In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularizes the 10,000-Hour Rule, which posits that achieving true mastery and world-class expertise in any complex skill requires roughly 10,000 hours of practice.

How much time did we spend in school, counting class time and homework?

17,000 hours through high school

5,000 hours in college

This means we spent enough time in school to achieve true mastery and world-class expertise.

TWICE. With 2,000 hours left over for the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic.

So, what two fields did you achieve true mastery and world-class expertise in during your 22K+ hours?

What’s that you say? None?

Unfortunately I’m right there with you. When I think back to my school years and what I learned in those 22,000 hours of classroom time plus homework, I struggle to find anything that directly contributed to success in the things that matter: career, relationships, money or health.

I learned all of the most impactful skills and knowledge after school – on the job, through my own study of scores of books, workshops and classes, or through the hard knocks of life. And many of those knocks came precisely BECAUSE I entered the real world unprepared.

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Not every learning hour is created equal

From the time we’re born until we’re 18, our brains are wired for learning.

One hour of learning for a kid is WAY different from one hour of learning for an adult.

Children’s brains are built for flexibility and rapid absorption (neuroplasticity). Adult brains are built for efficiency, execution and specialized processing.

A child’s brain is a highly adaptable blank canvas. An adult’s brain is a finely tuned, deeply grooved highway system.

It’s no secret that what we learn as kids goes into our minds and bodies differently. Learn a language, a sport, an instrument or a dance as a kid and it becomes part of you. Learn it as an adult and it often stays foreign and clunky.

As we move into adulthood, our brains shift from eagerly forming new synapses to pruning the little-used ones in order to create those efficiencies.

Yes, we’re doing it backwards

Looking at the way our brains work, it would make sense for:

• Kids to focus on learning the skills and abilities that will set them up for success in life

• Adults to take those mastered skills and refine them in order to succeed in a competitive world

Instead, we do the opposite:

• Kids are taught how to get through large volumes of mostly irrelevant work efficiently, within a highly competitive environment

• Adults must scramble to learn the key life skills related to career, people, money and health WHILE they’re in the thick of navigating them.

If adult life is an airplane taking off into the real world, ideally we would have spent our childhood building the plane and mastering how to fly it. Instead, we enter adulthood unprepared.

It’s like we’re building the airplane while we fly it.

What did we really learn in school?

The one thing school did teach me was how to endure doing things I didn’t want to do and saw no reason to do.

In essence, I learned how to grind.

Is that a valuable skill? Yes. There are times in our lives where we need to put our noses to the grindstone. However, I believe you can learn to grind while developing your genius, and while you’re grinding you’ll actually know why you’re doing it.

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What about math?

Which brings me to the question I hear most from parents thinking about taking their child out of traditional school.

What about math? Math is a nice skill to have. We use it for cooking, managing money and running our businesses. Is it absolutely necessary? No… The best math genius in the world is within arm’s reach, accessible through your computer or phone.

If you think math is so important, let me ask you. When was the last time you did math? If you suddenly lost your ability to do math, how would your life change? Probably not at all.

The reason most parents want their kids to know math is because it will be on their college entrance exams.

But how many hours does it take to learn that math?

At Sudbury Valley School, a group of students famously mastered the entire six-year elementary math curriculum in just 20 contact hours spread over 20 weeks, or 5 months.

So then… why did we go to school?

If school isn’t about preparing us for the real world, what is its purpose?

Many argue that our school model was originally designed to train kids to become compliant factory workers. However, your kids were born during a time when factory jobs had been shipped overseas, so that is no longer school’s purpose.

The real reason? It’s to gain access… to the next school.

I was told that if I did well in grade school I’d be prepared for middle school, then high school, then college, then grad school.

So, the reason we were told to do well in school was not to gain knowledge. It was to gain access.

In my first Substack article, “School Has Become an Unwinnable Game,” I compared the school system to a multi-level video game. Make it through your level and your reward is access to the next one. Just like Super Mario Bros.

The big prizes used to be college, grad school and a good job. If you played the game well, access to a high-paying career was guaranteed.

That’s no longer the case.

