Last week I showed you the four circles — our answer to the question nobody with authority over your child’s 15,000 hours has seriously asked since 1893: what’s actually worth learning?

Today we go to the center of the circles: Intuition & Creativity. And I want to start with the study I promised — the one that should stop every parent cold.

The 98% Problem

In 1968, NASA had a problem worth envying: rooms full of brilliant engineers, and no way to tell which ones were the inventive ones — the minds you point at the impossible. They brought in two researchers, George Land and Beth Jarman, to build a test for creative, divergent thinking. It worked so well that Land had a bigger thought: where does this capacity come from?

So he gave the same test to 1,600 children, ages four and five.

98% of them scored at the level NASA called “creative genius.”

Then the study did something almost accidental and became one of the most quietly devastating findings in education. They tested the same children five years later, at age ten: 30%. At fifteen: 12%. Among adults? 2%.

Buckminster Fuller saw it before the data existed. “All children are born geniuses,” he said. “9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.”

He was barely exaggerating. Land’s conclusion from the numbers was just as blunt: non-creative behavior is learned. We don’t grow out of creative genius. We are schooled out of it — a dozen years of being rewarded for the one right answer, in a system built to sort for compliance, does exactly what it was designed to do.

Notice Fuller’s word, though: inadvertently. Nobody sets out to de-genius a child. It happens the way erosion happens — 15,000 hours of small corrections, one “stop daydreaming” at a time.

Sit with that for a second. We spend billions on programs to teach adults “innovation” — trying to reinstall at 40 what was standard equipment at 4.

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Why This Is the Innermost Circle

Of the four circles, why does this sit at the center — deeper than the Genius Zone, deeper than life skills?

Two reasons.

First, everything else draws on it. A Genius Zone project without imagination is just an assignment. A career without creative capacity is just a job description waiting to be automated. The inner circle is the fuel for every outer one.

Second — and this is the one I’d tattoo on every school door — it’s the part AI can’t touch. In the last two years, machines have gotten frighteningly good at the exact things school optimizes for: recalling facts, producing correct answers, formatting five-paragraph essays. The 1893 curriculum is now a list of things a free chatbot does faster than any straight-A student.

What the machines don’t have is what your four-year-old has in abundance: original imagination, inspiration that arrives from somewhere beyond the training data, and the felt sense of knowing that precedes reason. In the Age of AI, the inner circle isn’t enrichment. It’s the whole ballgame.

The Age-Seven Window

Here’s the part developmental science has understood for decades and school has ignored just as long: young children aren’t just “little adults with less information.” Before roughly age seven, a child’s brain spends most of its time in slower brainwave states — the same states adults have to meditate their way back into. It’s why a five-year-old doesn’t pretend the cardboard box is a spaceship. For her, right then, it is one.

That window is when the imaginative, intuitive channel is wide open — and when it’s most vulnerable. Every worksheet that interrupts a deep game of pretend, every early lesson that the right answer matters more than your answer, is a small training in closing the channel. This is the de-geniusing, up close. It has no villain — just a curriculum running on autopilot since 1893.

You can’t blame teachers — they’re running the program they were handed. But you can build a school that runs the opposite program. So we did.

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What We Do Instead

At Coherence Education, the inner circle isn’t a Friday-afternoon art slot. It’s structural:

We start every day inside. Our mornings open with coherence practice — students learn to settle their nervous systems, drop into their hearts, and listen before the day asks anything of them. (Fun fact: researchers at HeartMath have spent years studying the heart’s role in intuitive perception. The kids just call it “getting coherent.”)

We treat intuition as a skill, not a superstition. Games and exercises that ask kids to sense before they think — then talk openly about what showed up. No pressure, no grades, lots of laughter. The skill grows exactly the way a muscle does.

We protect imagination like the asset it is. Unstructured creation time isn’t a reward for finishing the “real work.” It is real work. Some of the most impressive projects in our school started as what a traditional classroom would have interrupted.

And we never grade a child’s inner world. The fastest way to teach a kid to stop reporting what they sense is to red-pen it.

What happens when you do this for a while? In the next article I’ll tell you about one of our students whose intuition training started showing up in her projects — and what that did to the quality of everything she made. It’s my favorite story in the school.

How to Prevent the De-Geniusing, Starting This Week

You don’t need our school to start reopening the channel. Three small experiments:

1. Ask the question underneath the question. When your child faces a small decision this week, skip “what do you think?” and try “what does your gut say?” Then honor whatever comes — no correcting, no “are you sure?”

2. Leave the daydream alone. One time this week, when you catch your child staring out a window mid-task — let them stay there. That’s not attention failing. That’s attention arriving somewhere interesting.

3. Play “what else could it be?” Grab any object at dinner. Take turns naming what else it could be — the weirder the better, and the only rule is nobody says “that wouldn’t work.” That’s the NASA test, dressed as a game. Notice who wins. (It will not be the adults.)

NEXT UP: Circle two — the Genius Zone. How we help each child find the intersection of what they love, what comes easily, and what they care about most — and the student whose intuition training supercharged everything she built.

