View source for Axioms and Fundamentals About Data (501111)

'''Date:''' 11 November 1950

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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I want to give you some axioms about data.

You understand that knowledge is composed of data. You can have, of course, these half-felt-out intuitive data that can’t be precisely defined, but this doesn’t mean that these are not themselves data. The effort of man is to as closely and precisely understand every datum as he can. He takes various routes toward his understanding.

One should never despise any route of understanding. Never. The engineer makes a very serious blunder when he underestimates and refuses to have any concourse with mysticism or metaphysics. He thinks largely in terms of scientific thought. He does not want to have a great deal, or anything to do, if possible, with philosophy. He is lost in a wilderness of words. He doesn’t understand what lies behind these words but he has been told at school that, for instance, certain fields in philosophy barred scientific knowledge. Therefore, he’s been antagonistic.

He is told, for instance, that Ohm’s Law was held up by metaphysics for many, many years. That Piazzi’s2 discovery of the eighth planet unfortunately coincided with the publication of one of Hegel’s metaphysical works which proved that due to the perfection of the number of seven, there could be no more than seven planets. And Piazzi’s actual observation of the eighth planet was thrown aside at that time in favor of Hegel’s metaphysical dissertation.

He looks at this turmoil in the field and assigns his distaste and antagonism to labels.

Nevertheless, the field of philosophy is merely the field of the inexactly known, the unknown, and the broad, unending horizon toward which man continues to travel in an effort to know. Just because a datum cannot be precisely defined is no reason to throw it away. Just because it is inexactly known is no reason to discount it. So we find out that the principles, for instance, used by the mystics in the twelfth century, are very useful along certain lines of evaluation. These are routes of knowing. These are not bars to knowledge.

The people who bar knowledge by using various routes and then saying that because you are not traveling along this route, you then cannot know, are of course committing the same crime that, for instance, the engineer commits when he says, “We will have no concourse with mysticism, metaphysics or philosophy.” The engineer doesn’t realize, for instance, that anything and everything he is doing today stems from the sixteenth century, a philosopher by the name of Francis Bacon codified science, and that the definition of science as made in 1872 by Herbert Spencer is very, very precise and very workable and that the engineer actually works there. And that definition is: a science is a unified body of knowledge — understood in that definition: a unified body of knowledge which is oriented with axioms or oriented by axioms. That’s a science.

The word science means “truth.” What the engineer is dealing with are things which he can sense, measure or experience. The second he steps over into the field of mathematics he goes straight into the teeth of philosophy, right there. You can’t deal with mathematics without dealing right in the field of philosophy. And yet he says philosophy is bad, mathematics are good. They’re both talking about the same thing. His contest may very well be with Platonic reasoning as opposed to mathematical reasoning. However, there’s nothing weirder or more abstract, actually, than mathematical reasoning.

Leave it to a mathematician to get both feet over into the unknown and get stuck there! And then he tries to pull back and get into the real world again but he’s lost contact and he has a terrible time doing it. Then he invents something called quantum mechanics and introduces this large number of “bugger factors” and somehow or other gets an answer and he doesn’t know how he’s doing it. If he’d just step back into the real world and approach the problem again, quantum mechanics would probably simplify and become as simple as geometry. But because he keeps taking off from an unknown position further into the unknown without consolidating or backing up into a known position first, he’s having a hard time of it. Philosophy has always had this same hard time. Always.

There is nothing so absurd in the world as those things which are found in the books of philosophy. There’s also nothing as sensible in the world as is found in the books of philosophy There is nothing in the world so workable as found in the field of science. There is nothing in the world so unworkable as found in the field of science. These statements can just be made on almost any field and battleground of learning.

One, if he is seeking knowledge, should never despise a source of knowledge but he may often practice this principle: “Certain bodies of knowledge have not, in the past, led to a solution of the problem in which I am interested. I shall therefore, willy-nilly, move off the path of my reasoning these bodies of knowledge which have led nowhere.” A highly arbitrary action, actually, but it just clears the field.

