404 SCHOOL
An interview with Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky by Katerina Valiente.
Barcelona, 29 September 2026

— Why 404?

AG: Because when, instead of the usual hundreds of thousands of answers to a question, a search engine comes back with “No results found”, it at least makes things more interesting. And perhaps it means we have stumbled upon something important.
A “404 error” means that something used to be here but is no longer here; that the resource is unavailable, there is no route to it, or the information has, for some reason, been removed.
404 School is a course in restoring wholeness. It is made up of precisely those things that have been removed from our perception. A school for recovering what matters and has been lost.

NG: Besides, 404 is simply beautiful. A palindrome. A reversal. School — not-school — school.
The word school originally meant “free time”, “leisure” — the pursuit of an inner interest. And that, once upon a time — in Plato’s day, for instance — was exactly what a school was. Who could have imagined that the word would be turned so completely inside out, until it came to mean compulsory daily labour devoid of inner interest, supervised by professionals, punctuated by examinations, and culminating in a certificate confirming that your formatting is complete?
We are simply turning the idea back the right way round, restoring its original meaning.

— So you believe existing schools fail to answer the “big questions”?

AG: Exactly. They do not concern themselves at all with questions such as: What is life? What is consciousness? Love? Intelligence? Meaning? What is a human being? Why is a human being here — and how does one live up to that “why”?
There are not even any coherent definitions or criteria for these things — only euphemisms. As a result, people may be reasonably well prepared to perform uncomplicated practical functions, but existentially they remain ignorant, helpless and lost.

NG: For all the apparent diversity of its forms, the existing school system has no tools for dealing with any of this. It does not consider it part of its remit and does not venture into that territory.
Its business is to transmit knowledge and skills selected by somebody else because, at the time they were selected, they were considered useful.

— So 404 School won’t be teaching useful skills?

NG: Well, it is 404 School. From the system’s point of view, it is an error.
So no, it will not be teaching skills useful to the system that has brought us to our present civilisational and personal dead end. It does not compete with, overlap with or even touch the old educational system.
It exists precisely for what that system does not see at all.

— Such as?

AG: Half a century ago, a researcher called Blakemore conducted some rather cruel experiments on kittens. Newborn kittens were placed in a specially constructed environment — a cylinder containing everything except vertical lines.
When they grew up — apparently perfectly healthy — they were released into the ordinary world. And they kept smashing headlong into table legs, chair legs and so on. They simply could not see verticals. The perceptual apparatus required to do so had never developed.
A great many such “vertical supports” have been systematically removed from the perception and worldview of modern human beings. And with them, an entire dimension — the one that gives us height and depth — has been lost.
It is not that people have entirely lost the capacity to perceive it. Rather, the neural mechanisms responsible for this class of perception and knowledge have failed to develop because these “verticals” were never presented to them in childhood.
Without them, a person becomes — how shall I put it? — flattened.
Draw a circle on the floor and put them inside it, and it feels like an inescapable dead end. The possibility of moving not merely backwards or forwards, left or right, but in a third dimension — upwards or inwards — has never been activated. It is absent from consciousness and, naturally, absent as a skill.
Verticals pierce straight through the plane.

— Can you give some examples?

AG: We have identified around thirty such “lines”, with verifiable cultural and neural traces.
Among them are silence — both inner silence, which is constantly drowned out by preoccupation with oneself, and ordinary external silence, in which one can hear something other than the imposed noise filling the airwaves; “slow time” — the ability to live without deadlines, compulsory agendas and constant urgency; symbolic thought — the loss of which Mamardashvili called the great anthropological catastrophe; attention — the present generation of online scrollers can sustain it for roughly forty-five seconds, which is not enough even to follow the simplest chain of connections; meaning — in developed countries, the fear of a meaningless life has overtaken even the fear of death, while an overwhelming majority complain that their work is meaningless and demonstrate what is now called “quiet quitting”; the subjective and the invisible — I know I am hopelessly in love, and this something is the most important thing in the world to me, although “objectively” I neither can nor should have to prove it; faith and trust — not formal religiosity, but the kind of relationship with the world and with life without which one cannot enter deeply into a relationship or embark on a new undertaking; joy — which has been replaced by pleasure, although the two are of entirely different natures: pleasure can be delivered, administered, inflicted or received from outside, sexual pleasure included, while joy as a marker that one is living in accordance with oneself may be nowhere to be found; and responsibility as the author’s signature beneath one’s own life — a possibility that, in a society oriented towards an external locus of control and externally imposed values and bearings, appears positively scandalous, even heretical.
And another twenty or so “verticals” that form the architecture of a full human life. Flexible and alive, yet earthquake-resistant.