Want to see the inner circle in action? Join our next live Open House — Thursdays at 8:00 AM Pacific through July (Wednesdays at 9:00 AM Pacific starting in August). Register for an Open House here — or grab 10 minutes with me directly and let’s talk about your kid: Book a 10-minute call.

If this resonates, subscribe to follow the Inside-Out journey — and if you know parents wrestling with these questions, share it with them. ❤️

I sat down with Tim Shields on his podcast, and we went deeper into everything my recent article ‘School Was Designed in 1893. Your Child Wasn't essay could only gesture at — what happens when kids design their own projects, why “coherence” is the word we build everything around, and what a school looks like when it’s designed for your child instead of the 1893 average.

If this interview moves you, like and follow Tim — he’s doing beautiful work. I’ve been blessed with reading a pre-release draft of his new book Dream Tethering, and all I can say is WOW! It is filled with deep wisdom, practical application, and beautiful wordsmithing. Multiple ‘ah hah’s’ on every page.

If you’d like to learn more about Inside-Out education and how it can prepare the the kids close to you to THRIVE in the Age of AI, sign-up to attend our next Open House.

Last time, I promised you the nuts and bolts of implementing Inside-Out Education — how it’s actually easier than the traditional way, with happier kids and better outcomes.

I’m going to keep that promise. But sitting down to write it, I realized there’s a question that has to come first.

Everything in my last article — flipping the classroom, coaching instead of explaining, teaching skills individually — was about how to teach. And the how matters. But you can run the world’s most beautiful classroom and still waste a childhood, if what’s being learned isn’t worth the child’s time.

So before the how: what should kids actually learn?

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The Question Nobody Owns

Here’s an uncomfortable piece of history. The subjects your child studies — the math/English/science/history rotation we all accept like weather — were largely locked in place in 1893, by a group called the Committee of Ten. Ten university men, chaired by Harvard’s president, standardizing what American schools should teach.

They did their job well — for 1893. Their graduates needed to file, calculate, memorize, and follow written procedures in an industrializing economy. The committee built a curriculum for that world, and that world is gone.

The Carnegie unit came along thirteen years later to measure it all in hours of sitting (I told that story last time). And since then? We’ve added AP versions of the same subjects. We’ve digitized the worksheets. But nobody with authority over your child’s 15,000 hours has seriously re-asked the founding question: what, of everything a human being could learn, is most worth learning?

We’ve been arguing about the recipe for a century, without asking if we’re cooking the right dish.

The One Rule That Changes Everything

If my last article had a single load-bearing idea, it was this: people don’t retain what they don’t want to learn. Retention from lectures runs around 5% — and that’s when the student has some reason to care. Content a kid finds pointless doesn’t get learned slowly. It doesn’t get learned at all. Ask any adult to solve the quadratic equations they “learned” for six years.

Take that rule seriously and it transforms the “what to teach” question. You cannot start with a committee’s list and push it into the child from the outside — 130 years of red ink prove it. You have to start with what’s already alive inside the child, and build outward.

That’s not a metaphor. It’s an architecture. Ours looks like four concentric circles.

The Four Circles

At the core: Intuition & Creativity. Every child arrives with a live connection to imagination, inspiration, and knowing-beyond-reason — the capabilities every great inventor, artist, and leader draws on, and the ones no AI can replicate. School, mostly by accident, trains these out (there’s a NASA-derived study on this that should stop every parent cold — it opens the next article). We put them at the center, protect them, and actively develop them.

Circle two: The Genius Zone. Every child has one — the intersection of what they love, what comes naturally, and what they most deeply value. Instead of assigning generic projects, we help each kid find that intersection and then build real things from it: businesses, books, musicals, apps, documentaries. This is where “make them learn” becomes “try to stop them.”

Circle three: Key Life Skills. Career. People. Money. Health. The very skills adults spend hundreds of billions a year trying to learn after school failed to teach them — taught here in childhood, in age-appropriate ways, by people who live them. Genius that can’t navigate the world stays stuck in a bedroom. Ours won’t.

Circle four: Community. The ability to live with, lead, and build groups of humans who work and play well together. As the big top-down systems strain under their own weight, I believe community is the next stage of our evolution — and it’s a skill set, not a sentiment. I’ve lived the difference between communities that thrive and ones that tear themselves apart, and I’ll tell you those stories.

Why the Order Matters

The circles aren’t a menu. They’re a sequence — each one feeds the next.

A child with activated creativity and intuition brings uncommon spark to their Genius Zone projects. A child with a thriving Genius Zone has a reason to master money, communication, and health — the life skills stop being abstract because they’re in service of something the child already loves. And children who’ve mastered all three inner circles grow into exactly the kind of adults who can build communities that don’t collapse — people who create together instead of bickering, back-biting, and power-positioning.

Notice the direction: inside → out. The child’s inner world first, the world’s demands last.

