404 SCHOOL
An interview with the founders of 404 School, Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky,
by Katerina Valiente, Barcelona, 17 October 2026
(longread)
— A 404 error means “nothing found for your request”. The resource is unavailable, the information has been deleted, or there’s no way to reach it. So what exactly is School 404?
NG: A school that recovers lost information and finds routes to resources that are not yet accessible. A course in regenerating what has been lost and cultivating what we now need but do not yet have.
AG: Half a century ago, a researcher called Blakemore carried out some rather cruel experiments on kittens. Newborn kittens were placed in a specially designed environment containing everything except vertical lines. When they grew up — apparently perfectly healthy — they were released into the ordinary world. And they promptly walked straight into table and chair legs, banging their heads. They simply couldn't see verticals. The visual machinery required to perceive them had never developed. A great many such ‘vertical supports’ have been systematically removed from modern human perception. With them, we've lost an entire dimension, one that gives us height and depth. It's not that people have entirely lost the ability to see it; rather, the neural mechanisms responsible for this kind of perception have remained undeveloped, because those ‘verticals’ were never presented to them in childhood. Without them, people become, how shall I put it… flattened.
— Can you give me some examples?
AG: We know of around thirty such ‘lines’, with verifiable traces in culture and the nervous system. Among them is silence: both the inner kind, constantly drowned out by wholly invented problems and self-absorption, and the outer kind, without which we cannot hear anything beyond the noise imposed upon us and filling the airwaves. Then there's ‘slow time’: the ability to live without deadlines, compulsory agendas and constant urgency. Symbolic thought and imagination — a loss Mamardashvili called the greatest anthropological catastrophe. Attention: the scrolling, short-form generation can sustain it for about forty-five seconds, not even long enough to follow the simplest connections. Meaning: in developed countries, the fear of a meaningless life has overtaken even the fear of death; the overwhelming majority complain that their work is pointless and exhibit what is known as ‘quiet quitting’. The subjective and the invisible: I know I'm head over heels in love, and that this is the most important thing in my life, although I cannot — and should not have to — prove it ‘objectively’. Faith and trust: not formal religious observance, but a relationship with the world and with life without which we cannot venture into a profound relationship or a new undertaking. Joy: it has been replaced by pleasure, although the two are fundamentally different. Pleasure, including sexual pleasure, can be ‘provided’ and ‘received’ from outside, while joy — the sign that we are living in accordance with ourselves — may be entirely absent. And responsibility, as the act of putting one's signature to one's own life: in a society oriented towards an external locus of control and values imposed from outside, even that possibility seems scandalous, almost heretical.
NG: And another twenty or so ‘lines’. Some have disappeared over a very long time. Most, however, have been casualties of the cascading changes in our way of life over the past quarter-century. At the same time, there is a new class of ‘verticals’ whose necessity has emerged so rapidly that they have had no time to develop — or even acquire names. This produces a disorientation no less profound, leaving us unable to catch up with a future that has already arrived.
— Such as?
AG: A sense of the whole, of a non-local planetary unity — what Vernadsky might have called noospheric vision, without which we are now effectively night-blind. Long-range vision in time: an extended awareness of the causes and consequences of actions begun, perhaps, by the previous generation, and of our direct responsibility towards generations not yet born. A sense of authenticity, allowing us to distinguish what has arisen naturally from what has no author at all, being the product of artificial intelligence already capable of passing the Turing test. A sense of ‘my own decision’ in a world where algorithms anticipate our desires, shape our needs and suggest how to satisfy them. The right to privacy — and the culture of choosing not to publish every aspect of one's life, keeping what matters for one's own inner world rather than seeking public validation for a retouched picture of it. The right, and the luxury, not to be an expert: to retain an open, curious beginner's mind in a society where every Indonesian schoolgirl is a blogger and a coach. Trust in one's own experience, style and judgement, without the obligatory fitness tracker, likes, trends or KPIs. Genuine closeness across distances: in a world of constant movement and physical separation, closeness is increasingly defined not by geography or formal ties but by shared meaning, feeling, action and outlook.
NG: So School 404 is about two processes: recovering what we have lost but still need, while at the same time cultivating what is new and necessary.
— Can any of that actually be recovered?
AG: With children, yes: you ‘simply’ have to give them a sufficiently rich environment — although that becomes harder every year. With ‘well-brought-up’ teenagers and adults, it's difficult, but at least partial recovery is possible, and that can be enough to break out of a dead end. The brain remains plastic throughout life. Humanity can forget something within a single generation, but it can rediscover it — or create something new — just as quickly.
