I'll bet this has happened to you. There was a movie you wanted to see, and it was playing at a theater you'd never been to. When you finally found it, you had to pay a small fortune for your ticket and popcorn - only to find the theater crowded and noisy, and then land in a broken-down seat too close to the screen.

Most of us have had such a disappointing night at the movies, which is one of the reasons for the success of the home VCR. In like manner, the private automobile owes much of its success to problems often associated with mass transit, such as lack of cleanliness, graffitti, and shoving. There seems to be a principle here: when public facilities fail to deliver - when they give poor service, free, inventive people turn to the private sphere.

If you think about that principle, you can see that it was just a matter of time before parents, disgusted by the violence, drugs, promiscuity, and general dumbing-down of the public school, started looking around for private solutions. The private school recommended itself immediately, but for a lot of parents that was an impossibly expensive choice. And so a new option surfaced, which happens actually to be the return of an old one: schooling at home.

Now, when I say "home schooling," you may think immediately of a kind of education favored by religious cultists or rebellious hippies. But home schooling is not a fringe phenomenon. Right now there are around 1.2 million children being home-schooled in America - 1.2 million; that's more children than there are in the public schools of Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming COMBINED.

The growth of home schooling is not just due to failing public schools. The advent of the home computer and the Internet have hot-wired the connection between the American home and knowledge. More and more parents also have a dramatically new attitude toward education. Diane Ravitch, a former head of research in the U.S. Department of Education, calls this a whole new paradigm of what education is, a turning away from the idea that only government-run schools can educate. People are suddenly willing, Ravitch says, to try new ways to insure that their children receive a good education.

And is home schooling succeeding? How are children educated at home performing? Well, when home-schooled students take standardized achievement tests, they easily outdo students in public schools. According to one study, home schoolers score above public schoolers by 37 percentiles.

Home schooling is private, it's inexpensive, it addresses special pupil needs, and it works. So, of course, it's a nightmare for the teachers' unions and the rest of the education establishment - all those who tell you it takes a mountain of taxes and a vast "whole village" to educate a child.

Despite determined attacks by the education establishment, home schooling is legal in all the fifty states and thriving. In answer to the charge that home-schooling isolates children from a normal social life, their parents point to their participation in play groups, support groups, and enrichment activities of all kinds, such as music and dance lessons.

So just as many now escape to a movie in their own home, many children are now escaping from a poor education to a world of knowledge - at home.

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