Education and Dianetics (501111)
Date: 11 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
We have with us this morning education of Dianetics. I’m going to talk to you about Educational Dianetics without the benefit of notes. The only notes I have on this are in California in the hands of a stenotypist and so I’m going to give you this one strictly out of the hat and try to make, if possible, a better lecture than the one which was given from the notes.
Educational Dianetics has been around for some time. As a matter of fact, it is the oldest branch of Dianetics. The actual name of Educational Dianetics would be Advanced Epistemology. It was with epistemology that this whole study began, and probably after the aberrations are swamped up, it is the thing which will continue on forever and aye. Because epistemology means nothing more nor less than the philosophic study of knowledge. There is the crux of the entire situation, the entire basic integration of Dianetics— knowledge.
When one started to study thought he of course had as his closest approach to an examination of thought, knowledge. And knowledge still is very important to thought, although thought itself is evidently on a somewhat higher echelon than just knowledge. Because knowledge would be a sort of crystallized thought. So epistemology is a subject which may have a very terrific name, but it also is a very simple subject. When you look at it and when you peel Immanuel Kant and Hegel and Hume and Locke and, to go earlier, Plato and Aristotle, and all sorts of things off of this word, and you somehow or other get them pried off of the package, you find out that basically everyone is talking about merely knowing things and that man knows things and that there is something called knowledge. And now, “I see a cat” is knowledge. That is to say the fellow says—the act is “I see a cat,” and it becomes knowledge to somebody else. It means that this guy has seen a cat, that’s knowledge.
This is a terrifically complex subject as far as I could find out, once I had stripped it down; but until it was stripped down, epistemology had managed to surround itself so thickly. Cheval-de-frise and an outer bastion and the donjon keep and everything else, had been erected there, from letting anybody know anything about knowledge. This nobody was supposed to, I guess. What was knowledge? How did it function? What was it all about?
Following along this track, one first tried to find out is there an energy? And it came up against the fact that thought as an energy is an awful lot different than any of the electromagnetic-gravitic group energies of which we know. Doesn’t behave in the same way. Thought, as far as itself and traveling more or less as itself, will go before the fact or after the fact almost at random. It doesn’t much care. It will do prediction, it will do accurate prediction of events for which there is evidently no present evidence. You see it doing that every once in a while. There’s clairvoyance—enough authenticated cases, as if thought has got backwards time tracks and so forth, as far as this other world. We covered that. I won’t go into it again. I’ll just say that thought doesn’t think anything of knowing something before it happened in the finite universe. It does happen and this has happened enough times so that one can say—not that this is one of the main channels of thought, but it is one of the things that thought provably can do, once in a while. That’s in the field of parapsychology. So thought is pretty strange in a lot of ways. But let’s go a little bit further and find out how we approach thought. And we approach thought through the field of knowledge. We think and observe and imagine, and out of this comes knowledge. Now, we look a little further and we find out that knowledge as far as we’re concerned is that thing which is stored in man’s mind.
Now, I don’t care how far you extend man’s mind. You could extend it back via radio direction to a central intelligence or anything you want to, but it’s still man’s mind. I’m trying to give you a fact that it’s a—here’s a very wide definition of mind. But when we deal with knowledge, what we’re dealing with is evidently thought which is impinged on mind so we have to know something about mind. Not only impinged on but it is activated by and knowledge is contained in mind. So in order to know very much about knowledge we have to find out how the mind operates so we know something about knowledge itself. And it is on that actual detour that Dianetic processing came into being. Because the more one examined knowledge for man, the more one was struck with the fact that he had to examine the vessel of, or the computer of, or the imaginer of knowledge. So he had to deal with man’s mind if he wanted to know something about knowledge.
Up to that time the German transcendentalists and so on, had gone over the top and far away and you got out a set of binoculars and you looked very hard and there they were out on the horizon still chasing their tails. They had no more concept of what they were trying to look for. It’s wonderful that “knowledge is something that’s going to transcend all human experience.” In other words, man can never contact this and it’s never going to influence man.
Well, if this is so, then why worry about it?
