Elon Musk is opening a new school. Expect a very unwoke curriculum

IIf you’re not ready to get a microchip implanted in Elon Musk’s brain just yet, you can do the next best thing: send your child to the billionaire’s new experimental school. Applications are open for Ad Astra, which serves children ages three to nine in Bastrop, Texas, near one of SpaceX’s facilities. There’s only room for 48 students, which, considering Musk’s many descendants, means competition to be part of the “next generation of innovators” is fierce.

Although it’s a new campus, Musk’s education experience goes back a decade. In 2014, the tech mogul pulled five of his children out of their prestigious Los Angeles private school and put them in a conference room at SpaceX with some of his colleagues’ children and a tutor. In a 2015 interview, Musk explained that he didn’t like the way “traditional schools” were run and wanted to test his far superior ideas. Among them was a curriculum that involved battling robots with flamethrowers, but no music, sports, or languages; computers will do all that in the future.

Another of Musk’s educational innovations is to have “all the kids go through the same class at the same time, like an assembly line.” He seems pleased with how his assembly line is going, because he’s planning to open a university — presumably one where students will learn to combat what he’s described as the “awakened mind virus.”

Elon Musk isn’t the first celebrity to take an interest in education. Custom schools seem to be the new status symbol, with Mark Zuckerberg, Will Smith, Pitbull and Oprah Winfrey all getting involved in education.

Yet many of these schools have served as lessons in how to approach education. Kanye West’s controversial Donda Academy, for example, where children could only eat sushi and had to sit on the floor, was the subject of numerous lawsuits.

WeGrow, a $42,000-a-year vanity project masquerading as a private school started by WeWork founder Adam Neumann and his wife, Rebekah, hasn’t fared much better. It abruptly closed just as WeWork imploded. Still, there are plans to relaunch it as Student of Life for Life, or SOLFL, pronounced “soulful.” Which sounds like OLFL, pronounced “horrible.”