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The emerging knowledge societies will – besides many other dramatic changes – see a teaching revolution. This paper seeks to propose quality standards for this new type of teaching.

The paper argues that Peter Drucker experienced much of what he later came to call the principles of self management and effective knowledge work as a boy aged nine or ten at the Schwarzwald School – an utterly exceptional, progressive elementary school in Vienna. Given these astonishing similarities, this school's avant‐garde approach to teaching might just provide some insights into what effective teaching for a future knowledge society should be like. The paper is based to a large extent on accounts by and about the almost forgotten school's owner‐manager Eugenie Schwarzwald, some of which were made available only recently in the course of several biographical research projects dealing with this revolutionary pedagogue and social entrepreneur.

Firstly, the paper identifies similarities between the teaching practice at Eugenie Schwarzwald's schools, her approach to leadership on the one hand, and Drucker's principles of effective management and knowledge work on the other. Secondly, it concludes that in a knowledge society both effective management and teaching need to be extensively individualised services – much more than in an industrial mass society.

Combined, Schwarzwald's practice and Drucker's teachings challenge some seemingly up‐to‐date practices in both higher education and corporate personnel development, and helps in understanding what actually produces effective personal learning for the rapidly changing knowledge economies of the twenty‐first century.

The paper introduces selective aspects of progressive education to the field of management.

The purpose of this paper is to lay the foundations for new ways of management and personality development by using the same way Peter Drucker developed his ideas. What was this “teaching philosophy”? Where else can it be found? Which learning phenomena are typical for this way of teaching? Can this “teaching philosophy” be replicated? Can it be applied to management in general?

The historical genetic method developed by Ernst Mach from the historical‐critical method. Using this approach the paper traces the origin of Drucker's central ideas for management in his early learning experiences. It then asks the question, in how far can these central ideas be generalized and used to develop the central ideas of Drucker (including the intuitive ones) further? The question is genetically left open, i.e. it is continually transformative.

Drucker was heavily influenced in his way of thinking by his education at a special school in Vienna. The school was organized by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Many of Drucker's ideas on personality development and his intuitive theories on psychology and learning can be traced back to that time. What was especially important for Drucker's later works was the “teaching philosophy” taught by Schwarzwald's teachers.

There is a direct link between the science teaching results for Finland in the OECD PISA study and Drucker's way of thinking. Drucker acquired an exponential way of learning, instead of a learning based on a linear model. This is what made his thoughts so challenging and ahead of his contemporaries. As the example of Finland shows, this is not a light‐tower method (i.e. a singular phenomenon without empirical evidence of its reproducibility). One can use these ideas in general for all of education and it has been used in over a dozen cases at different around the world times. It is especially valuable in management education of knowledge workers. In such a way, one can create a much more efficient and effective way of education, an “education 2.0”.

This is the first time that Drucker's ideas can be linked to the ideas of Ernst Mach and to similar types of education based on ideas of Mach, such as used in Finland. The empirical results of such methods can therefore not only be found in Drucker's autobiography as a single case, but they can be compared in much more general contexts, for instance in the large‐scale field study OECD PISA study or in Hattie's educational meta‐meta analysis.