The only knowledge which is going to be of any slightest value to man is that knowledge which man can sense, measure or experience — that’s “or experience,”—sense, measure or experience. In other words, the knowledge which influences him and with which he influences. That knowledge of course, if it comes into the bracket of being sensed, measured or experienced, immediately says that it isn’t beyond the bounds of human experience.
What we have confronting us right at that moment then is the great simplicity of the fact that if it’s never going to be in a sense, measure, or experience bracket for mankind, as far as man’s concerned it doesn’t exist. And the second you look at it this way and say it doesn’t exist, you go out and you take Immanuel Kant and you very sadly consign him to the curiosa of yesterday.
Any time you get knowledge which transcends the bounds of all human experience, this immediately puts the gag on anybody who wishes to criticize the person who is putting forth such a thing. Because this person says, “I am the authority and you don’t know.” Well now, if somebody points out to this fellow that he’s human too, of course his argument would fall down.
Nobody ever bothered to point out to Kant that he too was human, so what he was writing about was obviously way beyond the bounds of his own experience. So of course he couldn’t know anything about it. This reductio ad absurdum of his own argumentation would have — if somebody had had brains or nerve enough to have done it 162 years ago—wouldn’t have left the whole subject of epistemology rotten for 162 years.
Actually the reason Dianetics can suddenly come into this society, vroommh, and “why didn’t somebody think about this” and so on, depends right on that pivot point. It’s the fact that 162 years ago Hume, Locke, Kant, all got together—separately—and they decided that they were going to delineate the basic laws of all philosophy and particularly epistemology. And when they got all through, it was so resounding that everybody was so frightened that nobody thought for 162 years, actually, in this field. And so we have 162 years of accumulated data which had never been sorted out. You pick up 162 years of accumulated data, integrate it and give it a good, solid testing and you couldn’t help but come up with something that would practically shake the society, because you had a 162 years of backlog of smart people who, however, not one of them had ever come up and thrown away formalized epistemology. They hadn’t thrown it away, they were still keeping it. “The laws have all been drawn up on this so we’re not going to touch this anymore.” You get the idea of the state of mind?
It took, then, somebody from an indoctrinated field such as engineering, indoctrinated into the belief that problems are solvable, all answers are basically simple. Those things which don’t work and can’t be applied or sensed, measured or experienced, probably don’t exist, to hell with ’em. Throw ’em away. The second you did that you look over the field of epistemology and, open sesame! You’ve suddenly realized that man’s mind is that thing which contains the knowledge with which man will have to do, that it is the thing which computes the knowledge and the thing which imagines the knowledge which man uses and needs. Then all you have to do is solve the problems of the human mind—that was easy—and you’ve got this whole business of epistemology figured out.
Now, I don’t want to become esoteric with you along this line because the subject is fascinatingly simple.
First let’s classify knowledge, and we discover that we find out in knowledge that the only things man’s really interested in are those things which are—influence his survival. Actually a workable data. What’s workable? That means does it work for us in our battle to survive? Data, then, which man can use, or data in the field of the aesthetics which he evidently does use but without which data, again, he wouldn’t survive very long. He has, in other words, a complete periphery of knowledge, no matter where it goes or how it goes through and he’s solving its center line on one problem. It’s survival knowledge. And the more closely a datum influences or can be used in or opposes the survival of man, the more valuable is that datum. In other words, those things which are in opposition to, or which are influencing or forwarding man’s survival become the most important data.
Data which is not important, we look it over and we say, “Well, that’s not very important”; well, that means that it hasn’t anything to do with what we’re trying to do and we just move it aside. So we categorize knowledge in this fashion. It does have a center line and there is a way to measure up knowledge. How valuable is knowledge?
Well, we look at the problems man is trying to solve and we find out that he has made quite a little bit of progress on the solving of problems. Mathematics, for instance. Mathematics is a whole body of formalized knowledge, most of it abstract, and every single scrap of it having to do with survival.