NG: Imagine a symphony orchestra. Every instrument has its own frequency and timbre. A good listener has polyphonic perception.
Now imagine that half the instruments are gradually removed from the orchestra. The musicians are not even thrown out — they are simply hidden behind an opaque, soundproof wall.
It is a kind of weeding-out of the range available to the listener. Two notes can still be heard, three have disappeared, the rest are indistinct.
Some of these losses took place over centuries. Most have cascaded through the system over the past three decades.

— Can all of this be recovered?

NG: In children, yes. You “simply” have to expose them to a complete environment — although that becomes more difficult with every passing year.
With “well-brought-up” adolescents and adults, it is harder. But at least partially, yes.
Partially — but enough to break out of the dead end.

— How do you intend to do that? Do you have a method?

AG: Yes. None of this can be restored through lectures, psychological counselling, orders or sermons.
A person has to extract it through themselves, through direct experience.
It is a treasure-hunting expedition. You have to tap the walls and floorboards around you until you discover hollow spaces behind them. Put your ear to the wall and hear that there is someone on the other side.
Our approach is based on experiences of precisely this kind: moments when a person feels that something beyond the ordinary is hidden within them, or is happening through them. When that happens, there is no mistaking it for anything else.
It is a programme of daily exercises through which each person assembles their own Cabinet of Curiosities.

NG: Every rule has its exceptions. Exceptions are inconvenient precisely because they are capable of forcing us to reconsider the rules.
That is why oddities, deviations and anomalies are either ignored or forbidden. Do not swim beyond the buoys.
But then you are condemned to swim only inside the buoys, leaving the entire ocean outside.
With a little help, anyone can discover exceptions within their own life. And if you do not turn away from them, you may discover that they are passages through the wall — wardrobes leading to Narnia. Into a single space that expands the familiar boundaries beyond comparison.

AG: That is our method: entering through the exceptions to the rules. Climbing over the fence for apples that grow somewhere else.
Every such expedition breaks a pattern and switches off the autopilot. A plank comes loose in the familiar decorative façade, opening a gap through which you glimpse something breathtaking.
And you know perfectly well that it is not a hallucination.

— For example?

AG: Peak experiences. Flashes of genius. Resourceful states. “Chance” coincidences. Spontaneous remissions. Extraordinary insight. Serendipity. Synesthesia. Decisions and actions that seem paradoxical to most people yet lead to breakthroughs in defiance of accepted algorithms and trends.
Our team has studied around thirty clusters of physical, intellectual, emotional and other capacities that radically alter our understanding of human nature and human possibility.
A cluster is not a single phenomenon but a class of events united by common characteristics and reliably verified.

— Miracles?

AG: The modern world does not believe in miracles.

We speak instead of rare, desirable events in which the means currently available to us do not allow us to trace a causal chain or observe the process by which the event occurs.
Such events are improbable and almost impossible to explain within our consensual model of reality. Yet everyone knows that they happen, and everyone has a collection of examples of their own.
We became interested in collecting them and seeing whether their probability could be increased.

NG: As for miracles… Obviously, a person who has access to certain bands of perception hidden from others also has access to aspects of reality that simply do not exist in those other people’s awareness.
Such a person interacts with the world and achieves a result by means incomprehensible to others. To them, it looks like magic, while the person appears either to be a fraud or an actual miracle-worker.
Until, that is, they open those channels in themselves.

— Are all these rare cases fundamentally different, or is there something that unites them?

AG: They are unquestionably connected — and therefore corroborate one another, like words in a crossword: with every new word, the others become easier to solve.
In all such cases, a person functions as an open system. For all their uniqueness, they are not sealed inside their own skin, alienated from everything and everyone, isolated and alone. They experience connection and interdependence.
Through all these vertical connections, they extend beyond themselves — into something incomparably larger.

— How long have you been building this collection?

