#192: The Unencumbered Child: Coherence Education with Andrew Freeman
A school where every hour moves a child forward, and the curriculum bends to the child.
Christine met Andrew Freeman at the Heartland Gathering in Nebraska, minutes after she taught a session on conscious parenting: how to see a child's unique essence and bring it forward, and how to unwind what in ourselves would copy-paste the culture we grew up in onto our kids. Andrew walked up afterward and told her about Coherence Education, the accredited school he founded for children from 8 to 18. Coherence is Christine's word of the year, the thread running through The Mystic Heart of Easter and Mantra, Tantra, Ayahuasca. An unfragmented interior spends less energy fighting what hides in the shadows, and that energy goes to creativity and play.
Andrew's own coherence began at 15, when his father, a conservative Midwestern doctor, invited him to a Transcendental Meditation class. He had been a dreamy kid who couldn't keep score in his own tennis matches. Meditation focused his mind, and school and sports turned easy. He daydreamed through most of his classes anyway, went on to a triple major in computer science, math and accounting, and earned an MBA at Kellogg, where he and Christine share an alma mater. Walking through his college dorm one day, he heard a voice say he would transform education for kids. He spent the next decades in tech, and kept drifting into teaching roles. At Hewlett-Packard he took over the lowest-rated training department in the company, whose product was disc drives, and made it the top-rated one with skits, Jeopardy-style finals and songs he wrote on guitar.
The school itself began with his child Jamie, who was eight when COVID arrived and already miserable in a classroom. Andrew joined an underground learning pod in Santa Cruz, then called Nassim Haramein and asked to build a kids' version of his science course. Haramein hired him as director of education. The first class of the new school was Coherence for Kids, taught with HeartMath, Lynne McTaggart, Michael Bernard Beckwith and Foster Gamble. Four years in, Coherence Education has 40 full-time students in 13 countries, all in one online room from age 8 to 18. Andrew calls it an accredited Hogwarts: students earn accredited credit while they study remote viewing and quantum energy healing.
Each child's path starts with three questions. What do you love so much you lose track of time? What comes so easily to you that you can't understand why your friends struggle with it? What in the world makes you very happy, very mad or very sad? The answers go into AI, which proposes ten projects inside the child's genius zone. When Andrew ran his own answers, the first suggestion was to start an alternative school. Every student also gets a weekly life coach, because Andrew treats each child the way an executive coach treats a Fortune 500 leader, with a targeted plan built on their strengths.
Andrew calls the model SPARC: spiritual connection, project-based learning, arts, relationships and community. He considers spiritual connection the cornerstone. Students study the physics of the unified field for the left brain, and meet the field directly through meditation, animal communication and blindfold training. One deadpan student on the spectrum stayed skeptical until he could name the color of any paper held behind his head. The next morning he greeted everyone with an exuberance his mother emailed about.
The phrase "the unencumbered child" came out of Christine's Heartland talk. Christine describes trauma as anything the nervous system can't integrate in real time, which leaves fragments carved out of the self, and children can learn early to notice that moment and ask for help. Andrew sees the encumbrance in competition, too. His school has no grades, and the students cheer each other's projects. About a third of them separated from mainstream school like oil from water, and he tells of one boy, living with his mother in their car, who arrived defensive and became a leader within months. Families take the connected communication classes alongside their kids, in the spirit of the Suzuki method Christine raised her own children with, and Ray Castellino's principle that in a healthy family everyone's needs matter equally. School choice programs in ten states, Texas among them, now cover tuition, and Andrew is aiming for two million children by 2030.
Christine closes the episode with Khalil Gibran's "On Children" and an invitation to The Atmosphere of Early Childhood, a 12-minute meditation you do lying down. It lets you feel a field of total welcome and unconditional love for your own inner child, and gives you a taste of what it would be like to hand that field to a child in your life. You'll find it free on the meditations page at christinemariemason.com.
About Andrew Freeman
Andrew Freeman is the founder and director of Coherence Education and Master Path School. He triple-majored in computer science, math and accounting while playing varsity basketball and tennis, earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and held leadership roles at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape and several startups. He is scaling Coherence Education's accredited full-time program toward a licensing model and looking for teachers, partners and funders. His book, Turning Education Inside Out: How to raise a child who thrives in the age of AI, by starting with who they already are, comes out November 30, 2026.
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