People say, “Well now, the phlogiston theory of heat never led anyplace, so well just move anything related to that off the field, and therefore after this, why, we’ll be able to think more clearly about this.” Okay, let’s go up into a wider sphere. And now let’s see, “Has religion produced anything which I can use in my field of search?” And if his answer is “No,” then let’s let him move all of religion off of his field of search and go on searching. He will find himself suddenly confronted with many more fields than just the field of religion, and the field is clarified at that moment. Or supposing he said, “I have never found my answer in science and I am searching. Let me remove from the field and course of my thought and search the whole body of science.” This is compartmentation. It’s the principle of compartmentation, which is very useful. You move off your field of vision, large bodies of knowledge which have not, heretofore, contributed to the solution of your problem. Men do that all the time. And men also keep squarely before them great bodies of knowledge which have never led anywhere. But this is a fortunate thing. It means those bodies of knowledge will be preserved and talked about and sooner or later maybe somebody can use them.

Man assembles and accumulates knowledge like a pack rat. Every single scrap, datum, empty cartridge shell that he can pick up along the track he clutches to his bosom and stores somewhere in his library.

You might say the greatest enemies of the human race have been those men who have destroyed knowledge or who have destroyed bodies of knowledge. The burners of books. Julius Caesar might possibly have some spot in history, no matter how minute, despite the fact that he cut off the right hands from fifty thousand human beings, on an order—the Gauls. Now, that wouldn’t necessarily stain a man’s history forevermore. But he put a torch to the library at Alexandria and destroyed, in that moment, the only existing storehouse of several civilizations. What was in the library at Alexandria (which I believe, by the way, was destroyed five times, in all) we can’t say. We can’t hardly guess. Knowledge was there which comes to us now only on a byroute, sort of a rumor basis.

Let’s take the Tarot. The Tarot is a deck of cards. It contains the formal deck of cards and then I think twenty-six additional cards. I’m not sure of this. It’s the formal deck of cards you use, plus these other cards. These other cards are picture cards of one sort or another. They have very interesting signs and symbols on them. You begin to look at the Tarot and you begin to be impressed with the fact that it is a sort of a philosophic machine that produced answers in some fashion. Men have been trying to unravel the mystery of the Tarot for some thousands of years. It’s probably around four or five thousand years old.

It has, for instance, right on them, the symbol of the triangle and the circle and a dot. It’s the problem of the microcosm and the macrocosm. It’s the principle of the—philosophic words can get you sometimes—the internal and external universes, the objective and subjective knowledge and so forth. Now, here’s a triangle sitting there. And one day I was fooling around with some of these old principles, one way or another, and I suddenly took another look at that triangle and I had had two things that were related. I knew that communication was somehow related to affinity. And all of a sudden a third point fell into view: reality. A piece of knowledge. Communication, affinity and reality. Very, very useful, workable little triangle.

This triangle has been kicking around the Tarot for a long time. It has some obtuse and strange definitions connected to it. It’s a piece of knowledge.

Now, the whole Tarot was probably in the library at Alexandria. But this deck of cards comes to us solely because it was used by the Gypsies in fortunetelling and in Egypt by fortunetellers. That is a strange route to get knowledge from. And yet man has come forward along his track and he has brought forward with him knowledge. We are a great civilization today because we can communicate knowledge readily and rapidly through the printed word and other means. Actually, a civilization progresses somewhat in ratio to its ability to communicate.

Now knowledge, then, is very valuable stuff It is actually the very stuff of which survival is made. It’s a basic building block of why we are alive. Knowledge therefore, should be understood, somewhat, for what it is, I will try and give you here something—may be of use to you.

Let us take one of man’s endeavors in the past in an effort to understand the subject: God or the Prime Mover Unmoved—the creator from whence came all this. Now let’s look over man’s effort to find something and let’s see if there might not possibly be some sort of a misconcept in his statements there that always prevented him from meeting up, squarely enough to satisfy everyone, with this entity which existed.

We find out that man has been prone to an error in reasoning. He has gone up as far as he could go along any line of thought and has then assigned to that point and position on the line of thought, a new unity. And he has said, “Now, you see, everything proceeds from here,” The physicist goes along that line, the chemist goes along that line. They get just about so far and then they run into an unsolvable situation and they say, “Well, this was created by God, And God is one.” Well now, that’s fine. Every time they go along further, though, we notice that this problem keeps moving back. The Prime Mover Unmoved, A child can come along and ask the question, “Well, who made God?” Therefore, religion has not been as solidly ensconced in the society as it might have been, because it was always open to this question. But one inspects this for a moment and he finds out that a unity disobeys certain axioms which as far as knowing is concerned—that there is something missing about this unity. Something definite that is missing.

In the first place, every—and these are very precise axioms— every datum is as valuable as it explains other data. In other words, let’s move up back along the line someplace and pick up a basic mathematical equation—Pythagorean theorem —and it explains an awful lot about surveying, so we say the Pythagorean theorem is a very, very valuable datum. It is as valuable as it explains other data, in other words.