Now look at the traditional model. It runs the arrow the other way — it starts with what the system needs (compliant workers, sortable test scores, seats filled for 120-hour units) and works inward, hoping something sticks to the child. Outside-In education, for an Outside-In world that’s disappearing.

That’s the whole disagreement, in one arrow.

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Where We’re Going

Over the next four articles, I’ll take you around the circles one at a time — what each layer is, why it matters more than ever in the Age of AI, how we develop it at our school, and what you can do at home this week, whatever school your child attends:

1. Intuition & Creativity — the 98% problem, and the age-seven window

2. The Genius Zone — how we find it, how we feed it, and what happened when one student’s intuition training supercharged her projects

3. Key Life Skills — why our geniuses will be buttoned-up about career, people, money, and health

4. Community — my two favorite living situations ever, and the Harmonic Age

In the meantime, here’s a dinner-table experiment: ask your child, “If school didn’t exist, what would you want to get really good at?” Then just listen. Whatever they say — that’s the inside. That’s where we start.

NEXT UP: Your child was born a NASA-grade creative genius. Here’s the study that proves it — and the schooling that un-teaches it.

Want to see the four circles in action? Join our next live Open House — Thursdays at 8:00 AM Pacific through July (Wednesdays at 9:00 AM Pacific starting in August). Register for an Open House here — or grab 10 minutes with me directly, and let’s talk about your kid: Book a 10-minute call.

Two riddles.

Riddle one: Sudbury Valley School’s founder reported teaching kids the entire K-6 arithmetic curriculum — six years of material — in about twenty contact hours. Traditional schools take twelve years to teach math, and (as we’ll see in a moment) mostly don’t succeed. Why?

Riddle two: A student can take French classes for six years, land in Paris, and be unable to order lunch. An immigrant kid dropped into the same city is fluent within a year — with no classes at all. Why?

There is clearly a disconnect between what we call teaching and actual learning.

The dictionary says teaching is imparting knowledge — structuring experiences so a person learns something new. Learning is acquiring knowledge or skill through study, experience, or instruction.

Notice those definitions describe two different people doing two different things. That gap is where twelve years can disappear.

The Scoreboard

You don’t have to dig deep to see how much teaching is happening — and how little learning.

• The primary objective of K-12 education is kids who can read and do math. How’s that going? Per the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, roughly 7 in 10 eighth graders are not proficient in reading, and nearly 3 in 4 are not proficient in math — after nine years of daily teaching.

• Adult education is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year — and the bulk of it is basic life skills: managing money, managing people, managing health, managing a career. Adults are paying to learn, between job and family pressures, what school had them for 15,000 hours and never taught.

• And if the purpose of college is preparing kids for the real world: 52% of graduates are working high-school-level jobs, 50% of 18-29-year-olds live with a parent, 54% have at least one chronic disease, and 42% of twenty-somethings deal with depression.

I know, I know — I’m not a career teacher. I don’t even have a teaching certificate. But I’ve spent three years running a school where kids love showing up and learn at a remarkable pace, and from inside that experiment, I want to offer some observations about how we close the teaching/learning gap.

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Explaining Is Not Teaching

The classic model: teacher stands at the front and explains what’s in the textbook. Kids go home and do the exercises alone, at night, as homework.

There are a few problems with this.

People learn by doing, not by listening. The famous “learning pyramid” puts retention from lectures at around 5%. Researchers argue about the exact percentages — but nobody argues about the ranking. Listening is the worst way to learn anything. Doing is the best. At 5%, a five-hour school day yields about fifteen minutes of retained material.

We learn what we want to learn — and tune out the rest. Remember that mandatory HR training you had to sit through? How tuned in were you? What do you remember, other than plotting your escape?

Teachers are more useful as coaches than as explainers. Here was my nightly routine as a kid: open the textbook, look at the homework exercises, and have no idea what to do. Yes, the teacher “explained” it all in class — but the sliver I retained wasn’t enough to even get started. So I’d read the chapter and teach myself. I was stubborn enough to do that. I imagine a lot of kids just throw in the towel — night after night, year after year.

Khan Academy figured this out years ago, and it’s worth repeating: flip it. The lecture can be a recording watched at home — no live teacher required. The doing happens in the classroom, where a live teacher can coach kids through the sticking points. The teacher stops being a broadcast tower and becomes what they were always most valuable as: the person in your corner when you’re stuck.

Knowledge Is a Group Sport. Skills Are Solo.

Knowledge — concepts, theories, facts — can be taught in groups. Grammar, biology, geography, history: one teacher, many students, works fine (as long as nobody’s lecturing).

Skills cannot.

Michael Jordan didn’t learn basketball in a classroom. Neither did any great artist, musician, writer, or engineer. They built their skill individually — challenging themselves at their own edge, harnessing a feedback loop, learning from each miss.

Back to our riddles: French is a skill. Math, past the basics, is a skill. We teach them like knowledge, in rows of desks, and then wonder why six years produces nothing a summer of immersion couldn’t beat.

Looking back, my most hated classes were exactly the ones where a skill was taught as a group subject — math, gym, music. Here’s the tell: I loved math, sports, and playing instruments when I was on my own.