A 2024 report from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada found that 52% of four-year college grads were underemployed a year after graduating, working jobs that don’t require a degree. And that was before AI started gobbling up entry-level jobs and internships like Ms. Pac-Man eats dots. AI has barely warmed up.

Getting out of college today is a bit like the nightmare where you step into the elevator expecting to go up to the next level, but you realize the car isn’t there and instead you step into the void.

That’s the real-life nightmare more than half of college graduates are experiencing today.

Fewer employers care about college

Elon Musk has been blunt about this for years. “You can learn anything you want for free,” he says. Colleges are “basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores.” What he asks of job applicants is “evidence of exceptional ability,” and in his words, “I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.”

If it’s not your genius, it’s not your job

I heard that saying at a workshop for entrepreneurs.

If bookkeeping, marketing or cleaning your office aren’t your genius, outsource them and free up time to do the work that is your genius.

In the Age of AI, the saying has become literal. If a job isn’t within your genius zone, it isn’t yours. In fact, it will soon no longer even be an option for it to be yours.

With the latest AI agents and bots, you can easily employ a bookkeeper, a marketer, even a chief of staff essentially for free. For a person trying to work in one of those jobs and to be worth hiring, they’d better add value beyond what AI can, by creating, innovating and thinking outside the box in ways AI can’t.

In short, if you’re trying to work outside of your genius, you will have no job.

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What does this mean for our kids?

Let’s use those 22,000 hours to ensure they build mastery in two areas:

1. 10,000 hours developing their unique Genius Zone. They’ll enter adulthood ready to use it to make money, solve problems, and create new solutions.

2. 10,000 hours to master the key life skills around career, people, money and health.

3. 2,000 hours to learn the ‘nice-to-haves’, like math, history, geography, foreign languages, etc. The key here? Let the child choose the things they are interested in, so they actually learn them.

This doesn’t just give our kids an airplane to fly into adulthood. It gives them a rocket ship!

This is how we change the world

In the old model, where we were encouraged to choose a ‘practical’ path towards getting a job just to get a job, most of us felt hollow. This is why I believe so many adults and kids turn to alcohol, drugs, porn and other numbing distractions. We’re trying to not feel that nagging, hollow place inside of us that is asking, “What are you doing with your life?”

Now think of the people you know who do live from their Genius Zone and Path-of-Purpose. What are they like? Chances are they have that sparkle in their eyes and the vibrant energy and health that comes from the passion of living on-purpose.

We know which future we want for our kids. We want our kids to be happy, healthy and thriving.

So there’s no time to waste. Especially not 22,000 hours of it.

Interested in seeing what an education that focuses on developing each kid’s unique Genius Zone and Path-of-Purpose looks like?

Check out our website and join our next Open House, every Thursday at 8am Pacific register here, or explore our Winter Quarter classes, which begin the week of January 11 (see the lineup).

From the inside out,

Andrew

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Hi, I’m Andrew Freeman, founder of Coherence Education and the Inside-Out approach to education.

I heard the call to help transform education for kids early in life, but I didn’t know how to answer it. So I spent a career in tech instead, at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape and a string of startups. Then Covid hit, and it became obvious that I needed to pull my eight-year-old out of second grade. Since then I’ve been building the kind of school that will prepare him, and thousands of other kids, to thrive in the age of AI.

Every few weeks I publish an article introducing a piece of my upcoming book, due out in early 2027. If you’re a parent who wants something better for your child, or an educator looking for a better place to do your work, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a message.

Together we’ll help children grow into their best human selves and help usher in the coming Harmonic Age.

Thank you.

P.S. Where the numbers come from: A typical U.S. public school runs about 180 days a year at 6.5 to 7 hours a day, which comes to roughly 13,000 to 15,000 hours across grades 1–12 (Pew Research, Education Next). Parents report 4 to 5 hours of homework a week in elementary and middle school and 6 to 8 in high school, which adds another 1,800 to 2,800 hours (NCES). Together that’s roughly 15,000 to 18,000 hours. The college figure assumes a full-time load of about 40 hours a week of class and study over four academic years. These are ballpark numbers that vary by state, school and student.

