Silicon Valley elites pay $75k a year to send their children to AI private schools as "guinea pigs."

According to Beating monitoring, in the United States, some affluent Silicon Valley families are beginning to completely move away from the traditional classroom model of “the teacher lectures, and the students listen.” At emerging private schools such as Alpha School, children no longer stare at a blackboard to learn; instead, every day they carry tablets, and AI software tailors courses for each person based on their learning progress. Real-life teachers at the school are effectively reduced to “daily coaches”—they do not deliver lessons, but instead handle discipline or provide psychological guidance when students get stuck. As long as they spend just 2 hours a day on core subjects such as math and reading, the rest of the time they can go to entrepreneurship workshops to work on projects or participate in sports. Another AI school, Forge Prep, goes even further: it encourages students to build a project portfolio by starting their own companies and developing products through hands-on work, instead of relying on end-of-term grading. It has even introduced an AI principal that can provide Q&A support for 24 hours a day.

But this forward-looking experiment has also drawn substantial skepticism. Parents pay $75,000 per year (about 540,000 RMB) to enroll their kids, but in practice they are using their own children as free pilot users for AI tutors that are still not mature. In the face of today’s sharply divided public opinion, Alpha School’s founder has chosen to avoid trouble by publicly announcing that the outline does not teach women’s rights, slavery history, or immigration history. Schools like Forge Prep are even more secretive about their teaching data—whether AI teaching is actually effective is something outsiders have no way of knowing.