6,000 Jam Hotel to Study, Teach Home-Schooling

Time and again, parents who home-school their children have heard they are not equipped to teach in a world of chemistry and physics and calculus. But the killings at a Colorado high school have given them a rejoinder, a terrible illustration that teaching children in living rooms instead of classrooms is the right thing to do.

You could hear it in the hallways of the Disneyland Hotel on Saturday, where 6,000 parents from around Southern California met at the 16th annual Christian Home Educators Convention. Organizers of the three-day event said it was the nation’s largest gathering of home educators since the killings at Columbine told the nation something might be very wrong with public schools.

“All those shootings, that’s why I keep my kids at home,” one parent said. “It brought me to tears. My kids and I watched it on the television,” said another.

“Thank God my children weren’t at that school,” said Char Hodgson of Yorba Linda. To be sure, what she meant was something even broader: Thank God her four children don’t go to public school at all.

“For me, home-schooling started from a purely educational perspective--at 3 my son could add and subtract,” she said. Hodgson saw he was already ahead of children in public school; she also was put off by all the ways her boy, Greg, could be sullied by popular culture. She thought, “I can’t put him in that.”

Organizers said attendance has steadily grown from a few hundred at the first meeting in 1984. This year they turned people away from some events.

Convention organizers were forced to use one level of the hotel’s garage to accommodate all the visitors: Dozens of exhibitors filled the space with religious educational material and textbooks on traditional subjects with a Christian bent.

But the focus was primarily on classes for the parents to learn to teach their children. Teachers and other experts led classes about dating, teaching politics from a Christian standpoint and teaching science.

Speaker Doris Bowers, a former public school teacher, told several hundred parents attending a workshop titled “Science at Home” that they should not even try to reconcile evolutionary biology and the Bible.

She suggested they consider the Bible a backbone for teaching their children about science--about floods and animals and disasters, for example--and use it as a springboard into other material on the Internet or in encyclopedias--sources, she said, parents should be careful to monitor for biased information about natural history.

For years, home-schoolers have heard criticism that they are depriving their children of the structure of an institution and a proper chance to learn social skills among their peers.

But convention organizers and parents said the very reason society can be a hostile place for youngsters is that institutionalized education, by its very definition, means educating to the lowest common denominator and exposing children to things they may not be prepared for. If providing some shelter--some isolation from swearing and pagers and fancy tennis shoes--is the cost of a more secure child, the home-schoolers say, so be it.

“Family is the foundation of society. This is the way it was historically. We did everything at home. We worked at home. We ate at home. We taught our children at home,” said Susan Beatty, who is editor of a bimonthly newsletter about home schooling. Even though it means one parent must stay home, Beatty says it is worth sacrificing a paycheck to hark back to older days.

Harry Beeson, chairman of the Christian Home Educators Assn. of California, which sponsored the convention, said children educated at home, particularly with a Christian orientation, turn out better adjusted and more secure than others. “They are independent. They become leaders. They are not peer dependent,” he said.

Beyond that, home-schoolers say the home simply is better way to stay involved in the lives of their children: Many of the parents at the convention blamed the parents of the two boys who went on the killing spree in Colorado.

“We go into our kids’ bedrooms and know what they are doing,” Beeson said. “Those kids in Colorado were building bombs and their parents didn’t even know it.”

Linda Yardley of Costa Mesa, who home-schools her six children, said the country is better off after Colorado and that, in her words, “we needed it.”

She doesn’t mean she is glad children died, but she figures it draws attention to a faulty public school system and lends credibility to the idea of home schooling. “I’m thankful it happened,” she said.

She realizes it sounds insensitive. But she would lay her hand on the Bible and say the same thing.