The Jenaplan approach: Learning arises from love, connection, and wonder. The school is a living-learning community where you learn to live together. Parents and schools work together to raise children to be people of significance for themselves, for others, and for a sustainable world.

Founder Peter Petersen 1884-1952
The founder of Jenaplan education is German educator Peter Petersen (1884-1952). Peter Petersen was born in 1884 to a farming family in a village in Grossenwiehe in Germany on the German-Danish border. In 1923, Peter Petersen became a professor of pedagogy. In doing so, he was put in charge of the pedagogical seminary and of the university training school in Jena, East Germany. At the request of parents from the city of Jena and the surrounding area, Peter Petersen established a university training school according to his innovation insights. From 1923 to 1950, Petersen was active in the German city of Jena, and from 1928 his wife Else Petersen worked with him. The last years of his life were particularly bitter: his life's work in Jena, a city in the former German Democratic Republic, was systematically demolished. A year before his death in 1952, the University School of Jena was closed, because the political leaders felt that it was politically a very dangerous relic of the Weimar Republic.