We look over the field of education and we find out that the knowledge which people are trying to really put into the brains of children and young people is survival knowledge. And we look at what Mama is trying to do for the baby and the family tries to do for the baby in general and they’re trying to teach this kid to live, more than anything else. And they’re trying to teach him to live in such a way that other people can live with him. They, by aberration, take some occasionally strange routes but the whole urgency is first you teach a kid how to eat. You ever see Papa or Mama sitting there trying to teach a kid how to eat with a spoon? This is very, very interesting if you never did this. I was in a restaurant not too long ago and there was a very sedate couple—they evidently had their grandchild—and this old, old lady was there and her daughter was there—daughter with the child. She finally got very disgusted with the way the daughter was poking this spoon at the child and so on, and so she pulled the highchair over and she started to feed the child. The child won’t open its mouth at the right time. So Grandma opens her mouth, so the child opens her mouth, you see. Unconsciously they’re giving the child a mimicry object, so on. The thing was following through just as pat—everybody in the restaurant—I looked around and they were opening their mouths. The effort, the effort to relay knowledge.
Now, it’s training and what one has to know, what one has to figure out.
Now, some shortsighted blunderer back in the past someplace, unpopularized imagination. He said, “Well,” he said, “aesthetics and imagination can have absolutely no bearing on survival so therefore we just cut these things off and move them aside. And we move those out of man’s ken.” And, boy, did he hurt us, right then, because imagination is sort of intuitive computing. And without imagination nobody could get a very good look at the future. Because out of what do you compose your own future? Imagination. In other words, it’s just a sort of a big freewheeling computation more or less auto-controlled and it’s a pretty marvelous mechanism. So we shouldn’t decry imagination, that’s a part of the same thing—knowledge. Get knowledge out.
Children’s hallucinations and so forth, so called, and delusions — their concepts of how they ought to or what they ought to do about it and they are beautifully founded because they have very fine computers and no data in them. And they have a fine time trying to measure up the real world with what an unimpeded computer can do about it. And, whooo! Way out into the blue with no trouble whatsoever. Boy, I wish I could see in this country a few thousand artists whose imaginations were as unimpeded at twenty-five as they were at three, and with all the data, too. You’d really start seeing something. But imagination shouldn’t be decried, neither should any of these other things be decried. This society, for instance, has just had a fine time of telling people they can’t figure and so on. It’s just built into the structure of the language. “You’re dumb, you’re stupid, you can’t figure this, you can’t do that” and so on. So that’s being sort of negated against. And you start looking at this around and you wonder how in the devil we ever think of anything anyhow and you see all of the conflicts and contest against knowing anything.
Well, part of the things that we should have known a long time ago, that this thing with the resounding word, is in essence a great simplicity. It’s just knowing what one needs to know to go on knowing. Otherwise, he as an entity here, at least on Earth at this moment, ceases to know. It’s as simple as that.
Now, the study of the mind leads us into Dianetic processing and understanding of its various mechanical principles.
We shouldn’t fall into the fault, though, of suddenly conceiving that we know all there is to know about the human mind, and all there is to know about what it can compute, because we don’t. But we know how to patch it up now, unburden it so it can do the computation it knows. In other words, we know enough to know that we can take away the things which are interfering with it and then we know enough to leave it pretty well alone. And it’s a lesson that every ship commander in the last war had to teach his radio operators. The radio operators would come aboard and they’d have all this standard equipment from the navy yard and it’d all be sitting there in its beautiful cases and it’d all be working. And he’d go around and these boys would open up and talk to this or that and somebody else around about the shop, and all the radios were working fine and then they’d figure out how to make them work a little better. So they’d start putting in a gimmick here and a wire there and they’d start to lead an antenna someplace else and this would happen and that would happen and the first thing you know you’d start to open up one of these cabinets and it would practically fly in your face like a jack-in-the-box. It was so crammed with stuff it didn’t need. Or they simply repaired it—that was almost fatal.
