Why Don’t Millionaires Send Their Children to School ?

Many of you may have noticed that over the last few years, millionaires and billionaires around the world are doing something unusual. No, they aren’t just reading a lot of books, buying private planes, or yachts. They’ve always been doing that; these aren’t new things.

The new trend is that they’re no longer relying on their country’s traditional education system for their children. They’re taking charge of their children’s education themselves.

You all probably know Peter Thiel, one of the most well-known venture capitalists and a part of the PayPal Mafia. And his fellowship, known as the Thiel Fellowship, has seen people like Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, emerge from it. Peter Thiel is considered one of the most significant figures on the internet, to the point that Silicon Valley might not have existed without him. Thiel educates his own child and doesn’t send them to school. If it was just Peter Thiel, one might say he’s mad, but that’s not the case. Grant Cardone educates his own children. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, does the same.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, who also educates his children.

This list is long!

Very few millionaires or high-net-worth individuals rely on the traditional school system for their children.

Around 2015-2016, Elon Musk joined this list. While many other millionaires and billionaires are homeschooling their children, perhaps in a small office or a room in their house.

Elon Musk didn’t follow this model. In 2014, he started a school called Ad Astra.

At this school, Musk educates his own children, the children of his friends, and the children of SpaceX employees.

The question is, why?

Why don’t millionaires and billionaires trust the traditional school system?

What can we learn from this?

The first reason is the school model.

We all know, from our common sense, and the whole world now agrees, that memorisation is not as effective as we thought.

Once, when paper was rare, and people lived in caves, they had to write information on stones or cave walls.

Gradually, people passed down knowledge through stories, and at that time, memorisation was important .

Then paper was invented but memorisation still remained essential because not everyone could read or write.

There were different languages, and few educated individuals.

In today’s world, if we try to judge school children based on their memorisation skills, it’s foolish. It makes no sense.

Would you want your child to memorise information that’s available in just two searches?

Another question arises here.

Are schools or teachers that ignorant?

Don’t they realise that rote learning has little value?

Don’t they see that memorising and regurgitating for exams doesn’t lead to actual learning?

They do!

But measuring someone’s ability to memorise is one of the simplest ways to assess them against others.

If schools moved away from a rote-learning-based system, it would be difficult to measure so many children, and the traditional schooling model would collapse.

Many schools, even though they understand, can’t do anything because it’s hard for them to assess on such a large scale.

Again, many people have no choice but to send their children to government or private schools, but millionaires and billionaires have options, so they don’t.

Another reason is that research shows schools are no longer preparing children for the future.

There was a time when information changed slowly, allowing time to create curriculum to adjust to it, making the education system effective.

However, that’s no longer the case. Information changes rapidly, and by the time a curriculum is adjusted, the information has already moved on. The world has shifted to blockchain and AI, but we’re still teaching how to work in Excel.

By the time we reach blockchain and AI, the world will have moved on to biotech, telepathy, and who knows what else.

Schools can never catch up because they’re always behind due to bureaucracy, while technology moves far faster.

So logically, it’s not the school’s fault. They can’t teach what hasn’t been discovered yet.

So, Millionaires and Billionaires are opening their own schools because they’ve lost faith in the traditional school system.

Now, even in their schools, what are they actually teaching?

If we understand this, we can understand what we should focus on for our children or ourselves.

Almost all of these schools, whether it’s Musk’s, Bezos’, Zuckerberg’s, or Thiel’s, focus on six main subjects.

Four of them are obvious: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—STEM. None of them ignore STEM education, and they unanimously agree that without STEM, one cannot survive in the future.

Alongside these, they’ve added two more subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. It’s assumed that the future will be an era of AI and Robotics.

So, if you want to prepare your child—or even yourself—for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years, you cannot avoid AI and Robotics. The focus is not only on technology or STEM education but also on Art, as Art itself is considered essential.

If we focus on one particular thing, it’s First Principle-Based Knowledge. Increasing children’s ability to think independently, without external bias, has been a core focus. Different schools have designed their curriculums in various ways, tackling problems from different angles, but the main goal remains to ensure children can think independently.

Another fascinating aspect of Elon Musk’s school, Ad Astra, is that it solved a unique problem. In traditional schools, classes are age-based, but Musk believes classes should be skill-based, not age-based.

Today, I want to end with a question, directed at those who are studying or have children studying.

Do you believe that writing, as the highest form of Art, can grow the thinking ability necessary to discover a new technology for the future world?

Let’s talk again in next another Story…