Here's a story about the progress of homeschooling in the USA:

Cassandra Stevenson isn't old enough to drive or vote, but she's already a college graduate. Five years ago Cassandra, now 15, entered her freshman year at Danbury's Western Connecticut State University before most of her contemporaries had hit middle school.

She and her older sister, Samantha, who at 19 has a master's degree in astrophysics from Wesleyan University in Middletown, never went to high school -- or elementary school for that matter. Like a small but growing number of Connecticut youngsters, they were homeschooled.

Masters degree in astrophysics. Propaganda that potent just can't be bought. No wonder homeschooling is spreading.

Cassandra attributes her academic achievements to the home instruction her mother, Deborah Stevenson, provided around the family dining room table.

"Homeschooling is more like college than a public or a private school is," said Cassandra, who lives with her mother in Southbury. "You learn what you want to learn and what you need to learn. The curriculum is fitted to you."

Yes that seems such a simple idea. I'm surprised more people don't learn things that way.

While off-the-charts success stories like Cassandra and Samantha's are relatively rare, a National Home Education Research Institute study showed that the majority of home-educated children score at or above the 80th percentile on statewide standardized tests.

Such statistics may account for why the number of home-educated children in Connecticut has increased six-fold since 1990. Despite such gains, only about 2,100 of the state's about 630,000 school-age children are being educated at home, according to data provided by the state Department of Education. About 250 Fairfield County youngsters are homeschooled, the state Department of Education's Student Census Report shows.

I like it when someone else can do educational numbers for me.

The statewide increase is part of a larger national trend, said William Lloyd, a researcher for the home education institute who estimates that last year about 2.1 million children were homeschooled – up from 500,000 in 1990.

"It used to be homeschoolers were thought to be earth mothers in California or Oregon," Lloyd said. "Now it's seen as a mainstream thing."

That's the key line in this story for me. A "mainstream thing".

What all of the above means is that in the short run, homeschooling is going to grow and grow, to the point where homeschoolers will exist in such numbers that their abolition, or even their excessive harrassment, will become a political impossibility. And if there are comments saying I'm wrong about that, it will be because this point has already been reached.

But then another question will kick in. For as long as homeschooling is done by mums like the mum of Cassandra and Samantha, it's pretty much bound to do really well. That at any rate will the retrospective put-down from the critics. But what if Mrs Typical Homeschooler starts to be Joanne Schmo rather than Alberta Einstein? How well will it work then?

I'll place my bet now. I think homeschooling will continue to outperform the state and even private school alternatives by any measures you care to dream up, provided the comparisons they make are half way fair.

After all, being well educated means learning how to find out about things that your teachers have no idea about. I reckon Joanne Scho might still crank out a few astrophysicists.