You’d take it that they always had the idea that it could be made to work better by doing something to it—by monkeying with it. And about nine-tenths of the time you were completely out of communication. I have stood, trying to get a message through on this—FM walkie-talkies that we had. They were pretty good because you couldn’t do much to them. There were about two thousand connections on one of those things and it required a morning to check one of the things out and nobody quite understood what they were so they checked by diagram, they didn’t monkey with these. That’s why FM worked on shortwave transmission. It wasn’t that FM transmitters were much better than the little walkie-talkies. I declare, that’s a fact. You could take the little walkie-talkies and you could do things with them. So you get something like TBS and you’d be trying to keep this boat from going on the reef. And—a landing craft out there someplace—and you had him spotted on radar and he was going it completely blind and you knew he was going to go aground if he kept on going on that course and you wanted to turn him. And particularly on an enemy beach where the—you could see on your radar, shells, splashing in an area where he was going in. And you would say to the radio operator, you’d say, “Get LCM 41 and tell him to get a 90 degree shift of course to the right, quick!” So he’d pick up this thing and he would say, “This is bridge calling Landing Craft 41; calling Landing Craft 41; calling Landing Craft 41. Am I coming through?” And after a while he’d say, “Well, what’s my signal?” And you’d say, “Hey, hey, get that message through!” And he’d say, “Well, yes sir, yes sir.” “You’re about sail two, about sail two, yeah, pretty good, sail two, yeah. Well, I fixed this rig . . .” And so you look rather hopelessly at the thing for about fifteen minutes and you finally get some sort of a message through, and he’s been aground for ten minutes! But people have been doing that about the human mind in the process of education, and here is where we enter into the main battery and point of this lecture. They have been fooling around with the human mind without knowing too much what it is but they always figured out that they could make it better. Now, that is a gorgeous misconception. They figured they could make it better. They didn’t know anything about it but they figured they could make it better. They have been, for instance, trying to train with all their might the standard memory bank which needs absolutely no training. That is the backbone of education. It is quite a denunciation of educational methods as used, because they try to train the standard memory bank.
Well, about the best thing that you could do for the standard memory bank would be to get up the engrams off of the thing that keep “I” from pulling back out of it, the things which have already been recorded in it. It records. It goes right on recording. It bypasses circuits and so forth, except where you get hysterical deafness and inattention sometimes. But the stuff goes into the standard bank.
The problem is to get “I” fixed up—unburdened enough—and the bank unburdened enough as far as circuits are concerned so that “I” can get the information out of the bank. That’s what’s necessary, it is taking something out of this thing that had been installed.
Instead of that, an enormous amount of effort has been applied by all educational outfits in the past toward getting these standard memory banks trained so they could remember. Oh, that’s just gorgeous. You couldn’t go further wrong in education.
What you want in education is to teach a person how to absorb, use and evolve knowledge. And if you did that on a solid line of epistemology—or how to procure, use and evolve and use, or evolve and relay, knowledge. Actually that would be all the steps involved. That’s what you should do if you’re trying to educate somebody. So you should take out of the educational system all the gimmicks and gimcracks which have been put into it that impedes this along any one of its lines. You have to know something about the mind in order to do this.
What you have to know about the mind is the fact that it can be impeded, and about the only way it can be seriously impeded is via moments of pain and anaten. Stuff laid in during those periods will put the mind into such a shape that it doesn’t perform these functions well. But you take that material out and you still have the problem of straightening up educational misconceptions.
We have to find out, first, that. Then the next thing we have to know is, how, in education itself, would you go about relaying information? Here we’ve got a complete problem of communication. It’s a problem of communication from beginning to end as far as education is concerned. It is not possible to relay to people, data which they are going to use—on any other level than a parity of levels. Let me give you that as the first datum.
Now, let’s talk about educating people in schools and so forth. Let’s narrow the whole field of education down to that. You see, education doesn’t narrow down to that. It starts out with little kids. Babies start learning, they learn by mimicry, other things and so on. And by the time a kid gets to school he’s about half-educated, actually. The tremendous amount of knowledge he’s gotten already rather overweighs a lot of the information he’ll get later.
Now he’s gotten basic data. Now after that he’ll start to get the data I’m talking to you about now.
What’s the way most people are educated? They’re educated by altitude and authoritarian teaching. It’s because the teacher says he knows and he says the data is valuable and he says the data has to be recorded. Now, a lot of it is—and also you have to think about this data and you have to figure out things from this data that we tell you to figure out.
We have gone into the field of giving people knowledge and letting them use knowledge, just about as deep as the tip of a finger into a pool. I mean, there we have taken such a tremendously limited sector and fixed it so thoroughly with a bunch of rules and balderdash and nonsense that it’s a wonder to me anybody ever got educated. And I don’t know even if they are.