Why Kids Cheat With AI

I recently attended a roundtable of educators discussing AI in education. Ninety percent of the conversation was about catching kids who cheat with it.

Not one person asked why kids want to cheat.

Ask the question differently: why are kids finding so little value in what we’re teaching that their main goal is finding the most efficient way to get it over with?

Here’s the case-in-point from inside our school. In our Genius Zone Project Rooms, kids are welcome to use AI. Very few do. When a kid genuinely loves what they’re making and can feel themselves getting better at it, the last thing they want to do is outsource it. (The exception proves the rule: our young entrepreneurs use AI constantly — as the low-cost startup team they get to direct.)

Kids don’t cheat on things they love. Cheating is a pain-avoidance strategy. Which raises the question: why is school painful?

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Hours Are Not Outcomes

Here’s a fact that should make everyone cringe: we literally measure education in units of sitting.

The standard currency of American schooling is the Carnegie unit — 120 hours of seat time equals one credit, and 20-24 credits equals a diploma. Four years of English-hours, three of math-hours, three of science-hours. Nobody asks what you can do — the diploma certifies how long you sat.

And the punchline: the Carnegie unit wasn’t designed to measure learning at all. It was created in 1906 by the Carnegie Foundation as an accounting standard — adopted because universities had to use it to qualify their professors for Carnegie’s new pension system.

Your child’s education is measured in an accounting unit invented for retirement plans, one century and one technological revolution ago.

As the scoreboard above shows: the hours are being served. The learning isn’t happening.

Coercion Runs Out

When I came home from my rough first day of first grade, my dad explained the deal (I told that story here): we put up with painful, boring school because good grades lead to a good college, which leads to a good job, which leads to a good life.

Bad grades, on the other hand, carry shame. Red ink. Mocking classmates. Uncomfortable meetings with parents and principals.

So the goal of school quietly becomes achievement to avoid pain — not learning. And a kid optimizing to avoid pain will, quite rationally, hand the pain to a machine. That’s the AI-cheating “crisis” in one sentence.

Coercion can produce compliance for a while. It cannot produce learning that lasts. And in the Age of AI, compliance is precisely the skill that’s being automated first.

Teaching Is Selling

“Whoa — did he really say that?”

Yes. I sure did. Stay with me.

What do great salespeople actually do? They qualify the prospect, so nobody’s time gets wasted. They ask questions to understand what the person actually needs. If there’s no fit, they move on — gracefully, because a “no” is just a “not now.” And when there is a fit, they show the person exactly how the thing improves their life, and let them decide.

Notice what a great salesperson never does: force anyone to sit through six years of a product they didn’t choose, can’t use, and will be punished for ignoring.

So what would teaching look like if it worked like selling?

• Qualification: Do you want to learn things that will take you to a different future — or are you content where you are?

• Discovery: What does that future look like? What would you need to know, and be able to do, to get there?

• The offer: Here’s the most efficient path we can build to that future. Want to see it?

• The negotiation: the knowledge and skills get fine-tuned to the kid — not the kid to the curriculum.

• The decision: if the student sees enough value in their future self, and the cost in time and effort is acceptable, they choose to move forward.

• The service agreement: frequent check-ins, course corrections, and a plan that keeps earning its place — because the customer can always walk.

A student learning this way is never exposed to material that’s a detour from their goal. They’re invested in the outcome, because it’s their outcome. Practice stops being homework and becomes satisfying progress. And here’s the beautiful part: real goals pull in breadth all by themselves. A kid set on becoming a concert violinist discovers she needs teamwork, music theory, money management, history, persuasive speaking to win the orchestra seat and conscious communication to keep it.

No coercion required. The future she wants does all the motivating.

The Name for All This

Focus on outcomes instead of hours. Coach instead of explain. Teach knowledge in groups and skills individually. Sell — don’t sentence.

That’s what you get when you design education around how learning actually works. It’s what I’ve been calling Inside-Out Education — and after three years of running a school on it, I can report: the kids learn faster, love school, and are becoming exactly the creative, self-directed humans the Age of AI will demand.

NEXT UP: The nuts and bolts of implementing Inside-Out Education — how it’s actually easier than the traditional way, with vastly better outcomes and much happier kids (and parents).

If this resonates, subscribe to follow the Inside-Out journey — and if you know parents wrestling with these questions, share it with them. ❤️

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I already knew kids were amazing, but nothing prepared me for the remarkable, mind-blowing things I’d witness them doing this past year.

• A thirteen-year-old wrote a full-length musical — twenty original, orchestrated songs in less than 16 weeks. One of the songs, sung by a classmate, is so tender it touched me to tears. Check it out and see if your tear ducts stay dry…

• An eleven-year-old cured her own peanut allergy through meditation. She was recently featured on Dr. Joe Dispenza’s YouTube channel, where the segment has drawn 27K views — and she gives Coherence Education a shout-out at the 5:11 mark for opening her heart and making the healing possible. She’s also built a YouTube channel of original animations teaching kids about heart coherence, and written an illustrated book — all in less than 24 weeks..