When I worked in tech in the ‘80s, there was a saying: nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

Back then, every desk had a terminal wired to a “Big Iron” mainframe humming in an air-conditioned room down the hall. No graphical interface, just a blinking green cursor waiting for cryptic commands. IBM owned that world. They were usually the most expensive option, the slowest to implement, and thinner on features than the newcomers. The Fortune 500 picked them anyway.

Why? Because IBM would throw enough people and brute force at any installation that things eventually worked. Even when a project went sideways, IBM was the defensible choice. So nobody got fired.

Until they did.

Microsoft, Apple, Dell and Cisco replaced the terminal-on-every-desk with networked personal computers running friendly, useful software at a fraction of the price. Within a few years, the executive who proposed betting the company on a mainframe was the one being laughed out of the boardroom.

Corporations are risk-averse, and so are most of us. We stick with what worked in the past, and we assume it will keep working.

Technology keeps proving that assumption wrong. It has already erased whole categories of work: the rooms full of human “calculators” who did arithmetic for banks, typists, keypunch operators, travel agents, much of the factory floor. With AI, the list is about to include almost every job you can name.

And yet schools still charge enormous sums to prepare kids for exactly those jobs. And parents still keep their kids in them. It’s an assembly line where the products roll off the end of the conveyor belt into the void.

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Broken AND Irrelevant?

A parent who recently pulled her son out of a mainstream school described the system to me as broken and irrelevant.

Broken is hard to argue with. The US ranks around 32nd in the world in education (World Population Review, 2025) despite spending over $20,000 per student per year. Most teachers will tell you they spend more of the day managing behavior than teaching.

But irrelevant? Could that really be true?

Elon Musk puts it bluntly: “Anything that is digital, which is like someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning.” Whatever you think of his politics, his record of seeing where technology is going is hard to dispute. His net-net:

Moving pixels: high risk. Any role that lives entirely inside a screen, including software engineering, writing, data analysis and digital administration, is exposed, because software scales at a speed nothing physical can match. He calls what’s coming a “supersonic tsunami.”

Moving atoms: lower risk, for now. Plumbing, welding, farming, cooking. Building a robot that can navigate an unpredictable kitchen is far harder than improving an algorithm.

Bottom line: white-collar jobs are going away soon. Blue-collar jobs some number of years later.

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What if the whole idea of a "job" is going away?

AI is taking over the noun jobs, the ones with titles: doctor, lawyer, accountant, electrician. But the people who are truly thriving right now aren’t doing it from inside a job title. They’re verbs. They’re creating, building and leading ventures that come out of their own perspective, passion and genius.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we’ll soon see a single person build a billion-dollar company with zero employees. AI is providing virtual employees that are faster, smarter, harder-working and more reliable than anyone you could hire, at a cost that is close to free. For most of what used to be called a job, that’s the new competition.

Can we imagine that our kids won’t ‘get a job’, and instead they’ll ‘create their own position’?

I believe so.

This is why I believe developing kids’ creativity and their unique genius zones is paramount to ensuring they thrive in the emerging AI reality.

Do We Want Our Kids to be People or Machines?

I know how this question sounds. Of course we want our children to be people. But that begs the question, why are schools training them to be machines?

What are machines great at? Repetitive tasks, speed, recall, math, data analysis, inside-the-box image creation, graphic design, writing, and programming.

What are people great at? Intuition, creativity, empathy, out-of-the-box thinking, leadership, fun, emotional awareness, physical development (we have bodies!), connection with nature, and building community.

So in a typical six-hour school day, how many hours go to the machine list, and how many to the people list?

If you’re seeing it the way I am, schools are training kids to compete against AI on its own playing field. That is not a fair fight.

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But College is Still Required for Success. Right?

Four years of tuition, room, board and books now runs $150,000 to $500,000 or more. And according to the Burning Glass Institute, 52 percent of recent college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. That number is from 2024, before AI started hitting entry-level hiring. [Talent Disrupted, Burning Glass Institute and Strada, 2024]

If a degree no longer buys a golden ticket, and you can learn almost anything for free with AI, YouTube and Google, how much longer will families spend their life savings, or take on a mountain of debt, for a credential that leads to a job at Starbucks?