I know I look at all of my schooling, I could go back over it and I find out that certainly 95 percent of it was a complete waste of time. It’s a rough deal when you take a person’s youth and mangle it along in this fashion. So people had certainly better know something more about education than is known.
Now, some of you, probably many of you, will be very deeply interested in relaying your knowledge of Dianetics to other people. Well, that comes under the head of educating people. So, you’d better know something about it.
Now, in the first place you want data to go into people’s heads in such a way as they can get at it again, and so if necessary, that they can reevaluate it. Now, in other words you don’t want data going into their heads that would be hung up on the order of “You’ve got to believe this, and this is the way it is and it is this way because it is this way, and you’re never going to be able to change your mind about it being this way, and it’s going to be this way from here on out.” There was a—oh, my God—in any ten-year period, what was true at the beginning of that ten-year period, and you take the number of data that were considered absolute truths in the society at the beginning of that data and look at them at the end of the period and you will find out that a large number of them have bitten the dust.
Well, if a person were being educated in the field of engineering, for instance—this year—was unable to reevaluate all of his information on the subject of engineering, ten years from now, it means simply that ten years from now he’s going to start using information which is already old hat. And that fifteen years from now he will be lucky to hold on with these young whippersnappers that are coming in. There is one of the proofs of the thing, the tremendous rub between the old guy in the field and the new one coming in. The new one coming in has got more data, newer data.
They aren’t in any unfavorable situation with regard to each other as far as they can compute on their data. The young guy coming in with one of these stet, fixed educations, just happens to be educated at a different, more advanced point on the time track. And of course he’s using it very facilely and so forth because it applies to his environment.
Now, the old guy starts to slow down on this thing and he begins to consider he must be pretty stupid. So he thinks slower. He doesn’t compute as well on this stuff so he starts to get scared, he entrenches, he becomes conservative and he says, “No, it shall not advance.” But the young guys keep coming out and the old guys keep getting ridden down in the fray.
That is not a principle, or that is not a type of function which is native to man, in a native rational state. That is incident to the type of education which is done—has a lot to do with it. Older people are not necessarily more conservative than younger people, and they very necessarily don’t think slower. A little testing along in this line generally proves it up. But there’s an aberration in the society which says that old people are more conservative, that they think slower than young ones, and how often do you get this in the bank? I’ve found it in the bank lots of times. So some poor guy gets up to forty years of age, he’s done. And it says so right in the engram bank. Now we pick up that one and is he done? No. So our problem then is to get information into the standard bank, make the information available to the computers and teach the person to derive from that information the future information he needs; keep that information in a state where it can be reevaluated at any time and to keep uninhibited the dynamics of the individual, about that information so that he can execute it and expedite with it. Now, all those are necessary steps.
If a person hasn’t a force of will to execute what he knows, somebody has done him a very bad turn somewhere along the track. And modern education rather constantly does this bad turn to people. I have seen it too often. They give a guy enough undigested information, he gets in bad shape after a while.
We take the course of events of some fellow who has had a package education drummed at him; he’s been made very nervous about the whole thing, he’s got to get this stuff, he’s got to remember it, he’s got to be able to put it back on the paper, he’s got to be able to figure this way about it; and the first thing you know he walks into a job and, “Huh? What the hell is all this?” He’s studied about all these things. So we add another factor: The education which a person is receiving must have been consistently compared, step by step, to the known world. You can’t step into an abstract in education. In other words, you just can’t keep on out here on the glorious, pure line of abstract, and never compare it to things which can be actually sensed, measured or experienced. In other words, you’ve got to keep one foot on the ground, no matter how delightful it may seem to go off talking about the purity and glory of pure mathematics. Unless you can teach a guy how to figure out his grocery bill, it’s not going to be much use to him. So every datum which a person receives should have some comparison with the real world. There’s got to be a comparative level. In other words, education would not best be conducted in a school where the real world was very far away indeed.
An engineering education would probably best be conducted by engineers in the process of engineering. If you want to teach a guy to build bridges, it would be all very well, he’s got to have the basic fundamentals of those textbooks. They contain a lot of fine information. But let’s see him reading the textbook between two and four in the afternoon or between eight and ten that night. And let’s see him out there walking around with people who build bridges the rest of the time. You could probably fix up a guy who could build beautiful bridges in a couple of years instead of six, and when he got there his bridges would hold up. Very important. Something quite normally overlooked in some quarters.
