was the best golfer in the world. There were, to be sure, personal and professional bumps along the way, but in April he became the second-oldest player ever to win the Masters. Woods’s tale spawned an early-specialization industry.

And yet, I knew that his path was not the only way to the top.

Consider Roger Federer. Just a year before Woods won this most recent Masters, Federer, at 36, became the oldest tennis player ever to be ranked No. 1 in the world. But as a child, Federer was not solely focused on tennis. He dabbled in skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding and squash. He played basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis and soccer (and badminton over his neighbor’s fence). Federer later credited the variety of sports with developing his athleticism and coordination.

While Tiger’s story is much better known, when sports scientists study top athletes, they find that the Roger pattern is the standard. Athletes who go on to become elite usually have a “sampling period.” They try a variety of sports, gain a breadth of general skills, learn about their own abilities and proclivities, and delay specializing until later than their peers who plateau at lower levels. The way to develop the best 20-year-old athlete, it turns out, is not the same as the way to make the best 10-year-old athlete.

The same pattern holds in other fields.

I’ve mentioned Minerva University a few times here. Arnold Kling calls it an experiment in centrally planned education:

I can applaud Minerva as an “existence proof” that it is possible to create a viable alternative to the standard university as it exists today. But I am concerned that Minerva’s emphasis on a highly-designed approach might give students the misleading impression that central planning is the best form of social organization.

Minerva started from a clear vision of how students should emerge from college. This vision included four core competencies, which were:

• Thinking critically
• Thinking creatively
• Communicating effectively
• Interacting effectively (page 24)

These core competencies were then broken down into dozens of what Minerva calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” each of which is given a hashtag abbreviation.

Habits of mind are cognitive skills that with practice come to be triggered automatically. (page 25, emphasis in original)

Foundational concepts are fundamental knowledge that is broadly applicable. (page 26, emphasis in original)

Two examples of habits of mind are:

Understand and use the emotional tools of persuasion. #emotionalpersuasion

Mitigate the role of conformity in group settings. #conformity (page 387)

Two examples of foundational concepts are:

Apply and interpret measures of correlation; distinguish correlation and causation. #correlation (page 381)

Identify ways that multiple causes interact to produce complex effects #multiplecauses (page 382)

The terms “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts” are examples of what I call Minerva-speak, a language that pervades the book. Another element of Minerva-speak is “far transfer.”

Far transfer occurs when students apply what they have learned in one context to a situation in a different time and place, one that, on the surface, does not resemble the original context. Far transfer is at the epicenter of what makes education effective. (page 51)

Another element of Minerva-speak is “active learning.”

Active learning requires students to engage with the material, relying on such activities as debate, role-playing, and group problem-solving. Active learning leads students to comprehend and retain much more information than do lectures. (page 135)

At most universities, it is up to each faculty member to design and implement a course. At Minerva, these processes are directed consciously from the center.

A Minerva syllabus is unusually detailed, often running to more than twenty single-spaced printed pages for a fifteen-week semester… As the author works through these details, he or she is able to discuss individual elements—everything from the overall summary of the course to the specific rubric descriptions used to evaluate student work on individual learning outcomes—with the course reviewer via discussion threads directly anchored to that element for context.

Once the reviewer is satisfied with the draft of the syllabus, Course Builder produces a shareable [document], which the course reviewer sends to an external reviewer for feedback, which the course author and reviewer later incorporate into the draft. (page 223)

Classes are conducted seminar style, albeit by computer conference rather than in person. Minerva uses a “radically flipped classroom,” with students expected to learn material, including what would be covered in lectures at other institutions, on their own before class. Class time is used for discussions and group problem-solving exercises that are carefully planned by the faculty in advance. Although there is room for spontaneity within these exercises, there is a lot of central control over what takes place in the classroom. Weekly meetings are held with all instructors teaching a particular course, in which they review the lesson plans to be used in advance.

Again, these lesson plans are pre-packaged and approved before the course even begins.

I think it’s fair to say that central planning is a bête noir of Kling’s, and the Minerva-speak is largely jargon they did not themselves create.