Elon Musk pulled his kids out of school and just… built his own. Inside a rocket company. As you do. No grades. No standardized tests. Just real problems that need solving. The school was called Ad Astra — Latin for “to the stars.” Because of course it was. His argument is devastatingly simple: schools teach you the wrench, never the engine. You spend 12 years learning tools with zero context for why they matter. So your brain — which is literally wired to delete useless information — throws most of it away by graduation. That’s not a flaw in students. That’s a flaw in the design. And now we have AI — the greatest teaching tool ever built — and kids are using it to skip the thinking entirely. We didn’t get smarter. We got better at avoiding the hard part. The tool got a PhD. The education system is still handing out participation trophies.