NG: Look: in two years of the pandemic, humanity changed virtually every familiar feature of everyday life, from ceaseless global socialising to the first worldwide closure of schools and places of worship in history, and the confinement of billions of people to their homes. There was a chance that, on that cleared ground, people would begin to build something joyful. Instead, they rushed headlong to reinforce precisely what had brought them to the impasse. Yet, without realising it, they demonstrated that they could make immediate, radical changes to the very foundations of their way of life. All that's needed is an intelligent vision of the future… a worldview. And that, in fact, is the task of a real school.
— Is School 404 trying to replace the schools we have now?
NG: Not at all. It's simply a way of spending free time for people who allow themselves to have any. It neither competes with existing schools nor even overlaps with them: it deals precisely with what conventional education places outside its remit.
AG: The existing school system is built on absorbing selected and approved knowledge and skills that were useful to the system when they were selected. It supplies ready-made ‘correct’ answers to questions a person has not asked, but has been handed as an obligation from outside. The result is a reactive, manageable human being, mechanically and rather boredly returning the balls sent their way, without choosing the meaning or purpose of the game, its rules, its pace, or even the game itself. Such a person does not choose who to be or truly conduct themselves, let alone know how to give passage to something that might emerge through them — from within rather than from outside. Culture is something that grows, not something received ready-made, portioned out and packaged for consumption. So a person may be formally ‘educated’ without possessing a culture of thinking, relating, exploring, choosing or making decisions. They have neither the skills nor the tools. Nor do they have the time: there are too many ‘useful’ rules, facts and skills to ‘learn’ before obediently putting them into practice.
NG: In fact, school was originally a way of satisfying curiosity: free time voluntarily devoted to one's own development. The literal meaning of the word ‘school’ is leisure. That its essence has been turned inside out and transformed into compulsory work, with timetables, supervisors and examinations, is one of the great reversals masquerading as common sense. The great discovery of the natural school is free play: testing the boundaries of possible realities and the rules by which one might live in them.
AG: That kind of Play is one of the most important lost ‘vertical lines’. It has been completely displaced by ‘useful activities’ overseen by specially trained outside mentors who supposedly know how a human being ought to be formatted, and the rules by which they must play ‘properly’.
NG: This substitution has taken over the entire process of personal formation. Something that can only take shape from within, growing like any living thing, is instead brought into being through artificial external pressure and instructions. The result is a handy roll of artificial turf: spread it wherever you like; the flowers look real enough; above all, don't dig beneath it. There's nothing there. No soil, so nothing unexpected can grow. Everything is under control. That's why 404 is a palindrome: it simply turns the concept the right way up again, restoring its meaning. Render unto God what is God's, and unto School what belongs to School: Play, as the creative and courageous construction of realities that are intrinsically worth exploring.
— Is that the main method at School 404? Apart from Play, what is the School based on?
AG: Above all, on direct personal experience. Unlike beliefs, it is harder to deceive. Lost capacities cannot be restored through lectures, orders or sermons. You cannot conjure up ‘vertical lines’ with a wave of the hand; you cannot invent them. You have to discover them in your own nature. In looking for them, we draw on patterns and invariants that run through cultural traditions responsible for extraordinary achievements in very different fields. Take the holistic development of human beings: for all the differences in language and method, an invariant can clearly be found where Sufism, Zen, Hesychasm and the Taoist art of ‘nourishing life’ meet. Recent neurophysiological research is now testing those cultural traces against neural mechanisms. Richard Davidson's research, for example, suggests that experiences of happiness, joy and fullness of life — and even simple calm — in someone who has learnt to live in harmony with their own brain and choices can be 700 (seven hundred!) times stronger and more stable than in the average contemporary city-dweller. Neuroplasticity makes the development of such capacities a real possibility.
NG: As for cultivating lines that have not yet formed, we use a method based on rare cases. The modern world doesn't believe in miracles, so we avoid the word and speak instead of exceptions to the rule. Every rule, as we know, has exceptions, although they are usually terribly inconvenient — precisely because they can change the ‘accepted rules’ and widen the boundaries. Everyone knows of such rare events, highly improbable from the standpoint of our existing understanding of human beings. But our current tools cannot trace their processes or chains of cause and effect. This greatly irritates the guardians of normality, so such ‘oddities’ are either ignored or prohibited. We suggest going inside the exceptions instead, on the assumption that these wardrobes may conceal passages to Narnia.
