The supposed purpose of schooling is to train children to survive and earn a living in this very rapidly changing world. However, our schools have not changed much in hundreds of years. The intention of the current system of education is, and has been, to train people to (be willing) ”fit in” to a traditional regimented business or industrial environment (to work in a factory). In the average classroom children are demanded of to follow instruction … “be quiet, sit down, take out your books …” and on and on.
However, per LRH, education can be one of the factors that can uplift a child out of confusion.
“Now, anything which tends to reduce the amounts of confusion and upset in a preclear, in other words, to advance him further up the track toward knowingness, is legitimate processing — anything. Education, anything. You can teach a person Scientology and find them coming up in tone, just because it’s closer to the truth than they have ordinarily been progressing.”
LRH, “History of the Theta Line”, 10 March 1952, from “The Dawn of Immortality” tape transcripts part 2, pages 149-150
A subject can only be taught if the following factors are in place, which are all part of LHR’s Study Tech. (summarized below)
A subject can only be pursued if the there is interest in it and a desire to learn about it.
- A subject can only be understood as well as the words within that subject are fully understood.
- A subject is only useful to an individual in so far as it can be effectively applied.
- A subject that is not taught in the right sequence with the correct gradients applied cannot be understood by the student.
Without these basics of the Study Tech in place we end up with a disinterested and confused child.
“A confusion can be defined as any set of factors or circumstances which do not seem to have any immediate solution. More broadly, a confusion in this universe is random motion…
“Confusion is the basic cause of stupidity. To the stupid all things except the very simple ones are confused. Thus if one knew the anatomy of confusion, no matter how bright one might be, he would be brighter….
“Ninety-nine percent of all education fails, when it fails, on the grounds that the student was confused….
“Until one selects one datum, one factor, one particular in a confusion of particles, the confusion continues. The one thing selected and used becomes the stable datum for the remainder.
“Any body of knowledge, more particularly and exactly, is built from one datum. That is its stable datum.”
LRH, The Problems of Work [1956], pages 20-22
This definition of education was devised in the Mid-fifties as the first entrance to the subject.
EDUCATION IS THE CONVEYANCE OF IDEAS, PATTERNS AND CREATIONS FROM ONE PERSON TO ANOTHER FOR KNOWING RETENTION AND CONSCIOUS USE BY THE SECOND PERSON.
By patterns was meant designs, forms and sequences of motion. Knowledge can be conceived to be ideas, patterns and creations and can include any concept or understanding.
It would then be seen to be vital that the Educator be as well a Communicator and that his cycle of communication be as nearly perfect as possible. The formula of Communication is:
CAUSE, DISTANCE, EFFECT WITH INTENTION AND ATTENTION AND A DUPLICATION AT EFFECT OF WHAT EMANATES FROM CAUSE.
(The best published discussions of Communication are found in Dianetics ’55!.)
As UNDERSTANDING plays its role in Education, one has to know the components of understanding. These are AFFINITY, REALITY and COMMUNICATION. These three elements together make up understanding and so play their role in EDUCATION
Our children do not get a chance to be creative, communicate their ideas and work together with others as most mainstream schooling is based on industrial age values. They are positioned in time and space by the system.
So, by the time an individual leaves school he or she is well placed to become thoroughly snared by today’s limiting work-a-day system. …
“Talk to a person who works from eight o’clock until five with no goals, who is being required by time payments, rent and other barriers of an economic variety to invest all of his salary as soon as it is paid, and we have an individual who has lost the notion of freedom.
His concentration is so thoroughly fixed upon barriers that freedom has to be in terms of less barriers. Thus, in processing we have to audit in the direction of less and less barriers in order to attain freedom.”
LRH, Dianetics 55!, page 82