If you were a student at St. Andrews University in North Carolina in April 2025, you got the news that your school was going to close next week. Within days the campus was wrapped in yellow caution tape and the sports fields wrapped in barbed wire. Sixteen small private colleges closed in 2025. Canaries in the coal mine? [Inside Higher Ed]. In my opinion traditional colleges are at risk of becoming the equivalent of IBM Mainframes.

The Cost of Betting on the Wrong Horse

When the executive who bet against the wrong technology got fired, they can lick their wounds and find another job.

The parent who bets on the traditional path can’t walk away so easily. If it goes wrong, they’re the ones carrying the debt, housing a thirty-year-old, and watching their own retirement slide out a decade or more. They don’t just live with the result. They fund it.

So run the two scenarios honestly.

If you bet on traditional education and you’re wrong, you fund the consequences, possibly for the rest of your life.

If you bet against traditional education and you’re wrong, assuming you pivoted towards developing their human skills, your child will enter adulthood with leadership, conscious communication, entrepreneurship and project management chops, plus have their creativity and intuition intact. Any academic gap they need to close later can be quickly dealt-with in night school.

One of those downsides is survivable. The other isn’t.

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It Takes Courage to Do the Right Thing

The first executives who chose something other than IBM needed courage too. Times had changed and the alternative was clearly better, but they still had to face the prevailing mindset in the room.

If your child is in a school that spends its day teaching machine skills and almost none of it teaching human skills, the obvious move is also the hard one. Especially if they are not thriving.

Step one: pull them out. A child who is getting nothing out of school isn’t standing still; the experience is working against them.

Step two: homeschool, or find the right alternative school. Create a program or find a school that treats human skills as the curriculum, not the extracurricular.

Pulling your kid out of school may sound harsh, impractical, even brutal. But how much further down the path do you want to go once you know where it leads? If you discovered a food you were feeding your child was slowly poisoning them, would you keep serving it?

If you’ve been following this Substack, you know the human skills are what our Inside-Out Education paradigm is built around: intuition and creativity through art, music, writing and intuitive training; each child’s unique genius through mentored, project-based learning; the life skills that actually matter around career, people, money and health; and the community skills of collaborating and teaming up on bigger problems.

And yes, if you’re a parent with a non-thriving kid in a traditional school and you ask me, I will question your decision to keep them there. Not only for what it does to your child’s future, and not only for what it may do to your own financial security. For what the world loses when a child’s unique, human gifts are blocked from ever reaching it.

If you want to see what Inside-Out Education looks like as a school day, come to our Open House, every Thursday at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern.

Hi, I’m Andrew Freeman, founder of Coherence Education and the Inside-Out approach to education.

I heard the call to help transform education for kids early in life, but I didn’t know how to answer it. So I spent a career in tech instead, at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape and a string of startups. Then Covid hit, and it became obvious that I needed to pull my eight-year-old out of second grade. I realized it was time. Since then I’ve been building the kind of school that will prepare him, and thousands of other kids, to thrive in the age of AI.

Every few weeks I publish an article introducing a piece of my upcoming book, due out in late 2026. If you’re a parent who wants something better for your child, or an educator looking for a better place to do your work, I’d love to hear from you. Together we’ll help children grow into their best human selves and help usher in the coming Harmonic Age.

Thank you.

When we transform education, our kids will transform the world.

Help Us Transform Education for Kids

In this special panel edition of The Awakening World on the Global Peace Tribe, Andrew Freeman joins fellow conscious education pioneers Marshall Lefferts, Gabi Jubran, and Annie Margaret for an inspiring conversation about the future of learning — with music from internationally acclaimed vocalist Gina Salā.

