Again, thank you. I appreciate your time.
I do believe you are referring to the "Enable sign-up for membership" under General Settings.
If so, that does allow a person to sign up for the membership, but it does not automatically make them a member.
I still need to go into admin > users & there I find two drop down menu's. One for 'sign-up' which will say 'educator' but the drop-down directly below is called 'membership' and needs to be changed from 'not member' to 'educator' by an administrator.
That is the step I'm trying to skip. I see on the forums some people were able to accomplish this on 4.1 and I attempted to follow those instructions, but my 4.5 reigister.php does not have the same line of text that was modified on the 4.1 versions.
http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=13641&page=2&highlight=moderated+ membership