CHILD EDUCATION. Heartstart Vs Headstart

In the early 1990’s the older President Bush invested 3 billion dollars on the national Headstart program. He was sold on the idea that teaching early literacy to pre-school kids would give them a headstart in primary school, and in that process, move the United States of America to the forefront of global education.

During that same period we pulled our own kids out of the state schooling system, and home-schooled them ourselves. We began by going in the opposite direction to the national Headstart program by abandoning structured learning inside a classroom. We threw out all the prescribed text books and concentrated on a purely oral-based educational program. We instilled a work ethic by making them help with household chores each morning, then left them to run free and engage in their own pursuits for the rest of each day. We encouraged arts and crafts and hiking and camping. Television viewing had to include time spent watching documentaries and current events. They were only introduced to reading and writing at puberty.

Below is a composition written by our youngest daughter. She is 13 years old. Exactly one year ago she was entirely illiterate and had to start with a first grade primer. ie The cat sat on the mat. Three months later she, just like her older siblings had done, was reading Harry Potter.
Her latest of many compositions was penned recently. I did not edit a single comma. It recounts a dream she had. It is way ahead of the best work I ever did in my final year in high school, after twelve years of professional instruction.
Her erudition, as with all m my kids in the Heartstart program, flies in the face of conventional child education wisdom, and begs the question on what is the best methodology to awaken the creative potential of script-based communication. It cost the state almost zero dollars.

[size=150]WINTER DREAM[/size]
By Zarina Pringle

A bleak time it is… winter, all plant life deserts its summer lushness for a harsh but equal beauty
I walk through a forest of the slender naked limbs of tall trees draped in the white silk vale of powdery snow which so reminds me of a deserted home covered in dust sheets until summer’s sun shines again

My long draped cloak swirls and whips in the frigid silver wind that is winter’s howl
It is the chirp of birds the scurrying of mice the goodbye song to summers warmth

Suddenly the prowl of a wolf takes command of the atmosphere
And in a shuffle of feet and a spray of snow, the blood of a stag stains the stark snow
I crouch in a thicket and watch fearfully as the event unravels

The white stag has given himself up to nature’s wrath, his neck clutched tightly in the wolf’s vice-like jaw
His dead black eyes stare into mine through the thicket as the wolf proclaims his victory by taking the first bite
The pack moves in to taste the meat of victory

They do not smell me yet, but still fear bites into me sharper than any fang as I watch the gory spectacle. I find myself both repulsed and yet strangely envious of their power over the wood.
I try to remain calm but I realize that I’m holding my breath, I bite down on my lip and clutch my fists to keep from trembling, and I assure myself that the smell of the stag over powers my own, and that they will take what is remaining of the carcass and leave.

Soon enough they do leave, back the way they had come, like a harsh grey wind with fur and fangs, all but one. It is a female by the looks of it, she seamed reluctant to follow the others. Her icy blue eyes scanned the area sending chills up my spine; they passed over the thicket in witch I remained hidden amongst the rotted leaves and soft snow. My heart pounded so hard I was half afraid she would hear it. Panic surged through my entire body; I knew that if she found me she would signal her pack, I would not stand a chance, I would be torn from limb to limb and end up in the stomach of a pack of the notoriously vicious grey wolves.

After a minute of waiting there, scarcely breathing for fear of being heard, I tilted my head slightly upward to see if she had gone, but to my utter horror she remained, and worse still her eyes locked with mine, in that one instant in witch a looked up, at that moment I knew she had discovered me.

I knew I could not stay there and wait for her to come to me like a paralyzed rabbit, if my life was destined to end this way, I would not wait for my end to come to me but rather go to it instead. Against my rational judgment and with my fists clutched in determination and my mind clear in resolve, I rushed out of my hiding place, brambles scratching my face and arms, and there I stood, out in the open, the rest of the world seamed to evaporate around me, all that existed was myself the wood and that wolf.

I forced myself to look her dead in the eye, well aware that this is the opposite of what one should normally do when faced with a wolf as this is a sign that you are challenging them, but I looked on in defiance, pouring into her with all my might all the strength and will that I had collected throughout every hardship in my life willing her to leave. She did not move at first, nor did I, we only gazed at one another, both of use waiting for the other to falter. I had been taught that wolves were of a lesser race than humans, but I knew then that in reality it was quite the contrary, I could see in her sapphire eyes that she was a wise soul, and that she was testing me as her equal. And I refused to bend.