Panelists include:

• Andrew Freeman — Founder of Coherence Education, helping children thrive in the Age of AI through Inside-Out Education

• Marshall Lefferts — Author of Cosmometry and Founder of Harmonic Science Alliance

• Gabi Jubran — Founder of HAPPI and co-steward of ILALI, a 22-acre hub for regenerative living in West Sonoma County

• Annie Margaret — Educator and truth seeker bridging nervous system training, expanded consciousness, and human perception

• Lee Kemter — Co-host, joined by members of the International Space Federation

Featured music by Gina Salā — global vocalist, chant leader, and performer whose credits include Cirque du Soleil and the United Nations.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

Do the math. Do the aftermath.

Andrew Freeman, founder of Coherence Education, has spent his career reversing that trend. In this conversation on Signs of the Upwising, Andrew shares his Inside-Out Education model — designed not to standardize children into obedient performers, but to help them discover and develop their innate creativity, curiosity, coherence, and authentic gifts.

This episode explores:

• How our educational system “de-geniuses” children through conformity, competition, and standardized testing

• Why AI is making the old educational model obsolete — and what replaces it

• Why students can no longer simply become “nouns” (lawyer, engineer, accountant) but must become “verbs” — active participants in shaping their own lives

• How project-based mastery, emotional intelligence, creativity, and self-directed learning help children flourish

• Why the one thing AI cannot replace is the spontaneity of human creativity

Education for the world we are actually entering.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

In this conversation with Chelsea Myers of the Brain Crops Podcast, Andrew Freeman — founder of Coherence Education and Master Path School — explores a groundbreaking approach to conscious learning that nurtures emotional intelligence, creativity, and sovereignty in children.

This episode covers:

• The journey that led Andrew to create Coherence Education and Master Path School

• What “coherence” really means and why it matters in today’s world

• Stories of transformation when children learn from a place of alignment and creativity

• Practical ways parents and educators can bring coherence into daily life

• The broader impact conscious education could have on families, communities, and the future of learning

A conversation that bridges philosophy and practice — offering both inspiration and tangible tools for anyone passionate about raising a generation of confident, connected, and resilient young people.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

This episode explores:

• Why every child has a unique Genius Zone waiting to be discovered

• How education can cultivate contribution rather than conformity

• Why creativity, emotional intelligence, and self-leadership are the defining capacities of the future

• How AI is transforming education and why becoming more fully human matters now more than ever

• What it means to design education from the inside out

🔗 Take the Genius Zone Survey: https://go.coherenceeducation.org/genius-zone-questionnaire

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In this live session recorded July 20th, 2024, Andrew Freeman — founder of Coherence Education — introduces his innovative S.P.A.R.C. framework, the philosophy behind Coherence Education:

S.P.A.R.C. stands for:

• S — Spiritual Connection: Cultivating inner wisdom

• P — Project-Based Learning: Real-world creation

• A — Arts: Creative expression

• R — Relationships: Social-emotional intelligence

• C — Community: Collaborative belonging

This session explores:

• How the S.P.A.R.C. framework is transforming education for kids

• Fun exercises and meditations to identify your unique Genius Zone

• How to harness your Genius Zone toward a purposeful, joy-filled future

Guest instructors at Coherence Education have included Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, Lynne McTaggart, and Rev. Michael Beckwith.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

That’s Coherence Education.

In this conversation with Belinda of the Perfect Child Podcast, Andrew Freeman shares what’s possible when we stop educating children for a handful of predetermined occupations and start nurturing their full, expansive potential.

The curriculum at Coherence Education includes money mastery, active listening, storytelling, blindfold vision, entrepreneurship — and direct access to world-renowned wisdom keepers including Lynne McTaggart, Bruce Lipton, and Gregg Braden.

This conversation explores:

• What happens from birth to adulthood that leaves most of us devoid of inspiration and creativity

• Why creating small businesses at age 9 beats a business degree

• How believing in a child’s genius changes everything about how they learn

Your child isn’t broken — the systems are.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

In this conversation with Tim Shields on the Inciting Incident Podcast, Andrew shares how purpose, curiosity, and trusting the unknown led him to create a school where kids are excited to learn and empowered to become the heroes of their own stories.

This episode covers:

• Why traditional education may be suppressing creativity instead of nurturing it

• How helping children uncover their unique genius changes everything

• Why purpose, intuition, and trusting the process create extraordinary lives

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

Together they explore the shift from traditional outside-in schooling to a soul-led, inside-out approach grounded in intuition, passion, and purpose.