AG: In 2008, largely for this very purpose, we founded the Dolphin Embassy — the first interspecies centre dedicated to direct interaction with some of the most highly developed bearers of consciousness on the planet: dolphins and whales.
In 2012, we set off on a round-the-world expedition called The Archaeology of Possibilities, searching for an antidote to degradation — the formula for an elixir, or a “Fifth Element”: the pattern, the invariant that distinguishes the most remarkable people and the most significant achievements across different traditions and cultures.
In 2019, we held the first NOW — Nature Of Wonders — Assembly in Delphi. It evolved into a permanent club bringing together 150 scientists, pioneers of breakthrough discoveries and practices, cultural figures and agents of change from twenty-five countries.
These are remarkably free people who do what they love and what they believe in, proving through their own way of thinking and way of life that it is possible to live at full height.

— Could you name a few?

AG: Ashok Khosla, former director of the UN Environment Programme, founder of Development Alternatives and co-president of the Club of Rome. Barry Kerzin, an American scientist and physician who is also a practising Buddhist monk and the Dalai Lama’s doctor. Giacomo Rizzolatti, the neurophysiologist who discovered mirror neurons — the mechanism underlying empathy and compassion. Jason Badridze, a biologist who spent two years living with a wolf family. Pablo Verón, the “Archangel of Tango”, the only person we know whose embodied motor intelligence is comparable to that of a dolphin. Jean Becchio, psychiatrist and creator of a method for activating consciousness. Gia Dvali, a quantum physicist who demonstrated that even inside a black hole information does not disappear but is rewritten onto another type of carrier.

NG: And from Russia: Alexander Asmolov, founder of the school of uncertainty and the psychology of dignity. Slava Polunin, the great trickster and founder of the Academy of Fools. Mikhail Kazinik, musician and educator, who plunges listeners of any age straight into the living current of what we call human culture.

— Will these people be teaching at the School?

NG: They will be part of the life of the School, whose approaches are based on their discoveries. They will give explosive seminars there, but more as provocateurs or catalysts than as teachers in the conventional sense.
How do you “teach” a sense of humour, the art of being in the minority, or creative inspiration? There is not very much to teach in the usual sense. It is more a matter of standing there, a catcher in the rye, while the children run about freely.
That attentive presence is itself a form of direct transmission — without which no initiation can take place.

AG: The modern school is a deadly serious institution. Seriousness and an unmanageable quantity of narrowly specialised “compulsory” information have displaced free play — the most effective means we have of discovering the diversity of life, testing the boundaries of reality and the rules by which it operates, forming relationships, and exploring our own strengths and inclinations.
Play has been pushed aside by “developmental activities” supervised by specialist experts. There is simply no time left for anything else.
This has changed — in fact, replaced — the entire substance of how a personality is formed.
Things that can only form from within, growing as all living things grow, are instead being manufactured through artificial external effort and instruction.
The result is a kind of roll-out lawn: convenient to use. Unroll it wherever you like, the flowers look almost real, and the main thing is not to dig underneath. There is nothing there. No soil — which means nothing unexpected can grow. Everything is under control.
404 School restores play as the construction of one’s own unique possible realities — not independently of the way the world is made, but in accordance and collaboration with it.

— All of this sounds rather radical.

AG: First, by now it is obvious to almost everyone that this train has reached the end of the line. There is nowhere left to lay the track. We need to get people out of the carriages — which are already rearing up — and find another way of moving.
Second, every new idea looks like heresy at first.
But there is actually very little that is new in ours. Rather than turning Plato’s school into a mantra, we might point to some perfectly contemporary models of living education: Peter Gray’s Free to Learn, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, Sir Ken Robinson’s work on transforming education.
All we have done is connect what turns out to be common to outstanding people across different cultures with the latest findings in neurophysiology.

— Are the School’s students children?

NG: Yes. “Become like little children.”
Roughly from nine to ninety-nine. Before that, they are still managing perfectly well on their own; after that, their picture of the world is probably fairly stable.
The difference is that with adult children you can openly propose exercises for restoring interaction with, for example… the invisible — with what neither the eye nor measuring instruments can see.
Like any form of exercise, these require conscious, independent action.
For children, you need to invent an irresistible form — a game called Hunters of the Invisible, perhaps.
The vertical bands are the same, so ideally these adventures can be undertaken by the whole family — simply at different levels of trust and scepticism.
Children still know that animals talk. Adults have a much harder time remembering it, so the children can help them.
That creates an entirely new level of intergenerational connection — a huge additional benefit of the programme.

— Does everything happen online?