• A thirteen-year-old walked into our final Money Mastery for Kids showcase and blew away a panel of “Sharks” in our Shark Tank–format finale. His tree-net business is on track to “net” him $10K+ this year — all in less than 8 weeks. Numerous other students launched businesses over those same eight weeks. Here’s Greyson’s segment.

• Students have shown incredible psychic abilities in class. Many have learned to see and read through blindfolds, accurately remote-view hidden objects, and send healing to animals in distress on the other side of the world. Yes, just like you, I was taught these things are scientifically impossible. Luckily, nobody told our kids that. Watch Ella demonstrate seeing and reading while blindfolded — a skill she developed in just a few weeks. Watch Ella demonstrate seeing and reading while blindfolded. She developed this skill in a short number of weeks.

For most adults, any one of these accomplishments would take years — if ever.

So what’s the secret? Did I just happen to hit the lottery and have a bunch of outliers come into my school?

No. These are brilliant kids, but for the most part their parents report that they were just “normal kids” before they came into our school and were unleashed by our “Inside-Out” learning methodology.

Honestly? The secret to their tremendous creations wasn’t anything I taught them.

The secret was me just getting out of their way.

Every Child Is a River

Here’s how I picture it. Each child is a river — a powerful current of energy flowing in their own unique direction.

Most schools think the way the kids’ current is flowing is wrong. They decide to divert it, dam it, or even make it try to flow back upstream! That, I’m convinced, is why so many kids hate school.

Inspired by the Sudbury School philosophy, I decided my job as an educator was to respect the path of the kids’ rivers, believe in their inherent desire to learn and create, and just to clear the way so each of their respective rivers could run unimpeded.

The result? Kids create at a genius level and LOVE coming to school (our biggest complaint by far is that our vacations are too long).

Every Child Is a River

Here’s how I picture it. Each child is a river — a powerful current of energy flowing in their own unique direction.

Most schools think the way a kid’s current is flowing is wrong. They decide to divert it, dam it, or even try to make it flow back upstream! That, I’m convinced, is why so many kids hate school.

Inspired by the Sudbury School philosophy, I decided my job as an educator was to respect the path of each child’s river, believe in their inherent desire to learn and create, and clear the way so it can run unimpeded.

The result? Kids create at a genius level and LOVE coming to school (our biggest complaint by far is that our vacations are too long).

A River Needs Banks

Here’s where people get me wrong. When I say “get out of the way,” they picture chaos — kids doing whatever they want, all day, with no direction.

The opposite is true. A river without banks isn’t free. It’s a swamp.

What makes a river powerful is that it’s channeled.

So we build banks. A rhythm to the day. A mentor who holds the vision alongside them. Real deadlines, real audiences, real stakes — a Shark Tank panel, a showcase, a published book. Accountability the child actually wants, because it’s pointed at their goal, not ours. True hope and optimism for the future.

Practically Speaking…

So what do the banks actually look like? The magical engine of Inside-Out Education is the two hours a day kids spend in our Genius Zone Project Rooms.

Parents tell me all the time: “There’s no way my kid could focus for two hours.” That’s true when it’s work they don’t want to do.

Genius Zone work is different. When the project is something a kid is genuinely excited about and wants to do — something that uses their natural talents and lines up with their values — focus stops being a battle. There’s literally nothing they’d rather be doing.

The kids work side by side in a Zoom room, heads down on their Genius Zone Project — the thing they love to do, are naturally great at, and care deeply about. As they work, they see the other kids working away on their projects, and the sense of camaraderie creates a wave of contagious focus.

The proof that this works? We never assign homework. And many of our students pour extra hours into their projects on their own time. Not because they have to — because they want to.

It turns out the river banks aren’t a cage. They’re a catapult.

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Life Coaches? For Kids???

I got a life coach — when I was 45 — and it was incredibly helpful to have someone in my corner who believed in me, providing expertise, encouragement, and accountability.

I wondered what it would have been like if I’d had a life coach when I was a kid. So I made sure every one of our full-time students got paired with their own Life Coach — a caring, non-family adult they meet with one-on-one every week. Someone to ask: “How are your projects going? What could be going better? How are you feeling — and how’s life?” It’s someone in their corner to be accountable to, to be encouraged by, and — quietly powerful — someone they want to show up for, because they want to be as amazing as their coach believes they are.

✦ SUBSCRIBE — If this resonates, subscribe to follow the Inside-Out journey — new pieces every couple of weeks.

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Nouns, Verbs, and the Age of AI

Recently I wrote about how school trains kids to become nouns — doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer — and how AI is rapidly taking over those noun jobs.

What I saw this year is the antidote. These kids aren’t being trained to be replaceable nouns. They’re becoming irreplaceable verbs — creating, building, healing, innovating, connecting — expressing exactly the divine human capacities no machine can replicate.

As we move into the Age of AI, we can’t afford to keep preparing our children the same way. It’s bad for the kids, and bad for the parents who will need to support them.