AG: The School helps everyone find such a passage. The search itself inevitably switches off the autopilot. At any age, you need no attention training or motivational exercises to become utterly absorbed once you've discovered a rabbit hole in your own attic. Our Cabinet of Curiosities already contains a unique collection, including analyses of the behavioural strategies of the people involved — people who somehow managed to enter that unknown space. They may help us understand how to increase the likelihood of desirable, improbable events.
— I think I've asked you this already, but I'll ask again. Such as?
NG: Remember Jacques Mayol, homo delphinus? Only a few decades ago, he became fascinated by breath-hold diving. Doctors explained quite convincingly that going deeper than thirty metres without scuba equipment was incompatible with life. He ignored their explanation and dived to a hundred metres. Scandalous behaviour, of course: respectable people don't do that; they take the experts at their word. Yet he forced people to recognise that the human body contains resources and mechanisms whose discovery can instantly expand our notion of what is normal. Today there seem to be freediving schools on every street corner.
AG: And speaking of schools, and the possibility of learning differently and learning different things: Derek Amato suffered a serious blow to the head at forty. A few days later he sat down at a keyboard for the first time in his life and began playing as though he had studied music for decades. The first time he played for six hours straight, as naturally as breathing. Those of us who have spent years drilling scales can only ask: you mean there was another way? More importantly, while this is certainly rare, it isn't unique. It's a cluster of cases: dozens, perhaps hundreds, of acquired savants who suddenly wake up with knowledge of several languages or with artistic or mathematical abilities.
— And there are several such clusters?
AG: We are talking about groups of documented cases pointing to potential human capacities in physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and other domains. Spontaneous remission. Synesthesia. Serendipity. Peak experiences. Resourceful states. Extraordinary insight. Paradoxical solutions producing exceptional results. Genius. ‘Chance coincidences’ — synchronicities. More than twenty such verified clusters altogether, suggesting that human beings are much more than they have learnt to believe about themselves through secondary school, or university for that matter.
NG: Or, more precisely, something quite different altogether.
AG: The mind is an unfinished project. It isn't static: it can develop or deteriorate. Some lines have been eliminated, for example because they were inconvenient to the system at a particular stage. They need restoring. Others have not yet been brought into being because there was no need for them. We must detect them and protect them from being trampled while they develop: without them, we cannot cross territories for which there are as yet neither words nor maps. When such an acquisition happens, it is transformative.
NG: Clearly, someone who possesses modes of perception hidden from others has access to aspects of reality that do not exist in those others' awareness. They interact with the world and achieve results by means others cannot understand. To those others it looks like magic, and the person appears either a charlatan or a genuine miracle-worker — until they discover those channels in themselves. All these are different entrances into the same space, where a human being no longer lives in isolation from the world but as an open system, reaching beyond the self and connected to the world by every vertical line.
AG: Unlike modern science, which hides behind euphemisms in such matters, there is a precise definition of intelligence here: ‘the ability to draw upon the powers of the world without destroying that world’.
— Hmm… So in a sense School 404 is another name for Hogwarts?
NG: Hogwarts is a wonderful fantasy. School 404 is a joyful reality, and reality won't bargain with you. At Hogwarts, students have to go shopping for a magic wand. At School 404 we believe the wand is inside them, and works through them. It's built into them; they and it are one. So they are not users or consumers of a magical world, but its co-creators. That's a different understanding of humanity, a different anthropology.
— Hogwarts had all sorts of magical subjects, from spells to broomstick flying. What's on the School 404 curriculum?
AG: There won't be ‘subjects’ as such. The world isn't divided into separate subjects in the first place. In Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, the man raised by Martians returns to Earth and everyone asks him to teach them some extraordinary skill: one wants to move objects, another to kiss girls into oblivion, a third to relax while lying on the bottom of a swimming pool. A fourth — who didn't make it into the novel — wants to fly on a broomstick. He replies that it would take enormous time and effort and yield distinctly mediocre results. So what should they do? Learn Martian! Once you've absorbed the worldview and way of thinking that come with the language, you'll do all those things effortlessly (apart from the ones you've lost interest in), and countless others you can't even imagine yet. School 404 is an intensive immersion course in Martian.
— Apart from the ‘general education’ subjects that resemble conventional school, what else won't be there?
AG: Grooming and networking masquerading as profound human connection. We don't run Bali retreats, success workshops, personal-brand coaching, family constellations or the whole frantic business of ‘healthy living’. These are all attempts to patch holes in the ceiling with little pieces of sky-blue plywood. Nor will we have a so-called topical news agenda. For all our engagement with current events, those events are the consequences of lost vertical connections; you cannot put things right without first restoring those connections. You cannot agree on what counts as a red light and what counts as green when everyone's eyes are shut.
