CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Christian home schoolers are going to gather later this month in Cincinnati and will hear from the founder of a creationist museum that takes the Bible literally. Ken Ham scorns the theory of evolution and contends dinosaurs and humans lived alongside each other 6,000 years ago. It is scientific heresy. But his followers would contend Ham's message is Christian orthodoxy straight from the Book of Genesis.
Homeschooling caught on in the 1980s, in part because some Christians found the public schools too secular. The also was a separate counter-cultural branch of the home schooling movement -- a less religious group who saw the public schools as too rigid and lacking creativity. Researchers say there is third wave, the mainstreamers, who use the Internet and come from every walk of life.
In all, there are an estimated two million American children being home schooled, a number split between Christians and those who feel that conventional schooling causes harm. In the late 1990s, there were about 750,000 home schooled children.
The creationist museum is on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, and is set to open in June on a 50-acre site. Ham is an Australian who settled in the Cincinnati area and has become an active speaker on the Christian circuit. His biography says he once taught science. He will be a featured speaker and is slated to address rebuilding the culture. The schedule of workshops and sessions is HERE.
The home school convention is scheduled for Landmark Christian, which has a large campus in Cincinnati's northern suburbs. Bios of the speakers are HERE. An online article in SynergyField.com about the history of homeschooling says the Christians took to it in the 1980s because tax law changes forced many small sectarian schools to close.
"Suddenly, the parents of the students attending these schools were forced with a choice between government school attendance and homeschooling. For many, this wasn't a choice at all, and these Christian families become part of a large second wave of homeschooling. Christian curriculum providers, already well-established businesses that had just lost a large chunk of their original market, followed the money and easily courted the new market of homeschooling parents."
Thank you for acknowledging that there is a sizable secular side to the homeschooling movement. I educated my daughters at home because the public schools were woefully inadequate. Through homeschooling I met hundreds of smart, wise, and worldy parents doing a great job of raising their children. The Christian creationists make homeschooling seem silly and scary--but it is only they who are silly and scary.
ReplyDeleteFYI: Not all homeschoolers are Christian creationists.
ReplyDeleteMy family homeschools and we are Pastafarians. Homeschooling allows us to teach evolution (along with the theory that global warming is a direct result of the decline in pirates) according to the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. http://www.venganza.org
Can I get a "ramen" from the audience?
The theory of creation has been around for thousands of years while the idea of evolution has been around only a couple of hundred years. I'm not saying there is no truth in evolution, but we are always learning new things and finding things to be false that we previously thought true and vice versa. Why not give the guy's Museum some consideration. At least he is standing up for what he believes in! And that is something as a homeschooling Mom I want to impart on my kids! My kids will learn to choose for themselves when the time is right~ For now we teach creation as that is what the Bible teaches and they are young, but later we will introduce evolution as a possible way God used to create the world! Anyways, my point is just because we are Christian homeschoolers, doesn't make us fanatics or looney tunes! =)
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