This episode covers:

• Why intuitive parenting is the future of education

• How heart coherence unlocks learning and creativity

• The importance of emotional intelligence and self-discovery in childhood

• What’s emerging in Dubai and beyond for holistic, conscious learning

• How Master Path School is preparing children for life, not just for tests

A powerful reminder that every child has genius waiting to be nurtured.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

Heidi shares her Hollywood background and creative journey, while Justin opens up about the short films he’s currently writing and what drives his passion for cinema.

This conversation covers:

• How character and plot drive meaning

• How to nurture your voice as a young screenwriter

• Why storytelling is a transformative tool for students today

This episode is a glimpse into the Screenwriting & Storytelling class at Master Path School — a full-time accredited learning experience where students learn directly from world-class mentors and write stories that matter. https://www.coherenceeducation.org

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

This conversation features:

• Bruce Lipton on the power of choice, joy, and thought patterns

• Gregg Braden on how breath, focus, and feeling regulate our potential

• A moving tribute to the next generation of thriving creators

Inside Master Path School by Coherence Education, children discover their genius through intuitive learning, project-based exploration, and an inside-out model designed to empower the whole child.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

In this heart-opening episode, Andrew Freeman is joined by Kerri Lake — author and animal communicator — and Belle, a Master Path School student, for a deep dive into the unseen world of animal communication.

Together they explore the silent language of presence, energy, and intuitive connection that emerges between humans and animals, especially horses.

This episode explores:

• Growing up spiritually attuned to animals

• How horses ground us and reflect our truth

• What it feels like to be accepted into a herd

• The difference between liberty work and traditional riding

• How intuitive communication can be a gateway to self-discovery

Whether you’re a parent, student, educator, or animal lover, this conversation will awaken your understanding of the sacred bond between children and animals — and how that connection can transform education, healing, and daily life.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

Together they explore:

• How children access purpose through creative expression

• Why art, intuition, and trust are foundational to future-ready education

• The journey from being shut down to reawakening your creative flow

• Ella’s dream of building Soaring Stories — a live circus of imagination and joy

• How families can reclaim education as an inner game of knowing and creating

For every parent, educator, and visionary who believes kids are here to remember, not just memorize.

🔗 Learn more about Allison Paradise: be-the-epicenter.org

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

In this conversation with Gina Noetica of Expanding Consciousness with Gina, Andrew Freeman shares the story and soul behind Masterpath School — an alternative learning community for young people aged 8 to 18, where traditional academics meet intuition, energy work, and spiritual connection.

This episode explores:

• The birth of Masterpath and its soul-led philosophy

• Teaching intuition, remote viewing, and energy healing alongside core subjects

• Activating each child’s unique Genius Zone

• How community impact and spiritual connection shape the curriculum

• Why the future of education is about heart coherence, emotional intelligence, and resilience — not grades

Originally aired on Expanding Consciousness with Gina, hosted by Gina Noetica.

🎥 Watch on YouTube →

Jeff has spent over 20 years pioneering emotional regulation programs for students, teachers, and families across the U.S. and Canada — and his work with HeartMath’s biofeedback tools is changing how we think about what’s teachable in the classroom.

You’ll discover how children can learn to self-regulate in real time, why emotional intelligence is both measurable and developable, and how heart-brain alignment unlocks calm, clarity, and confidence from the inside out.

This conversation grew out of Coherence for Kids — a weekly class at Master Path School taught by Andrew Freeman in collaboration with HeartMath Institute and guests including Lee Holden, Lynne McTaggart, and Rev. Michael Beckwith.

If you believe kids deserve more than test scores, this one’s for you.

🔗 Now enrolling: https://www.coherenceeducation.org

▶️ Watch on YouTube:

In this conversation with Gina Noetica of Expanding Consciousness with Gina, Andrew Freeman shares the vision behind Coherence Education — a global online learning community built around nurturing the whole child: intellectually, emotionally, creatively, and spiritually.