— Will the teachers be Martians?
NG: Martians would find it unbearably dull. And interfering in our affairs would hardly be ethical. Besides, we're not entirely sure they exist. So the teachers will be Earthlings, but ones who speak the language. Mostly rather unusual people, then. Though there isn't much to teach, really. It's more a matter of standing by the cliff edge in the rye, so that children absorbed in their games don't fall over it. That attentive presence is precisely the kind of witnessing without which no direct transmission takes place. One of our older friends, the ethologist Jason Badridze — the first scientist to spend two full years living with a wolf family — described giving a cub a new task. It took the cub at least twenty attempts to master it. But if a wolf that already knew how to do it was simply present, four or five attempts were enough. No lectures, admonitions, demonstrations or sounds. The attentive presence of someone who knew made learning five times faster.
— Where will you find these… tutors? Moderators? ‘Witnesses’?
NG: They are our greatest asset. In 2008 we founded the Dolphin Embassy, with a permanent research centre in the Canary Islands — the first interspecies centre organised around some of the planet's most ancient and highly developed bearers of consciousness. We began spending a great deal of time with them, in their own home, gradually being admitted to their games, schools, celebrations, rest and funerals… Learning the language. We invited all sorts of gifted people unafraid to swim beyond the buoys on our expeditions, from consciousness researchers to jazz musicians. In 2012, having assembled an interdisciplinary team, we set off on a year-long round-the-world expedition, Archaeology of Possibilities, specifically to find that cross-cultural invariant, an antidote to degradation, an ‘elixir of life’.
AG: In every country, what mattered most to us were people who embodied the human ability to live a life filled with meaning, creativity and joy. In 2019, at Delphi, we convened the NOW (Nature of Wonders) Assembly: 150 creators of breakthrough scientific discoveries, social practices, works of culture and more, from 25 countries. It became a permanent club of thinkers and changemakers. In Barcelona in 2026, the Assembly decided to establish School 404. The School's approach rests on the discoveries of this community.
— Can you give us a few names?
NG: 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 a doctor to the Dalai Lama. Giacomo Rizzolatti, the neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons, a mechanism involved in empathy and compassion. Pablo Verón, the ‘archangel of tango’, the only person we know whose bodily intelligence compares with that of a dolphin. Jean Becchio, a psychiatrist who developed a method for activating consciousness. Gia Dvali, a quantum physicist who demonstrated that information is not lost even inside a black hole, but encoded in another form. Paco Calvo, who studies the intelligence of plants, that ‘vertical civilisation’. Mark Moffett, ‘Doctor Bugs’, an entomologist who has spent half his life on expeditions and a leading expert on the ‘hive mind’ of social insects — bees and ants, creatures so like ourselves. David Rothenberg, a multi-instrumentalist and philosophy professor who plays duets with animals of every sort, from whales to birds.
AG: From Russia: Alexander Asmolov, who developed the school of tolerance for uncertainty and the concepts of a culture of dignity and pre-adaptation — the capacity not to lose one's bearings on the threshold of the future. Slava Polunin, the great trickster and founder of the Academy of Fools. Mikhail Kazinik, a musician and educator who plunges audiences of any age into the living current of what we call human culture.
— How will learning be organised? Is it an online programme?
AG: It's a School of Natural Intelligence. A school centred on immediate subjective experience — sensory, felt, emotional, bodily and spiritual — living and continuous, everything that fundamentally cannot be digitised. We use screens to see one another and agree where to go in search of direct experience. And, on our return, to discuss our discoveries in a real conversation.
NG: Think of it as an expedition in search of genuine treasure. Everyone sets off after whatever seems most important to them at that moment (that may grow and change later). There will be a provisional map of the landscape of possibilities: the hypothetical Forest of Vertical Lines. Like any map, it will mark areas where particular ‘vertical lines’ are thought to have been sown or hidden. Naturally, only those we can identify with some confidence in advance will appear. The most important personal discoveries may be completely unexpected. There are also unknown regions where no human foot has trodden and almost anything might be lurking — traps, marshes and bogs, underground passages, wastelands and labyrinths. At the start of each week there's an online briefing, where participants receive tools and hypotheses.
