What should school achieve today?

The [[dreiklang|triad]] and why the order matters

The base is relationship, called the growth relationship in our handbook: relationship before operations. The path is meaningful, value creating work: meaning before system. The goal is wisdom and self determination: maturing before pure output. That order is a claim about people. Without a relationship that holds, no learning format works. Without a real project, relationship stays pleasant and without consequence.

Without the goal of wise power we produce either nice but powerless children or capable but immature people.

The growth relationship has a name from developmental psychology. Diana Baumrind called this style authoritative: warm, clear and demanding at once, high warmth and high expectation. In daily practice a mentor likes a child and still asks something of it. Warmth alone produces arbitrariness. Expectation alone produces obedience. Together they produce growth.

The idea has a second root. In a video from 2023 I name theatre director Peter Brook as the inspiration for this first principle. He asked what makes theatre essential once you strip away everything unnecessary, and found the relationship between actor and audience as the answer. Nothing else is indispensable, everything else only serves that one relationship. That is exactly why relationship comes first in the triad.

• Build the world: set up the environment so that real challenges occur in it.
• Set the challenge: hand over a task that looks one size too large.
• Hold the consequence: let what follows from a decision actually follow, even when it gets uncomfortable.
• Resist the temptation to deliver the solution yourself. The hero story belongs to the child.

Where the triad comes from

It came out of a months long symposium on Clubhouse, around 9,700 members, more than twenty hosts from philosophy, neurology, pedagogy and parenthood. The same question ran every day: if there were no education system, what should it look like? These three stages are what remained. The answer was then tested every Saturday at Colearning, long before it went into a school.

Where this runs first

Freie Schule Salzburg is the first case. Planned in 2022, at Strubergasse 26 in Salzburg since 2023, run by the non profit association Kreativwerkstatt. Since the 2025/26 school year it holds the permanent Öffentlichkeitsrecht, the Austrian state accreditation, based on its own organisational statute under the private school act. For families that means state valid reports and no yearly external examination. The school runs years one to nine in mixed age groups across three stages: Primaria 1, Primaria 2 and Sekundaria. At the 2026/27 start there are seventeen children with two mentors, at most twelve per mentor. Tuition is 600 euros a month.

The Laboratorium holds a 3D printer and a cutting plotter, plus a film and a podcast studio. Access is staged: “Every machine has its own licence: safety briefing, operation, material knowledge and a test piece.” That is the triad as furniture. Relationship is built by the person who signs off the licence. The test piece is the meaningful work. And whoever may run a machine carries real responsibility, which at this school is called maturity stages.

• 2022: The school is planned.
• 2023: The move into Strubergasse 26, rooms on the first floor.
• 2025/26: The permanent Öffentlichkeitsrecht arrives. Reports count, the yearly examination pressure falls away.
• August 2026: Rebuilding from 17 to 28 August. The rooms get their names and their purpose: Agora, Forum, Laboratorium, Phantasia, Skriptorium.
• 14 September 2026: Welcome celebration on the first day. A red ribbon, scissors for every child and every parent, cut together.

How this can be checked

Four times a school year the school shows publicly what the children have built. These expos are the most honest test I know. Either something is on the table, or nothing is.

Since August 2026 the school’s learning platform is called Heureka. It shows every child where it stands, runs without AI and even offline on request, can be paused at any time, and the youngest children learn with no device of their own. The principle behind it: “We treat computers, the internet and AI like fire. Unaccompanied it burns everything down. With adults who live and teach a mature way of handling it, it becomes a stove, a light and a forge.”

One sentence measures the whole school: whatever I want to learn, I can learn it. Whatever I want to create, I can create it. What that looks like for one single teenager is in Building an AI platform at fourteen.

• 26 November 2026
• 11 February 2027
• 13 May 2027
• 1 July 2027, closing expo with a summer celebration

On record

freieschulesalzburg.at/kosten and the blog post on Öffentlichkeitsrecht, retrieved September 2026. Pedagogical foundation, chapters 2.1 to 2.5.

• Permanent Öffentlichkeitsrecht since the 2025/26 school year, under the school’s own organisational statute
• Tuition 600 euros a month, as of September 2026
• Years one to nine, mixed age across three stages, seventeen children with two mentors in 2026/27
• Paideia is the quality mark and development layer for independent schools, at around ten percent of the running income per child, net
• Four expos in the 2026/27 school year, the first on 26 November 2026

Sources and links

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Deepened with the origin of the relationship pillar: theatre director Peter Brook named as the inspiration, from a video of 2023.

2026-09-03: Corrected: permanent Öffentlichkeitsrecht since the 2025/26 school year, tuition 600 euros a month. Deepened: the origin of the triad, the game master stance, the timeline of the school, expo dates, Heureka and a block with all sources.

2026-09-02: Planted from the education question page.