Finely she bore her teeth, ivory and as sharp as blades. Her face twisted in a snarl, wrinkling her blood stained muzzle. It was without a doubt an intimidating form, but still I would not flinch.

And all at once the fierceness faded from her face, and I could have sworn on my mother’s life that I saw her give a curt nod of respect and recognition just before she turned and disappeared into the snow clad forest.

Honestly, I must say that’s quite lovely.

How do you figure that delaying instruction in reading/writing helps to produce such results? Do you think a study could be done to support your ideas?

To me, it seems to speak of a deep alienation the Child must be feeling.

Puberty is never fun.

I found in my travels in rural Africa forty years ago, where script learning had yet to arrive, that the average pubertal initiate had an oral vocabulary nearly three times as rich as their script-indoctrinated counter-parts. Their memories and general information about life did not come from books, or data stored in libraries and so, in order to gain interested attention from others, each child was forced to pay more attention to personal observations and to memorize a rich store of tribal lore by heart. Consequently their verbal interactions were rich in the use of original observations, spiced with well-chosen metaphor.

I believe that premature script exposure artificializes the world for the budding psyche. Instead of observing Nature and life directly and forming their own early opinions on it, which they can later compare to that of our finest literary masters, and thereby gain a better sense of self-perspective, the state system is prematurely forcing them into a prescribed structured form of largely mechanized and regulated consciousness. Emphasis is made on correcting their endless mistakes in grammar and math, thus stilting their self-confidence and self-expression even further. As a result and all sense of spontaneity, originality and poetic expression is lost.

Deciphering and interpreting the meaning of scripture is a significant advance in our evolution of consciousness. It has allowed technoliogy to be broadcats world-wide. At the same time it is also a two-edged sword that has made the world a far more dangerous place to live in, than when communication exchanges were purely oral. Only students with some degree of confidence in their own intelligence should be exposed to its dramatric influence on the human psyche. Preschool kids may well learmn to quickly mimic reading and writing, but they hardly know what the effect written words have on their consciousness.

We are living in a world today in which all of us are experiencing the end result of centuries of systematic scriptural indoctrination. From a religious prespective that brain washing blinded us to the Truths of other Faiths and made us fanatical about our own

The current mass education system, which has thankfully moved script indoctrination away from a purely religious perspective, to concentrate on physics, may work well enough to place a reasonably literate work-force on the mass production line – but it leaves us largely robotic in our responses and attitude to the vibrant world that surrounds us.

From this broad perspective, I believe that by incarserating children inside classrooms at ever younger ages, for six hours a day for twelve years and more, we are investing our collective time and effort in an educational methodology that borders on the criminal abuse of the human genius potential.

In support of these harsh criticisms, President Bush’s three billion dollar Headstart program, after a dozen years of application, has done absolutely nothing to improve school test results. In fact education in America is at an all time low. Less than 1% excell at exams. 40% drop out. The remainder are mediocre students. Cheating at exams has become pandemic. As a result increasing parents across the nation are opting for home-schooling.

General Colin Powel, ex-secretary of State, made an interesting observation. He said that a good idea has no power until it has an influential champion. We do not have that as yet. In the meantime our Global Stewardship Foundation is doing the best it can to gain attention. We believe that our home-school program, once applied to a larger study group, will produce the same results with other families. In the meantime we are busy enlarging our training facility in Nevada in order to accommodate small family groups who can come and stay for several weeks of grounding in applying the Heartstart method.

Heartstart requires only three years of text book study after puberty for less than one hour a day before matriculation. Parental supervision is only peripheral. Once each child has orally grasped the basic mechanics of grammar and mathematics (around the twelfth year) they tutor themselves all the way to matriculation without help from anything more than the internet.

We place a great emphasis on family values and personal ethical behavior in the pre-pubertal years. This includes establishing a strong chore-based work ethic, conscientious arts and craftsmanship, and a metaphysical belief in the natural laws of cause and effect - what goes around comes around. These parentally guided pre-literate disciplines makes them strictly honest with themselves and their relationship to others. The net results in national exams have put their marks, including science and maths, in the top ten percentile.