Now, so in order to do these things, you of course in this society at this time would require rather definite reforms. Knowing these things about education, they should of course be practiced in the Foundation as much as they can be and actually they are. You, for instance, don’t go very far along one of these—you don’t go very far along one of these theories and so forth without seeing something about it in action. The place is just crawling with engrams. They’re very easy to locate in people. You can observe behavior, you can observe the real world, so you’re not too far out of touch. But supposing we were teaching you Egyptology and supposing we just went on talking about Egyptology and the Ethiopians and the this as and the that as and the voodoo rites that they used to practice (only they weren’t voodoo rites back in Egypt—same thing, practically). And we just went on and on along this line and we just had a glorious time being 100 percent esoteric about Egyptology and when you all got through, why, you’d probably walk up and you would see a scarab and you would say, “What’s that funny looking bug?” Then somebody would say, “That is a scarab,” and then you would immediately know. Compared to the known universe. But it would be a lot better to dig around a few old tombs and look up a few civilizations and take a look at some Ethiopians and let’s mull the whole situation over and find out what we have to know and then by the time we got through all the information we’d picked up, would be oriented information, oriented against the real world.
That’s a very necessary step, to orient every datum against the real world.
Well, the first thing one would do, then, when he started teaching a subject would be to tell people what he did with a subject. One just doesn’t start out in high gear and start teaching people the subject, and somebody asks, “Well, what do you do with this stuff?” “Quiet, bud,” and go on teaching the subject.
Because he’s not teaching a subject, he’s just putting some recordings into the standard bank which are unintelligible and which may or may not be fished up later, by the student, for his use.
I found somebody one time teaching calculus in this fashion. It didn’t say in the textbook what you used calculus for. It didn’t say anywhere along the line what the use of calculus was, the instructor didn’t say what calculus was or what it was for, and I noticed that everybody in this class—it was my calculus class, by the way—I noticed everybody in this class was just studying away and they were writing down and they were differentiating and they were integrating and, boy, they were having a fine time and I sat back and I wasted about two weeks—I was trying to figure out what you did with calculus before I let myself open to a barrage of calculus. Of course, I lost out on a lot of the early axioms of the thing and I asked the instructor two or three times and he looked embarrassed and looked away hurriedly and it suddenly came to me that he didn’t know too well either. He was a mathematician but he had never been through engineering, so how does an engineer use calculus? This I had to know before I would monkey with calculus any further.
Well, I found a fellow by the name of Thompson, and his method of writing probably was very disgraceful. It didn’t start out on a level that no student could understand so naturally the book was no good. It started out with Swift’s—“Fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite them,” so forth and so on, ad infinitum. And this was his example of what you did with calculus.
Well, I looked this over with some interest and read a little bit further into the book and I found out that in calculus you measure rates of change and—rates of change, and gave some examples of how rates of change could be very confusing mathematically and after I looked this over for a while and looked some other things over for a while I was perfectly willing to get down and study calculus. So I went back and I studied calculus and flunked the course. But that’s a fact, see. I asked for reexamination and they reexamined me. But I had then flunked the course because I had been so insistent on trying to find out what you did with calculus.
Well, it seems to me to be reasonable that a student should be able to ask and have a right to ask at any moment, “What do I do with it?” Now, your little kid learning arithmetic; if you take these little kids and you ask them, “What do you use arithmetic for?” rather snidely—because somebody should have told him this a long time ago. “Why,” he says, “to get A’s.” Well, during the war we were having some very bad watch standing on one ship and we were just riddled with officers—gee, there were sixty officers on that ship. And there were only two people who could stand a top deck watch—the four-striper in command of it and myself. The two of us had been thrown to the ship, and we had all these other officers and we had an awful time. The old man was standing twelve hours on and twelve hours off and I was standing the other twelve hours on and twelve hours off. And of course being the captain he pretty soon got tired, so I was standing twenty-four hours on.
