AI Just Turned School Into an Unwinnable Game — Here's How We Fix It

School is training kids for jobs that will soon no longer exist. There's a way out. I'm calling it Inside-Out Education. But we'll need to pivot fast.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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