EDUCATION & CAREERS: De-Schooling the Schools

Home schooling is going mainstream. Home-schooling parents select home schooling believing it gives their kids a better education.

Home school parents also can rest easy about their kids' college future. For starters, home school children do better on their SAT scores: 1093 average versus 1020 for public school kids.

The future requires just-in-time learning where students can "dial a tutor" - a life mentor - anywhere in cyberspace. Mass education can never compete with that, and it inevitably will be replaced by individualized, lifelong e-learning via the Web.

In many homes, the PC long ago displaced encyclopedias, dictionaries, and textbooks as the best learning resource. Two-thirds of children with a PC at home use it to do homework and 85 percent of them complete assignments with information found online.

Online learning won't just replace schools but make them irrelevant. The public education system is in catastrophic need of change and higher education is fossilized.

Online learning will become a distinguishing mark of the Web Lifestyle family because "Web-Gen" kids and keyboards are such a natural fit. What about yours?