It became very desperate to me how to encourage these young men to learn how to stand a watch and steer a zig-zag course and a few other things like that. And somebody came up to me one time and says, “You know”—because all these poor kids were straight out of college, ninety days. Most of them straight out of college, you know, and then ninety days indoctrination and then, “Here’s a stripe and there’s your orders and goodbye and God bless you,” and they really meant “God help you.” So this fellow said to me rather snidely, he says, “You know,” he said, “I bet if you graded them, they’d measure up.” I thought, you know, that’s very interesting. So I wrote up on the bulletin board “A” and graded this officer “D” and so forth. Put it up on the bulletin board, they snapped right into it.
Their indoctrination was not toward doing a good job, their indoctrination was toward getting “A.” And I went over this with them and I pointed this fact out to them, and a couple of them were very smart boys and they thought this over and, boy, they got kind of mad when they started figuring out where they had triggered along the line and gone off course. And they made some good watch officers.
Those that couldn’t be reformed, we just graded them watch by watch, they got an A or a G or something of the sort. And others, why, we reformed by making them work for the ship and not for a grade. But there is an indoctrination, and that was no foolishness. That was about eighteen years of indoctrination these people had had. Holy cats, that’s a long time to indoctrinate a person toward just one thing, getting a grade. And then if you indoctrinated a person all those years on the fact that the Great God Voodoo was the only god, he’d probably fight and die for the Great God Voodoo. Well, don’t think it’s very peculiar that a person would fight and die for grades after eighteen years of indoctrination, yet this is true. So what does the modern educational institution offer as an invitation to a person? It offers an A.
Now, the defined purpose then becomes a very important fact in education: defined purpose. “What is this information going to do for me in my business of survival, for the future races, for the group and for mankind? How is it related into the scheme of epistemology? What sector does it cover? How important is it?” And the guy has a right to look it all over. And when he’s looked it all over, be able to say, “That doesn’t look important to me,” and after that leave it alone. Because there is no reason to try to force pieces of information into heads that are not going to do anything with them. And if they don’t know what it’s for, they’re not going to do anything with it. So the principle of altitude examination teaching is 180-degree vector wrong, just bluntly. In the first place, let’s look what happens.
We have altitude teaching, somebody is a great authority. He holds his position by being a “great authority.” When he says, “Pigs is pigs,” he means it. Actually he’s probably teaching some subject usually that is far more complex than it should be. And he has become defensive down through the years, and this is a sort of a protective coating that he puts up: that the subject also will always be a little bit better known by him than by anybody else and that there are things to know in this subject which he really wouldn’t let anybody else in on them. This is altitude instruction.
Now, in order to get people to sit very alertly and look at him and so forth and do exactly what he says, he has another trick. He gives them examinations. Now, that’s a beauty.
The society gives examinations, society gives examinations via doctors and via teachers. And there’s hardly anybody who doesn’t have the word “examination” or “test” in his reactive bank. And there’s hardly anybody who sooner or later doesn’t get it push-buttoned. And furthermore, there is an anxiety created around this examination because it’s made—the person is indoctrinated in the belief—parents do this, and so on, very early in life—indoctrination into the belief that if you fail school, if you don’t pass, the world will fall in, the sun will go completely out of its firmament, you will be left to starve and die in the streets and everybody will hate you, if you don’t pass from IB to 2A.
Actually little kids sometimes look at it and have this much of a break on it. You flunk a little kid like that and he just goes to pieces in a hurry. Well, he’s got this anxiety around his grades. Now, that comes forward and as he goes forward in education he finally gets up to a point where when somebody says “examination” to him its not only push-buttoned him but it’s also a threat to Mama, Papa, love, general survival, everything else and it’s a terrific whip. So it keeps people in a state of confusion. And when their minds are slightly confused they are in an hypnotic trance. Isn’t that interesting?
What’s hypnosis? Anytime you get enough altitude on the part of anybody, he can be called an hypnotic operator. And what he will say will act as hypnotic suggestion. Very interesting. Hypnotism is a difference of levels in altitude.
Now, there are ways to create and lower the altitude of the subject but if the operator can heighten his own altitude with regard to the subject the same way—he doesn’t have to put the subject to sleep. What he says will still react as an hypnotic suggestion. It isn’t a sudden little trick or a mechanism in the mind that is very unusual, it’s just this difference in altitude.
