Christian Home Schoolers Heading For Ohio: Creationist Leader Is Speaker

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."