Andrew walks through the evolution of Coherence Education from its early beginnings to a full-time global programme, bringing together world-class teachers and pioneers including Lynne McTaggart, Bruce Lipton, and Gregg Braden.

At the heart of the Coherence Education model are four foundational pillars:

• Intuitive Sight

• Remote Viewing

• Animal Communication

• Energy Healing

These pillars sit within a wider ecosystem that includes emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, creativity, sacred geometry, music, film, communication skills, and community connection.

This conversation explores:

• Awakening children’s innate human potential

• Expanded perception and critical thinking

• Nurturing every child’s Genius Zone

• Cooperation over competition

• Building global communities for the next generation

Originally aired on Expanding Consciousness with Gina, hosted by Gina Noetica — Remote Viewing Teacher, Consciousness Coach, and Quantum Energy Alchemist.

Andrew Freeman, co-founder of Coherence Education, knows firsthand what it means to be an underperforming student. As a teenager, Andrew was mediocre in the classroom. Then everything changed when he discovered Transcendental Meditation. Almost overnight, he became an exceptional student and athlete, going on to compete in two sports in college while excelling in science, mathematics, and accounting.

“After that, everything got easier.”

That personal transformation became the foundation for Coherence Education — a school built around each child’s innate genius rather than a one-size-fits-all system. In this conversation with Brad Szollose, Andrew shares what’s possible when you start with the child first, including taking students on field trips to Egypt to experience history firsthand.

Originally aired on the Awakened Nation Podcast with host Brad Szollose. Watch on YouTube →

Andrew brings a rare combination of backgrounds: a triple major in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Accounting, an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern, and a tech career spanning HP, Microsoft, and Netscape. That experience showed him firsthand how much traditional schools miss — creativity, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and self-leadership.

In this episode: what it means to nurture the whole child, how project-based learning builds real-world skills, and why the Age of AI demands a completely different approach to education.

Originally published on the Alfa Vedic Podcast. Watch on YouTube →

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, my parents threw the occasional cocktail party, and I got a front-row seat to how grown-ups behaved when they thought no one was watching.

Everyone looked fantastic. The men could have walked off the set of Mad Men; the women were Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. The style was impeccable. The behavior was anything but.

The men talked rough to each other, one-upping with their latest business conquest (or other kind of conquest), pinching the women as they passed, trading the latest ethnic joke to a chorus of “ha-ha.” The women rolled their eyes and put up with it, then turned to gossip brutally about whichever woman hadn’t shown up.

I remember it so clearly because my parents thought it would be cute to have their eight-year-old tend bar. So there I stood, pouring hard liquor for adults who guzzled it, feeling like I was watching a dystopian TV show unfold in my own living room. I remember thinking, Is this really what it’s like to be a grown-up? (Yes, if this happened today, someone could rightfully call Child Protective Services.)

College in the ‘80s wasn’t much better. The thing to do on a weekend, as a young man, was go to a bar, get drunk and try to pick up women. I went to bars with live bands because I love music, and I’d stand there aghast at what was happening around me: alcohol-fueled fistfights (sometimes between the young women), and the endless, clueless peacocking of guys trying to get lucky.

Every one of those scenes ran on the same zero-sum game: if I win, you lose. If you win, I lose.

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School taught us the game

School reinforced that belief system at every turn. Students competed against each other on a bell curve for grades, or at tryouts for the varsity team. Land in the top 10%? You got the A, you made the team, you were in the popular crowd. You were a winner. Land in the other 90%? You were a loser, and the winners would never let you forget it.

When you remember that our education system was designed in 1893 to produce efficient factory workers, you can see that this was the perfect design for the job. Competition maximized output and rewarded the alphas.

I’ve always been a gentle soul. Watching rude and mean behavior produced the same reaction in me that I’d had behind that bar at eight years old: a deep concern for the state of humanity, and a strange out-of-body feeling of watching a world in which I couldn’t believe human beings could act so inhumanly.

Then something shifted

Here’s what strikes me now: how far we’ve come.

If you watch mainstream news, we’re more racist and sexist than ever. Open your eyes and actually look around, though, and that is so far from the truth.

