He has no employees, but his children help out as lab assistants, and recently his brother Noah became a full-fledged co-worker. Before Noah left for graduate studies, Art and Noah submitted a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over the years, Art Robinson co-authored scientific papers with many famous men, including his teacher of 40 years ago, Linus Pauling. Recently they heard that the paper was accepted.

Robinson published books and home-schooling curricula in recent years and now ship to the public. Robinson’s newsletter, Access to Energy, is printed on his property and next to the main house is a log-cabin structure where all the Robinson children have been home-schooled.

Art Robinson was a chemistry student at Caltech, and something of a whiz kid. He was one of the few students ever to be appointed to the faculty of the University of California (in San Diego) immediately after getting his Ph.D.  He is not pleased by many developments in America in the last generation, especially at the intersection of science and politics, and his own life has been beset by obstacles and tragedies. But he is a man of steely determination and intensity, and he has achieved a good deal since moving to Oregon 20 years ago.

Art and his wife Laurelee, and his brothers Zachary and Noah, moved to Oregon in 1980. Concerned about the decline of public education, Laurelee had already begun to accumulate filing cabinets full of her own instructional material and was home-schooling all the children. By 1988, the six Robinson children ranged in age from 12 to one and a half. “For most of my life,” Robinson says, “I had found education to be a boring subject. I enjoyed teaching chemistry because I enjoyed chemistry—not education. When Laurelee died I continued our home school, but I let the children teach themselves.”

His formula—”let the children teach themselves”—sounds as though it came from the progressive play-book. There are four keys to learning, he believes—”study environment, study habits, course of study, and high-quality books”—but he may not realize the extent to which his own discipline, determination and watchfulness have made the first two a given in his own household. He permits no television, which “promotes passive, vicarious brain development rather than active thought.” Sweets aren’t allowed either—”sugar diminishes mental function and increases irritability.”

Art is a Christian of no specific denomination and irregular church attendance. The family gets together for Bible-readings every night and the children say grace before meals (in nearly inaudible whispers). Art says of his own parents: “They were, I think, Methodist.” His approach to religious instruction parallels the teach-yourself philosophy he applies to education generally. “No one in our family ever questions the truth of the Lord’s Word as provided to us in the Old and New Testaments of the King James Bible,” he wrote in Practical Home Schooling. “We only seek to understand these truths by repeated reading. That is rarely accompanied by interpretive comment. Each of us must understand these things for himself and build his own relationship with God.”

Remarkably, Art has managed to convert the education of his children from a financial drain into a thriving business. Among them, the family members have developed a home school curriculum consisting of over 250 books-among them the 30,000-page 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—which the youngsters took turns scanning into computers. The curriculum was transferred to 22 compact discs, which are sold in a box for $195. Over four years, 20,000 sets have been sold. More recently, with typical single-mindedness, Robinson tracked down all 99 historical novels by the Edwardian writer G. A. Henty, and they in turn were optically scanned. Three thousand Henty sets (6 CD’S) were shipped in the first year. They retail for $99.