AG: Then each person chooses the most appealing square on the map, heads there and explores at their own pace, along their own route. In the evening, they make an entry in their expedition diary. Not an online post, but handwriting in a notebook: an intimate personal observation, not an exercise in carefully groomed exhibitionism designed to provoke a reaction.
NG: On Fridays — an old and much-loved tradition dating back to our first archaeological expeditions — everyone meets online again, lays the fruit, berries, odd artefacts and pottery shards they've collected on the table, and talks about them. We comment, mark newly discovered landmarks on the map, wonder what soup we might make from our finds and what mosaic we might assemble. Then we agree on the next steps: it's a shared exploration of the field. Theory comes after practice, when a new mechanism has already begun to form within you, when you have discoveries and trophies that raise questions demanding clarification. Instead of being asked questions and trying to guess the ‘right’ answer, you have questions of your own, born of new experiences you don't yet know how to handle. We move through new territory in small groups, roped together as climbers are. Together you can land a big fish that no one could haul in alone. Individual guidance is available when needed.
AG: So it's one part screen to nine parts genuine ‘fieldwork’. For most people today, life is structured the other way round. We allow about a week per ‘vertical’. The whole programme lasts roughly nine months — we didn't invent that period. In other words, an academic year. It cannot be done faster, even if nine energetic women all work together.
— Will children and adults follow separate tracks?
NG: Separate groups, for obvious reasons. Every age has its own relationship with the universe. But the ‘vertical lines’ are the same, so the routes are shared. The difference is that adults can understand why they need an exercise to restore their relationship with, say, the invisible — what neither the eye nor measuring instruments can see. For children, you need an exciting format, perhaps a game called ‘Hunters of the Invisible’.
AG: That brings another important bonus: the ideal pair of students in the same boat is a parent and child. For the first time, this means not only strengthening the meaningful bond between generations, but transmission in both directions. Previously the parent was always the guide. In this programme, ‘it depends’. First, the child still knows that animals can talk and miracles happen, and can help the adult rediscover that. Second, children are much more at home in the new world and in some respects genuinely more capable than adults — not only with gadgets, but in anything requiring freedom from learnt stereotypes and automatic responses. So there will be special groups for children and parents together. They may even lead the way.
— They say that for a new venture to succeed it should be twenty per cent new and eighty per cent familiar. Don't you think your proportions are the other way round?
AG: First, it's already obvious to almost everyone that this train has reached the end of the line. There's nowhere left to lay track. We need to get out of the carriages, which are already rearing up, and change the very means of travel. This is no longer the Exit we were talking about a few years ago, but the Emergency Exit. Eighty per cent of the old is just footprints in the sand. The future can no longer be extrapolated from the past: the day has come and the time is fulfilled. Second, every new idea looks like heresy at first. There's nothing to be done about that. Third, there is nothing particularly new about our idea. Rather than endlessly invoking Plato's school, let's remember some thoroughly modern models of living education: Peter Gray's Free to Learn, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society and Sir Ken Robinson's Creative Schools. All we've done is bring together what turns out to distinguish outstanding people across different cultures, and connect it with the latest neurophysiology. Incidentally, early in 2027 we'll publish something that's not quite a textbook, more a guide to the School's landscapes of meaning. It will be called Human 404.
NG: And fourth, we've been doing this for a quarter of a century — precisely the period in which the greatest changes to our way of life have occurred. Until now it was a programme ‘for our own people’ at the annual international Dolphinity festivals, behind closed doors. Now it seems to be becoming the main event, and open to everyone.
— What are the admission requirements?
AG: A test consisting of elementary Martian ‘application questions’: ‘What was the purpose of your birth?’, ‘What would you do if you became omnipotent for fifteen minutes?’, ‘What do you intend to learn here?’ and so on. The final questions will be almost identical. You assess the changes in your answers yourself. For tuition, you choose one of three payment options. The choice is made in advance and does not affect the core programme, but is itself part of the programme. Beyond the core there is an optional programme: meetings with the people behind discoveries, workshops and experiments, access to the information centre, games in the Museum of Mistakes, teams formed to explore new territories, offline sessions (initially once a quarter at the Dolphin Embassy in the Canaries and Studio 404 in Barcelona), and later an alumni club, among other things.
— Many schools promise that by the end of their course you won't recognise yourself. What's your promise?
NG: You're trying to provoke us into saying ‘at last you'll know yourself’, aren't you? Not a chance. But we hope you'll become more interesting to yourself. And life itself will, too.
AG: Inter esse simply means ‘to be among, to be within’. Darling, I'm home! Quite a joy, wouldn't you say?