The future is going to DEMAND that our kids be at their human best.

And as parents — why would we want anything less?

Stay tuned. Next week we’ll explore the benefits of igniting each child’s intuitive superpowers. It turns out seeing through blindfolds is much more than a nice party trick — it’s one of the keys to unlocking their true genius-level creative abilities.

Want to see more? I pulled together a full highlight reel of this year’s Shark Tank projects — Tell me where to send it and it’s yours.

Send me the highlight reel →

Want to see it in person? Come meet us at our next Open House — CoherenceEducation.org/open-house

NEXT UP: How to implement Inside-Out Education at home

Whether you do or you don’t, check out our student Lielle describing how she healed her severe peanut and pet allergies using Dr. Joe’s meditations.

I’ve heard Lielle’s story before, and I was relishing hearing it again – especially as it is being shown on Dr. Joe Dispenza’s 1.7 million subscriber YouTube channel.

But then at the 5:11 mark, she said something that stopped me in my tracks. A shoutout for Coherence Education and how what she learned at my school helped open her up to her miracle healing! I hadn’t heard that part of the story before.

Jump to 5:11 if you want to go straight to Lielle’s shoutout for Coherence Education — though the whole thing is worth your time.

Lielle has her own YouTube channel too, where she creates videos teaching kids about mindfulness and coherence. Check it out here! https://www.youtube.com/@Bubblesquantumkids

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Lesson One: A Rude Awakening

Do You Remember Your First Day of School?

I sure do.

I was six years old, wide-eyed, sporting my brand-new school clothes and shoes, clutching a pristine stack of school supplies. I pushed through the heavy outside doors of Village Heights Elementary in Englewood, Colorado, and stepped into my new era — going to a real school, like the big kids.

I knew where to find my classroom because I’d done a dry run with my parents and older brother a few days before. But on that quiet practice run, the hallway had been empty. Now it was packed — loud, raucous “upperclassmen” everywhere. I started down the corridor and suddenly felt very small, very self-conscious, practically gasping for air – a fish out of water, in fresh sneakers.

That’s when I ran into the clump.

A knot of older kids was clogging the narrow hallway. As I tried to sidle past them unnoticed, a tall boy stepped into my path.

“Hey, check out the little kid. I bet he still believes in Santa Claus.”

He bent down and stared right into my face.

“Do you? Do you still believe in Santa Claus?”

I blinked. My six-year-old brain was trying to process the fact that the reality of Santa Claus could even be questioned.

“You believe in Santa Claus, right?” the kid asked again, almost sweetly.

“…Yes,” I answered, tentatively.

I was nearly knocked off my feet by the blast wave of laughter.

“He does! He still believes in Santa Claus!”

The laughter swelled. Other pockets of kids picked it up and amplified it. My face burned with shame and confusion. I tried to push past, and the tall boy shoved me into the wall, sending my pencils and Pee-Chee folders skidding across the linoleum.

As I scrambled on hands and knees to collect my supplies, he stopped laughing long enough to deliver the punchline:

“Hey — this kid would be really fun to beat up!”

The others took up the chant. “Yeah! Let’s beat him up. Let’s beat him up after school!”

I didn’t even know what “getting beat up” meant. But I knew it couldn’t be good.

I spent the rest of that day soaked in dread, watching the clock, picturing them waiting for me outside.

That was lesson one.

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Lesson Two: A Boy Named Pickles

I learned about compliance from a boy named Greg — who preferred to be called Pickles.

Unlike me, Pickles was dripping with confidence. Magnetic personality. Endless silly jokes. A spark that lit up the room. The girls all had crushes on him. All the boys wanted to be his friend. He had comedic timing most adults would kill for — he could say a single word and the whole class would crack up.

Our teacher saw all of this and decided he was a threat.

She would spend nine months on a slow, methodical crusade to crush Pickles’ spirit. Every joke, every aside, every flash of light from him was met with a seething glare, a sharp word, or a punishment. And the kids who laughed at his jokes? We got punished too.

I have a strong aversion to disapproval. So I made a decision: I would never laugh at Pickles’ jokes again, no matter how funny they actually were. I even started wishing he would just stop. Just sit down. Just be quiet and compliant like the rest of us. Just stop making waves.

But Pickles, although 1/3 the size of the teacher, was uncrushable. Like Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke, he had a spirit that no system could break. I can still see him sitting in the punishment corner, sneaking a glance back at us with that smirky little smile, as if to say, Isn’t this funny?

It was funny. And I wouldn’t let myself laugh.

What I Learned That Day

That night, my dad asked the question dads ask: “What did you learn in school today?”

I’ll never forget the crestfallen look on his face when I told him.

I learned there was no such thing as Santa Claus. I learned you weren’t allowed to laugh in the classroom. And I learned what “getting beat up” means.

My dad empathized. School was hard, he said. Boring. Sometimes mean. But it was worth it. If I did what the teachers told me, I’d get good grades. Good grades get you into a good college. A good college gets you a good job. A good job gets you good money. Good money gets you a good life.

