WeWork’s kindergarten is a social disaster

Ok kids, first nap time. Then Jayden is going to build a for-profit API to disrupt the Nicaraguan wool industry.

Rebekah Neumann, the co-founder of $20 billion shared-office firm WeWork, wants to encourage kids to be “conscious” entrepreneurs. “There’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” she told Bloomberg last month, placing her among the tech industry’s growing clique of self-satirists.

WeGrow will open next year at WeWork’s Manhattan office, enrolling 65 children from preschool though fourth grade. Regular school, Neumann thinks, kills creative spirit. She can have this view and not be ridiculed, because she’s rich.

These are things Neumann will have in common with WeGrow’s first students. The school will be for-profit, with yearly tuition running at $36,000: impossible for those living on anything near New York City’s median income of $50,711.

CityLab has written excellently on how WeGrow’s language of altruism veils an insidious and damaging philosophy that deems public good a byproduct of profit.

It also degrades entrepreneurialism as a function of a meritocratic society, placing it out of the reach of ordinary schmucks who must toil away at un-entrepreneurial — and by extension worthless — careers.

Neumann won’t mind. She comes from the same entitled band of Silicon Valley pseudo-libertarians who revel in “hacking”…