Preposterous as it may sound to many, we feel that similar experiments like ours in home-schooling, will eventually prove that the artificial nature, vast expense and inconvenience of the current school system can be scrapped. This will be of great benefit to poor countries who are currently trying to ape our system, and consequently have no hope of ever leveling the educational playing field.

Self-taught global children raised in the sanctity of their own home, have a broader, more natural and less artificial sense of their own intelligence and self-worth. Their family values remain untarnished by undue peer-group influence.

We do not agree that their socializing skills are impaired by staying at home. Humans are not only naturally intellectually curious and innately creative, they are naturally gregarious as well. Our kids have no trouble relating to others.

This one example from Zarina, who trained herself to read and write inside one year, while religiously doing her share of the household chores and practicing her art work, should make many parents, who despair over the present performance of their children at state schools, sit up and take heart. They do not need to be highly educated themselves, just highly principled in applying sound family values. Well loved kids will do the rest.
We have proved that with all seven kids during the past twenty years of application.

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Using case studies to try and make a point for homeschooling over public schooling is not a good idea because while your daughter may have excelled in certain academic and creative areas this may not be the case for all children. And yes, some studies show that children may receive a better academic education through home schooling, but going to school (be it either private or public) is also about maturing socially, and many of the children who are home schooled do not develop the necessary social skills to maneuver around the world outside of school.

The primary solution to this problem is not to start taking kids out of public school but to modify the public school system which is in desperate need of an overhaul ever since George W. put the No Child Left Behind Act into effect.

All seven of our kids have benefited in imaginative literary composition via late introduction to text-book instruction. All of them have also excelled in maths and science via lsitening only to oral instruction, prior to text book study. Their IQ;s are all normal. There is no reason to suppose that other kids will not produce the same results.

The difference in scholastic perfromance lies not in intellectual intelligence, but in stunted emotional and social intelligence, which robs them of motivation.

My own twelve year experience in a huge co-ed school leads me to disagree heartily. All I saw were gangs and small exclusive cliques. Nobody ever had more than two or three close friends. Kids from poor families suffered material shame in comparson to rich kids. Never saw much love anywhere until drugs came along in the '60’s to jerk us out of the rut. The only community skill that I saw being exercised on a mass scale was in how to get some sex. In none of my grades did I ever see more than one kid who was a true scholar. I can go on and on about a predominance of unsavory peer-group pressures…cheating at exams, lying in order to play hooky etc etc.

The primary problem is that tutoring more than ten or twelve kids at a time is a chronic waster of time and money. And as the global population expands exponentially, the crowding in classrooms is going to get worse. The plain fact is that the Iron Age schooling system has become dangerously redundant in the face of a whole new global paradigm. Mass change if direction is urgently needed.

Parents are the first and best teachers for any kids. The Heartstart program shows that parents need little or no academic qualifications to produce outstanding students. Instil sound family values, look after their emotional and social intelligence and their intellectual intelligence surfaces if its own accord. We have direct proof of that.

children need both headstart and heartstart. The question is how much, and when . . . and it ALWAYS deepends on the child.

I congratulate you magnetman for trying something not just new (because new doesn’t always mean good) but something new AND well thought out and prepared. That is inspiring, since I hope to have children in the next 5 years and start figuring out how to raise happy healthy spiritual children.

You hit on a key word there. One that is central to the success of our program.

Spirituality.

Encouraging spiritual intelligence is the magical key to sound emotional intellgence, social intelligence and intellectual intelligence.

The consensus of mass opinion in each of our Ages has been based on how we approach metaphysical states of consciousness.

In the Stone Age it was via animism.
In the Bronze Age, via shamanism and ancestral or totemic worship.
In the Iron Age it was via intense scriptural indoctrination.
In the Steel Age it has been via scientific determination - which has more or less negated metaphsyical influences.
In the new Nuclear Age the global consensus is gradually moving towards a more ontological stance.

Educated people are becoming more interested in states of self-realization than in material gain.

From infancy we have encouraged our children to become meta-normally conscious of the natural Laws of Cause and Effect that operate all around us. This modern form of superstition has made them deeply conscious, not only of the effect of their own actions on others, but also of the effect their thoughts tend to create.
This self- policed form of spirituality is now deeply seated and has made them strictly honest in all other aspects of their lives. They strive in everything, even mundane chores, to achieve a degree of excellence. Their almost perfect school test marks reflect this.

and more… :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:
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regards, Absterted87