you will be working there, won't you? -- take a few moments to reflect on how well the market has provided a wide selection of food and shelter for the people who have no other choice but the shelter or the street.

Then apply that thought to children whose futures, whose whole lives, will depend on at least being able to read, write and do simple math. Go ahead, throw them to the lions. They're somebody else's kids. Who cares?

We can have a discussion on how this relates to the notion of America as "a Christian nation", and how much liberals hate religion, another time.

When you say that people's families have a lot to do with their futures, you've said a mouthful. When children from disadvantaged and possibly unstable families are offered no other chance, no other way, no other example, no other window... well, prepare for a tax hike. Prisons are expensive.

The point is not whether George Bush is smarter or Bill Gates is stupider, but that both of their families could entertain the thought of being able to afford to send them to Yale and Harvard in the first place. It implies a level of security and intellectual enrichment that goes to the very heart of this discussion.

Home schooling in the 18th and 19th centuries was one thing. You want people setting up chemistry and biology labs in their garages and apartments?

You want to make sure that everyone has the technology available for cyberschool? Or should that, like everything else, only be available to the people who can afford it? You want to deal with a society in which children don't have real contact with each other, but only "talk" like this, with no eye contact, no nuance, and no experience working together in the flesh? You think that that would be an improvement? You want a world in which no one will ever have the chance to ask a child, "Honey, where did you get that burn?" because no one will ever see him?

We already have enough "failure to thrive" cases without encouraging social isolation to satisfy the market.

I know a lot of homeschoolers, Tom. I know which ones thrive, and why. It's a full-time job and it needs to be done by people who are themselves willing to continually augment their own educations. It also takes people who have the stamina to set up and run multiple group activities in cooperation with other families to make sure their children's social learning needs are met. Do you homeschool, Tom? Why not?

I know some cyberschool families too. Some of their kids can't read, but it takes a while for the teachers to twig to this, because they never clap eyes on the kids. Nor do they understand how much of the work is being done with continuous prompts from the parent because they aren't there to witness that either. Right now, I've got an issue with the parent of a cyberschool kid who wants me to be the truant officer for her teenager, and turn him in when he comes to the library to check stuff out when he's supposed to be home doing school work. (The answer I have for her is "No". I'm not his guardian, and there are laws that keep me from restricting his access without a court order.) Why isn't she supervising him herself? Because she's at work. There's a lot of this. The kid is getting an education, but it's not the one he's supposed to be getting.

The market is making its adjustments, all right. Right on their little heads.

You suggest that ignorance and poverty are a suitable fate for an indeterminate number of children, though I'm sure your children are not among them, for the good of Business. Welcome to the Gilded Age.