Parity: no hypnotic suggestion. This is between friends, something like that, acquaintances, friends, fellow students and so on. But you start to get up into professorial class and it starts to tip a little bit. It starts—and it can be used, or as it is in the modern university, about so, until the poor student sits there and he gets knocked out like a light on this stuff Well, he isn’t going to get that information back except as positive suggestion. Now, you know what a positive suggestion is. Stuff will lie in the bank more or less literally.
The guy has got the atomic element chart down pat but damned if he could tell you what an element is. I mean, it’s that sort of thing; the outside periphery of definition. That altitude teaching does this. It suppresses the information in the standard bank so that it cannot be reattained by “I”—the effects of a positive suggestion. In other words, “I” has not been permitted to reevaluate this information, this information stays stet. And ten years from now when it is no longer valid information, people know a lot more, this guy is going to have to keep on saying doggedly that this information is absolutely true and this is all anybody knows about it. That’s done him a terrible disservice right there.
Furthermore he hasn’t got this information—the information isn’t recallable by “I.” Remember that it is not recallable or usable in the central computers of the mind so he can’t think on this information.
That’s the one thing that must be completely safeguarded in the human being in the process of education, is that he must be permitted to think. He can be taught the basic fundamentals of any subject—and get this one—if they are known. And from that he can be actually taught to derive all the future information which he needs on the subject. Taught to derive that information. And in the third way he must be also taught that he can execute and expedite; in other words, lend his dynamics to this knowledge. In other words, he’s got a right to use this information, he’s got a right to think about it, to figure out new things about it, and he’s got a right to execute with relationship to it. If those things are safeguarded, you could then and only then call the person well educated. But how many fields have existed, particularly in the humanities, where everybody was assuming very broadly that the basic fundamentals were known? They have told people they are known when they are not known. So we get another point in education which is very important: Those things which are not known exactly must be labeled as such, in the process of education. We don’t then get big, wide statements made of the effect that all—every kleptomaniac, when he cannot steal anything, burns down the house. Direct quote from a textbook. It’s an inexactly known subject. All right, if it’s an inexactly known subject let’s teach it as such. Only let’s tell the student we’re teaching it as such. And all of a sudden the student will pick up, this is its possible use in the real world. This is about what we know about it and what we know about it is not exact. And then take off from there. That would be educational honesty and it is something which should be part of the educational ethic. And all of these points which I am stressing as desirable would form, when amalgamated, into an ethic, an educational ethic. It’s astonishing that today there’s practically no educational ethic in existence.
What is the responsibility of the teacher and the institution to the person who is being educated? I am afraid that the kingpin around an institution is the person who is being educated, not the person who is doing the educating.
Now, regarding these principles of the reduction of altitude — so that people don’t feel they have to take data just because somebody said so. They take it if it makes sense to them. If they can compare it to the real world; if they know about it, if it makes their thinking clearer or if it makes the things better for them, yeah, mm-hm—then take it. But nothing forced off on the student, nothing. Furthermore, if he has some misconcepts or so forth, clear them up for him, don’t penalize him because he has misconcepts. In other words, don’t raise hell with him because he has the wrong answer, try to help him so he can get a right answer. That’s a big difference. That’s a complete reversal on the examination system, isn’t it? So the educational ethic should also go along the line of making absolutely certain that the ability of the person to execute or expedite with the information which he has been given is not at any point impeded but that every effort is made to help him execute and expedite with that information. To do otherwise is to seriously threaten his own survival. You see what I mean by it? So there is such a thing as an educational ethic and it should be written up, promulgated and practiced. You would probably raise the general alertness of the whole nation within a couple of generations, to a point nobody ever dreamed of before, by the adoption of an educational ethic.
What they call today education is practically without ethics. A person is permitted to come in and study. He is tolerated while he is there. He is given the information, he is examined to see if he knows the information and then when everybody is sure that his standard banks now contain some of this information, they dust their hands and crow proudly over their great task done. That’s not the way to do it.
All right.
I’m going to give you a few axioms after the break, going to give you a few axioms and some various fundamentals about data so that you maybe know a little bit better.
Thank you.