AG: Not at all. This is a school of Natural Intelligence.
For us, the screen is simply a means of sending participants offline.
We meet to agree what we are looking for today and where; then we switch off the computer and fan out into real experience, each person living it for themselves.
One part screen to nine parts genuine field experiment. For most people today, life is structured in exactly the opposite proportion.
Discovering, bringing into focus and “growing” each vertical connection takes at least a week. An hour a day.
In the evening, you make an entry in your own expedition log. Not online as a post, but by hand in a notebook. A technical record, as in any ship’s log: where you were, what you saw, distance, wind, how you felt…
At the end of the week comes integration. Theory comes after practice — once a new mechanism already exists inside you, once you have discoveries and trophies, and they have begun to generate questions that need answering.
Nobody asks you questions while you try to guess the “correct” answer. Questions arise in you because of something new you have experienced and do not yet know what to do with.
We move through these new territories in small groups — what mountaineers call a rope team. Together, you can land a big fish that you would never manage to pull in alone.
Individual guidance is available when needed.

NG: The School is not only a programme but a community.
Not a territorial community, as communities were when people’s lives were largely confined to a local area, but one based on values, meaning and action — a community united not by formal proximity but by genuine affinity.
The School’s virtual campus will open soon. Residents will be able to wander between departments, palaestras, underground passages, secret staircases, workshops and sandpits… Visit the library, cinema and exhibition of discoveries; attend seminars by visiting professors; enter laboratories and take part in experiments; drop into taverns where groups are being assembled for expeditions into new territories…
And, if they wish, join offline sessions as well — initially in Barcelona or in the Canary Islands, at the Dolphin Embassy.
The School’s pilot programmes — week-long intensives — have already taken place in precisely this format in France and Spain.

— Will the programme have specific subjects?

AG: In Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the protagonist, who was raised by Martians, is asked to teach people various things: one person wants to move objects, another wants to kiss girls until they lose their minds, a third wants to hold his breath underwater.
He replies that teaching these things directly would take an enormous amount of effort and produce distinctly mediocre results.
So what should they do?
Learn Martian.
Then all these things will begin to happen “by themselves” as a consequence — along with another thousand things they have not even thought to ask for yet.
404 School is a language course: immersive Martian lessons.

NG: Such a language contains within it a way of thinking and a coordinate system in which you can unfailingly sense what is “yours” and what is “not yours”.
If, with your eyes closed, you know which way is up and which is down, which is right and which is left, where reason lies and where absurdity begins, you cannot be disorientated.
Specific disciplines and skills can then be mastered, when necessary, much faster and more accurately than before.

— Apart from the “academic” subjects associated with ordinary schools, what else won’t you have?

AG: Grooming and networking masquerading as profound communication.
We do not run retreats in Bali, success training, career-coaching sessions, family constellations and so on.
Those are all attempts to patch holes in the ceiling with little pieces of sky-blue plywood.
Nor will there be any so-called “current affairs agenda”.
For all our engagement with what is happening in the world, what is happening is itself a consequence of the loss of vertical connections. It cannot be changed before those connections are restored.
There is no point agreeing what counts as a red light and what counts as a green one while our eyes are squeezed shut.

NG: Nor will there be “everything, all at once”.
Breaking a pattern works like a cold shower. Learning a language requires concentration and time. Entering a new linguistic environment is a form of culture shock.
So this can be quite an intense experience.

— That was going to be my next question. How long is the programme, and how intensive is it?

NG: Roughly nine months.
That is how long a human being takes to prepare to enter the world — and even nine extremely energetic women working together cannot produce one in a month.
The shoots need time to break through far enough for a forest eventually to grow from them.
But nine months means nine months. We have no desire to tether a student to us for years. This is not a psychoanalyst’s consulting room, nor is it Scheherazade.
A good driving-school student is one who learns to drive independently, then calmly and confidently gets behind the wheel and drives away.

AG: Which does not, of course, prevent them from continuing to shine in the alumni community afterwards.
There will be all sorts of rallies along the verticals and thr
ough the tunnels.

— Is the School paid?

AG: Yes. What costs nothing is not valued, and therefore does not work.
But everyone will be able to choose the price they consider appropriate to their expectations.

NG: Whatever they choose is accepted in adva
nce. It does not affect the content of the programme — but the choice itself is part of the programme.

— Entrance exams?

NG: A test. A few simple questions.
“What is the purpose of your birth?”
“What would you do if you became omnipotent for fifteen minutes?”
And another dozen or so.
You mark your own test.

— Will the School award any sort of diploma?

AG: Of course! And a medal engraved with blind kittens.
What diploma? What on earth for?

NG: Oh, there’ll be one. How could we possibly not give them one?