In 2018 I was at the Eclipse Festival in central Oregon, solidly in my fifties, surrounded mostly by twenty-somethings. And instead of the alcohol-fueled aggression I remembered from my own twenties, I found masses of young men and women packed into the yoga tent, or soaking up talks on permaculture and tantra. The drug of choice was ecstasy, and although I’ve never tried it, I swear I got a contact high from thousands of people vibrating at the frequency of love. The dancing during the EDM sets was about self-expression and connection, through gentle eye contact and contact improv.

Eating in the café area, I overheard two young men comparing the different styles of yoga and meditation they’d tried and which worked best for them. I thought about my own upbringing, where my peers ridiculed me for my daily meditation practice.

It hit me: we had crossed into a new age. An age where people feel and express love, cooperate rather than dominate, and actively seek to expand their consciousness and raise their vibration.

Is there still aggression, violence, racism and sexism in the world? Of course. But I liken it to the hot spots after a forest fire. They’re still burning, but instead of the whole forest being ablaze, they’re isolated pockets that are gradually cooling. Those hot spots are also the sole focus of mainstream media, so if you’re sitting in the living room with CNN on, that’s all you’ll ever see.

What this means for our kids

Most of the parents I talk to are scared. The future is changing faster than anyone can track, with AI driving a level of acceleration that makes the Internet revolution look gentle by comparison. Parents are worried their kids will be stranded in a future with no place for them.

I believe that is the furthest thing from the truth.

The catch is that our kids can’t do it the old, lazy way: get trained for a technical vocation, collect the paycheck, shuffle the same papers every day, especially in a vocation outside their Genius Zone. We were told constantly to “be practical.” I nearly went the CPA route myself because it promised steady income, and I can tell you there is no job on earth further outside my Genius Zone than accounting.

Those jobs are going, going, gone. AI is already better, faster and cheaper than any human at those technical ‘turn-the-crank’ jobs, and no amount of “practical” will bring them back. And was it really ‘practical’ to become a wage slave in a soulless job anyway?

My friends Marshall Lefferts and Teresa Collins call the next phase of humanity the Harmonic Age, and I can’t think of a better name for it.

In the Harmonic Age, the unconscious automaton has no role. What’s needed instead is exactly what school has spent a century training out of us: intuition, creativity, a developed genius, and the ability to combine it with other people’s.

Kids who have grown up through the four circles of Inside-Out Education — Intuition & Creativity, Genius Zone, Key Life Skills, and Community — are Harmonic Age ready. They won’t compete with AI. They’ll partner with it, using it to accelerate the innovative solutions and human leadership they bring into the world.

The Harmonic Age is waiting to be filled with healthy, joyful geniuses playing a non-zero-sum game: vibrating and harmonizing with one another to create the Eclipse Festival at scale. Not for a long weekend in the Oregon desert, but as the way we live our daily lives.

Our kids are the ones who will build it. Our job is to get out of the way and give them the tools.

Where to begin

Next week’s article is about the concrete steps you can take at home to prepare your kids for the Harmonic Age, whether you homeschool, unschool or send them to a traditional school. In the meantime, try these three this week, one for each of the inner circles:

Intuition & Creativity. Tonight, ask your child a gut-level question with no right answer (”What does this room want to be?” “What’s your body telling you about tomorrow?”), and don’t correct the answer. Just listen. This is the muscle our Align and Shine and Deep Coherence classes train every morning.

Genius Zone. Ask your kids what they’d build if school didn’t exist tomorrow, and write down the first three things they say without comment. Then take the Genius Zone survey together for ten project ideas that match: https://coherenceeducation.org/genius-zone

Life Skills & Community. Let your kids teach you something this week — anything — and treat it as real. Ask questions, get it wrong, let them correct you. Teaching is the fastest route to mastery, and being taken seriously is the fastest route to confidence.

If you’d like to see what this looks like in a live classroom, join us for the Open House this Thursday at 8am Pacific, and have a look at the Fall à la carte classes, which start Monday, September 21st: https://coherenceeducation.org/a-la-carte-classes

The forest is cooling. Let’s raise the kids who’ll plant what grows next.

With love and appreciation, Andrew