And if I didn’t do those things? Disaster. I’d become “a bum” — my dad’s word for a person with no job.

So the next day I went back. I tucked my light firmly under a bushel, kept my head down, and tried not to attract the attention of either the bullies or the teacher. I admired Pickles for his “not give a f“ courage, but I was terrified of the angry red marks on my papers, the trips to the principal’s office, and the laughter at my expense. So like most of the other kids, I learned to play the game.

Day after day. Year after year.

The Cruel Joke at the End of the Game

Fast-forward two and a half decades. Three undergrad majors. A fancy MBA from Northwestern — at the time ranked the #1 business school in the country by Forbes. Student loans. A new-hire orientation at Microsoft.

I walked in there, chest puffed out, alongside a half-dozen other freshly minted MBAs from Harvard, Wharton, Stanford. The keys to the kingdom were within our reach. We had been told repeatedly that we were the elite ones. The Harvard and Stanford folks were a bit cockier than the rest of us — they had the kind of name they could drop in any conversation to separate themselves from the “normal” people.

We were all ready to set the software market on fire. The only question was: who among us would shine brightest?

Here’s the punchline. Want to know who became the star of our department?

None of us.

The two new hires who mopped the floor with all of us were Richard, who came out of the Navy, and Gary, who’d skipped college entirely and taught himself programming and entrepreneurship in his bedroom and out in the real world.

And it wasn’t just them. The more I looked around Microsoft, there were more shining stars who’d taken non-traditional paths. English majors. Psychology majors. Philosophy majors. People with funny résumés. People who hadn’t played the game the way I had played it. Bill Gates himself was a college drop-out.

So wait. What?

Was it possible my dad was wrong? Was there a different path than the Game of School that he so clearly laid-out?

I thought about Richard and Gary every month when I paid my student loan bill. Was the degree worth it? Could I have been out in the world making money and learning real skills the way they had, instead of paying to learn arcane knowledge I’d never use?

That was the 1990s. The game worked back then, with our degrees giving us access to jobs, as promised.

Now? That game has changed. The assembly line students are on is more-and-more leading to nowhere.

The Game of School Will Soon Be Unwinnable

In a survey conducted last year, 52% of college graduates were working in high-school-level jobs.

Today, social media is rife with stories of Harvard grads with 4.0 GPAs spending a year applying for work. Any work. And coming up empty, as AI is taking over millions of entry-level jobs.

And AI is just getting warmed up…

Eric Weinstein recently put it in a way I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He said schools have trained kids how to be nouns — doctor, lawyer, accountant, financier, engineer. AI is taking over the noun jobs. To thrive going forward, our kids will need to become verbs — innovators, creators, community-builders, healers, sense-makers, connectors, etc.

It reminds me of the railroads. They went out of business because they thought they were railroads — a noun — instead of transporters of people and goods — a verb. They confused the vehicle with the purpose. A noun is static, but a verb is variable.

I started becoming a noun on my first day at Village Heights. The moment I decided to let the big kids and the teacher take away my sense of magic, my creativity, and my self-esteem — that was the day I traded a verb (a curious, creative, full-spectrum human being) for a noun – a compliant student who would, eventually, become a compliant employee.

I was six.

So, how do we get our kids to be verbs?

Not by fixing the schools.They’re so process-bound it takes them a decade to adopt a new piece of software. They aren’t going to pivot fast enough.

As Buckminster Fuller put it: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

So that’s what we have to do. Build a new model.

It has to start from a different premise than the one our current schools start from. The current premise is that kids are raw material to be shaped into a standardized product. The new premise has to be this:

Every child is a unique genius. Not 1 in 100. Not 1 in a million. One of one.

I call the new model Inside-Out Education.

Instead of the Outside-In paradigm — where kids are forced to adapt to a single, antiquated system — Inside-Out starts by identifying each child’s unique genius. Then it develops that genius. And alongside that, it actively honors, hones, and sharpens the divine human qualities AI can never replicate: intuition, creativity, empathy, cooperation, courage, and presence.

It sounds like a pipe dream. I get it. I would have thought so too, a few years ago.

But it isn’t. I just finished year three of Coherence Education, the school I founded to test whether Inside-Out Education could actually work. I can tell you, from inside the experiment: it works like magic.

The kids haven’t been trained to hide their light under a bushel. Instead, they’re getting the tools, training and encouragement to become lighthouses. They’re becoming their own version of Pickles – self-expressed, unique beings with uncrushable spirits.

If you have a six-year-old somewhere in your life — your own kid, a grandkid, a niece, a nephew, a neighbor — ask yourself one question this week: Are they being trained to be a noun, or a verb? Their future will depend on the answer.

Would you like to learn more about Inside-Out Education? Visit our Website – CoherenceEducation.org

NEXT UP: How did we get here? An exploration of the 200 year-old education system that still trains our kids for a bygone era.

