At present, between 3% and 4% of the children in America are home schooled - a number that is growing very, very rapidly. Even if public schools were not academic and social nightmares, the microprocessor and communications revolution would cause the decentralization of education and the destruction of the educational monopoly.

The fact is that academic quality can at least be doubled and the cost of education reduced by more than 10-fold by means of Internet and CD-ROM technology. In addition, as children are removed from state schools, these schools can no longer be used as centers of indoctrination and social engineering. Future American education will consist of a mixture of self-taught remote home schools - including grade one through college and even graduate school - and more conventional group schools run by private enterprise at one-tenth the current cost of public education. All will have much higher academic quality.

Public, tax-financed, socialized education will soon disappear. While the tens of millions of personal tragedies that this degraded remnant of socialism has caused can never be reversed, at least this nightmare is finally coming to an end. Across America, by 2020, many public school and university buildings will have been converted to other uses by entrepreneurs who purchased them at auction.

With this transformation will also come an end to the most oppressive and pernicious of America's tax systems. Property taxes, whereby each home owner must buy his home again from the state, year by year, regardless of current income and under threat of seizure of his home by force if he cannot pay, are an outrage - an outrage that has only been possible by self-serving socialist appeals "on behalf of the children.'' The bitter irony is that the schools built "for the children'' have ultimately become a net destructive force in their young lives.

I have had the privilege of watching an unusual experiment that demonstrates the pressure building in America for educational change. When the six children in our family home school (ages 12, 10, 8, 6, 6, and 1) lost their mother 10 years ago, I converted their home school into a self-teaching school with no teacher at all. I have spent less than 10 minutes per day on this school during the past 10 years - and its graduates are outperforming most of their peers in college and beyond.

Four years ago, these children started putting their school on CD-ROMs in such a way that it and all of its books and teaching materials could be inexpensively communicated to other families. They were helped in this by several family friends. For the past two years, the children have marketed this "Robinson Curriculum'' on 22 CD-ROMs to the home school community. Their entire advertising budget has been approximately $150,000 - and they now have about 30,000 students. That is $5 to find and sell to each student!

While public school costs are over $5,000 per student year and average home school costs are about $500 per student year, teaching with the Robinson Curriculum costs about $50 per student year. It is available for $195, postage paid, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, Oregon 97523.

While this story, even when told in detail, is a remarkable one, it is not a story of geniuses and revolutionary new ideas. It is largely a story of an education industry which has become so ridiculously ineffective and costly that six farm kids with a good work ethic and about a year of actual effort can blow a noticeable hole in it. Their "school'' is now larger in number of students than most American universities.

How does this compare, however, with conventional wisdom? Are there not numerous reports that computer education products and private education businesses have had very poor financial results? Yes, but the reason is that most of these businesses so far have been designed by "educators'' whose ideas are derived from either the public school system or the computer game markets. Neither of these works.

It is traditional educational methods that work. These were developed by scholars during the past two millennia and adopted in the Eng-lish-speaking world during the past five centuries - all before the recent socialist school failures. Those methods - delivered inexpensively and effectively by 21st century technology - are superb. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and helped bring an information miracle to every home. Now public school "dropouts'' can extend this miracle using the PCs and Internet to obtain and deliver first-class education.