Check out part 1 and part 2 of this discussion on indigo children.

Part Three

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 that day. Unfortunately, my teacher made me erase the whole workbook and re-do it along with my classmates.

A reader of this column 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, she 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 she 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 enrol 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. This is consistently found in homeschooled children. Their average scores run higher than those of children taught in public schools.

This reader 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 being 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 judged by the parents to be helpful to their growing children.

From my channeling sources’ point of view, education is about encouraging the essential soul nature in children rather than about socialization and progress through an arbitrary set of school lessons. When the Confederation entities whom I channel speak of education, the education they are interested in aiding us with is the uncovering of the true nature of ourselves.