Inside-Out Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you! ❤️

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I’m Andrew Freeman. I have an MBA from Northwestern, three decades of tech leadership at Microsoft, HP, Netscape, and various startups, and I’m a recovering kid who was put on Ritalin in elementary school for the crime of daydreaming.

What got me off the meds was meditation — a life-altering gift from my father, who took me to a Transcendental Meditation class when I was 15. The question that’s stayed with me ever since: why do we make kids wait until they’re adults to learn the life skills that actually matter — career, relationships, money, health?

When my own kid became incompatible with the school system during Covid, I founded Coherence Education to teach kids what I wish I had learned in school.

Every week, I’ll share insights, practical tools, and conversations with the educators, parents, scientists, and kids reimagining education from the inside out. These are the subjects I’m exploring in my soon-to-be-released book, Inside-Out Education.

Let’s build the kind of education our kids deserve, so they can build the kind of world we’ve been waiting for.

Have friends with kids?

Please share Inside-Out Education with them.

❤️ Thank you! ❤️

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What if school wasn’t brutal?

One of the most surprising—and meaningful—outcomes we’ve seen through Inside-Out learning is this:

Bullying simply doesn’t emerge.

Not because we enforce strict behavioral rules.
Not because kids are constantly supervised.
But because the conditions that create bullying never take root in the first place.

Why Bullying Often Appears in Traditional School Settings

In many traditional environments, kids are placed into systems built on comparison and competition:

• Grades rank students against one another

• Praise goes to the fastest, loudest, or most dominant

• Classrooms reward conformity over individuality

• Social hierarchies form quickly

In these environments, sensitive kids—especially those who are creative, introspective, or neurodivergent—often learn an unfortunate lesson:

“It’s safer to shrink.”

We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in students who come to us:

• Kids who hang back

• Kids who withdraw socially

• Kids who dim their curiosity or creativity

• Kids who have been teased, ignored, or bullied for being “different”

This is especially true for children on the autism spectrum, who may already feel out of sync with group dynamics built around dominance or social performance.2. What kind of community are you looking to build here

Inside-Out Learning Changes the Social Equation

Inside-Out learning flips the model entirely.

Instead of asking:

“How do you compare to others?”

We ask:

“Who are you becoming compared to who you were yesterday?”

This simple shift—competition with self instead of competition with others—changes everything.

Genius Zone Learning: Where Every Child Has a Place

Through Genius Zone project-based learning, each child works on projects aligned with:

• Their interests

• Their natural creativity

• Their personal pace

• Their unique style of expression

There is no single “right” project.
There is no hierarchy of “best” work.
There is no reward for outperforming someone else.

As a result:

• Kids stop posturing

• Kids stop comparing

• Kids stop competing for dominance

And something remarkable happens…

Sensitive and Shy Kids Begin to Emerge

When children feel psychologically safe, their nervous systems relax.

When they know they won’t be judged, ranked, or embarrassed:

• Shy kids start speaking up

• Quiet kids start sharing ideas

• Neurodivergent kids stop masking

• Creative kids take risks

We’ve watched students who once stayed silent begin to:

• Lead discussions

• Share their projects with pride

• Support classmates enthusiastically

• Express themselves authentically

They didn’t need to be “fixed.”

They needed to be safe.

A Culture Where Kids Become Each Other’s Cheerleaders

Because no one is competing against anyone else, something unexpected emerges:

Kids start rooting for each other.

In our learning environments:

• Success is celebrated collectively

• Progress is personal, not comparative

• Differences are valued, not targeted

Students naturally encourage one another because:

• Another child’s success doesn’t threaten them

• Creativity isn’t scarce

• Confidence isn’t a limited resource

This creates a culture of mutual respect, empathy, and kindness—without forced social-emotional lessons.

Especially Powerful for Neurodivergent Kids

For students on the spectrum or with heightened sensitivity, Inside-Out learning can be transformative.

Instead of navigating:

• Loud classrooms

• Competitive dynamics

• Unspoken social hierarchies

They experience:

• Predictable emotional safety

• Respect for differences

• Freedom to engage at their own pace

In this environment, neurodivergent students are not “othered.”
They are seen, valued, and loved.

And that changes how they see themselves.

Why “Competition With Self” Accelerates Growth

Ironically, removing competition with others doesn’t slow growth—it accelerates it.

When kids focus on:

• Their own progress

• Their own goals

• Their own creative expression

They become:

• More motivated

• More confident

• More resilient

• More willing to try hard things

Growth becomes intrinsic—not driven by fear of failure or comparison.

The Deeper Lesson

What we’ve learned is simple, but profound:

When children feel safe, they grow.
When they feel valued, they shine.
When they aren’t competing for worth, they discover it within themselves.

This is the heart of Inside-Out learning.

Is This the Environment Your Child Needs?

Families who resonate with this approach often tell us:

• Their child is sensitive, creative, or introspective

• Traditional school environments felt overwhelming or unsafe

• They want learning to build confidence—not anxiety

• They want their child to be themselves

If that sounds familiar, a short conversation can help explore whether this model is a good fit. Please reach out!