When I was five years old, I was tested for IQ and socialization skills. My mother wanted to start me in third grade rather than first grade, since I was reading at a seventh-grade level and doing beginning algebra as a game when we were going someplace in the car. My IQ was high enough to qualify for advanced placement, but because I had been raised in a household which encouraged discussion and reading as opposed to playing with toys, I flunked the socialization test! All I wanted to do was talk to the administrator of the test, and he had no way to score that.
I was excited to start school anyway. However, my excitement was soon dimmed. I received a workbook which went along with the first-grade reader. “See Spot run,” was hardly a challenge for me, but I liked the workbook and finished it the same day. Unfortunately, my teacher made me erase the whole workbook and re-do it along with my classmates.
A reader of this column, Monica L, wrote in after reading my previous articles on Indigo Children to say that although she liked my presentation on the subject, she felt I should take a closer look at the concept of homeschooling. She directed me to the work of John Holt, whose book, “Teach Your Own,” had helped her decide to homeschool her son, David.
At the point where she read Holt’s book, in the early 90s, she was in a quandary. She had sent her son to an expensive Montessori-based private preschool the previous year and had felt good about the decision when David was four. However, Monica reports, “When David got to kindergarten, he was already reading fourth-grade books, yet they had him recite the alphabet with the other children. He was already multiplying 4 times 8 in his head and yet the school insisted that he do worksheets of 1 plus 1. To this day he still does not like math.”
She decided to homeschool David. She tells me that far from being a restrictive atmosphere, homeschooling can be very freeing, as parents form cooperative groups which share some classes and take field trips together. The classes Monica remembers her son sharing cooperatively include drawing, painting, sculpting, piano, speech, drama, chess, journalism and laboratory experiments in chemistry. When David began to chafe at restrictions within the homeschooling environment, Monica found that he qualified to enroll in community college classes for dual credit, both high school and college.
David is now 17. He has created web sites for two homeschooling cooperatives and now is retained by Best Buys as a consultant. His scores on national tests are high, and this is consistently found in homeschooled children. Their average scores run higher than those of children taught in public schools.
Monica makes a great case for homeschooling. Her one concern about homeschooling is that almost all of those parents interested in homeschooling are fundamentalist Christians in terms of their belief system. Indigo Children seldom are able to deal with the dogmatic and illogical nature of conservative Christianity and David is no exception. It was at David’s request that he switched from home education to community college education. His problems were with the dogma taught at the cooperative classes.
The Confederation sources which I channel do not distinguish between homeschooling and public schooling but suggest that all schooling has the tendency to include not only simple facts but also a biased presentation of those facts. Therefore they suggest that the most important thing for parents of Indigo Children to provide for their kids is a daily spiritual practice.
For parents who are comfortable in a religious environment, that practice will likely be Bible study and other doctrinally oriented material. For other, less conventional parents, that spiritual practice may include silent meditation and any readings or songs which are helpful to the growing children.
The reason for this lack of interest in formal education by the Confederation is that their point of view looks at the essential soul nature of human beings rather than the outer picture of education, socialization and progress through an arbitrary set of school lessons. When the Confederation speaks of education, the education they are interested in aiding us with is the uncovering of the true nature of ourselves.
Homeschooling is a small movement so far. Perhaps 20,000 children in the United States are currently being homeschooled. Using cooperatives, the homeschooled child receives the kind of diverse learning experience which used to be common in one-room schoolhouses, where all ages were taught by one teacher.
It can well be argued that more true socialization takes place in such an atmosphere than in a conventional school where kids are placed in a track and usually stay in that track, taking a different curriculum than other tracks and meeting no one outside that small group of people who are all one age.
Further, John Holt reports that the tracks “correlate perfectly with family income and social status; the richest or most socially prominent kids in the top track, the next richest in the next, and so on down to the poorest kids in the bottom track.” Clearly, this is an unfair and self-limiting system of teaching.
Holt reported one case where a teacher was called on the carpet by her principal for awarding top grades to a couple of her slow-track students. She said that her two students were doing excellent work. The teacher was told that she must be mistaken, for there were no good students in her track. When the teacher looked back to see when these kids had been assigned to their track, she found that it was at the first level at which they entered the system, and not because of testing but because of how the children presented as class, race and so forth.
I greatly appreciate Monica’s comments on homeschooling. In looking into the sources she recommended, which include John Holt’s work and also Manfred Zysk’s, I could see that there is nothing simple about the decisions which parents of today’s special children must make concerning their kid’s education.
An easily overlooked aspect of Indigo Children is that they are as much teachers as they are students. They incarnated here, according to the Q’uo group which I channel, as brand-new graduates of Earth’s current “school for souls”. However when they got to “heaven” and could choose what they wished to do next, they wanted to come back to Earth and help everyone else graduate. Almost every child born now fits this description.
What is it like to live according to the values of “heaven”? The Confederation talks about this in different terms - third density for Earth and fourth density for heaven - but these terms mean the same thing, roughly. They say that in fourth density, which they also call the Density of Love, the truth is seen by all.
Everyone’s thoughts are known to everyone else. There is a tremendous freedom in not having to hide anything about yourself. When all one’s imperfections are known, and one is accepted without reservation anyway, life becomes much more low-stress! All ages, races and sexual orientations become harmonized. People accommodate each other’s quirks.
The Indigo Children just came from that free and accepting environment. Then they hit the strictly held judgments of Earth. Most of these judgments are incorrect, to a logical mind. Men are not better than women; nor are women better than men, for instance. One can extrapolate from here to see how Indigo Children find our prejudices quaint. They tend not to wish to obey for usually solid reasons.
We who are raising these children need to become much more ready to be taught by them. They have lessons to teach us about being present, being real and being authentic.
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. If you are dealing with one of these very special children, I salute you and wish you great fortune in the quest to offer the best possible environment to your child. Know always that your first and greatest teaching is your presence, your essence, your love and your song.