Grade school will not escape.

Recent studies now confirm what I,  with my omnipotent wisdom, have always known. Home schooled children (HSCs) do as well or better in high school and college than children that attend public or private schools. And further, home schooling does not create a socially inept child. Some public schools are now even willing to share their lesson plans and materials with parents who elect to teach their children at home - which they should because the parents pay taxes to produce the materials anyway. Some experts claim there are 1.4 million HSC in America.

Why not? It does not take a master observer to see that 8 years of grade school can be done in 4 years. And a visit to any grade school and a few discussions with the teachers will set a person straight on how many really good teachers there are. Not that they do not try, but local regulations and legal protocol, no doubt, get in the way of much education. Education has been effectively gridlocked by the few imposing their will on the many. Grade school teachers and many high school teachers will tell you they are babysitters with a college degree and a good pension-and members of a union that is satisfied with the status quo.  At home if the HSC acts up, you can make them run 6 laps around the house, but at school punishment for misbehaving is trivial and enforcement is trivialer.

And the punishment at many schools is nonsensical. When a son of mine skipped school for one day, the school punished him by suspending him from school for 3 more school days. He was happy? And when I confronted the school with this bit of administration irony, they did not understand.

I do not have young children in school any more. If I did, I wish I would have the courage to take them out and educate them at home. It takes courage to swim upstream. It is always so much easier to go down with the current. The main reason that I would want to teach the children at home is to focus on teaching the children "how" to learn new stuff, not "how" much I can teach them about old stuff. Yes, it is an educational paraphrase of the "teach a person how to fish is better than giving a person a fish" concept. It is also a recognition that today's younger generation will have to learn several different knowledge-careers in their life-the real separator will be knowing how to learn.

Schools for the most part still focus on teaching material other people have already discovered rather than teaching children how to discover new material for themselves. A bit of the former is understandable, but a lot of the latter is genuine education. It is a cliche that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, yet that is precisely what we do in most educational institutions.

More on the Internet and education to come. From yesterday, I fixed the link on the VC funded Udacity. It is www.udacity.com. Take a look. If you wish to be a part, go work for them. They are the future.