A datum can be evaluated only in terms of other data. In other words, no datum can be evaluated by itself.

No datum is valuable until it has been evaluated. Now, that’s self-evident, both of those — if this is a datum. This is a datum all by itself. What do we do with it? We know it is a glass or a cup or a holder or something, and it contains water, and that one can drink out of it doesn’t have anything to do with it. It might have an aesthetic value, too. This might be a spot of color here. A spot of color, bright color, cheerful—so it has a value. But it hasn’t any value unless it has some of these qualities. But immediately we get it related to other things.

The second that we pick up an isolated datum—let’s pick up this datum right now, “psi,” p-s-i. That’s a datum. I don’t think you’re impressed. This is psi. In other words, this datum has got to be in communication with other data—hasn’t it?—in order for you to understand anything about this at all. I say it’s a Greek letter; you say that’s very nice. Somebody says, “So the Greeks had letters.” Now, if I say psi is the number you multiply two by to get four, you’d say, “Well, that’s interesting.” We’re interested in mathematics. You multiply psi by two and we get four—by five, six . . . Not very valuable because it doesn’t go very far.

We go back to our first axiom again, you see. It doesn’t relate to a lot of other data. It only relates to the fact that psi can now only be two, so why do we have psi? Well, it’s not very far related. It’s just an obtusity, you might say, that has been thrown into the picture. But psi all by itself means nothing. That is a datum which is unrelated to other data. You know this immediately. It’s not valuable. It’s not understood. It doesn’t predict anything. It’s a shut off datum. It’s isolated. It’s out of communication. It doesn’t communicate with you, you can’t communicate with it. Therefore it has no value.

Of course, if I reached down here and held up a rattlesnake and threw it into your lap like that, of course you all would decide that that was a valuable datum that’s very intimately related to survival right now. You see? An interesting datum. Not an intellectual datum but certainly one that you have to understand and appreciate. That’s the stuff of which survival is made.

You go down here and you get in an automobile and you go driving off down the highway at sixty miles an hour—you are placing an enormous amount of faith in the data of an awful lot of people, aren’t you? But you are in communication with that, and you have been around that for a long time and you have an awful lot of data with regard to automobiles. Terrific stacks of data. You probably wouldn’t realize how much data you have on an automobile until you start checking it through. Good heavens!

It’s an integral portion. The automobile is pretty valuable to the community because it has use, but its use is only dependent on the fact that it is related to all kinds of things in the society. And they’re all valuable. My good God! If you suddenly picked up all the automobiles in the United States today and just moved them aside as a datum and said, “They don’t exist anymore,” (descending whistle) what this United States would do for a while would be pretty tough! Or let’s get a little more basic. What datum does the automobile depend upon? Or what body of data? The gasoline engine or the internal combustion engine or the steam engine. Let’s take the internal combustion engine out of this society. Whoof! That light would go out. Right now. That train would stop running. Those people would not get where they are going. The freight, the letters—things like that. Communications would be interrupted all over the shop. So we start noticing that every datum has something to do with communication, doesn’t it? Not just because I said letters. But for instance, the internal combustion engine goes out; travel is a form of communication and so on. So data seems to be valuable in the terms that it communicates. It is a route or it is an object but there is something about it that we can get into communication with it one way or the other.

If it’s a painful datum, we want to get out of communication with it or knock it out as a datum—using the word datum and object synonymously. Just demonstrating to you that all these things we know are tremendously interrelated on a huge network.

I started out by mentioning that every time man got up to an imponderable he suddenly jumped and he said, “Well, there’s one above that and everything stems from this one and you better be good because everything stems from this one. That’s the end of that problem.” Only it was never the end of the problem and nobody was ever satisfied. So we find out that by suddenly posting this datum here and saying, “Well, all proceeds from one datum,” we couldn’t possibly understand this one datum, because of this fact—there’s another axiom in here: a datum can only be evaluated in terms of data of comparable magnitude.

That’s very obvious, isn’t it, when you think it over? Comparable magnitude. In other words, don’t try to evaluate a mountain by evaluating a grain of sand. One evaluates mountains in terms of mountains. In other words, order of magnitude. What is the order of magnitude of the datum? Very important. We wouldn’t say for instance that if all the tape recorders in the country were suddenly taken away it would leave the society in as bad a state as if all of the internal combustion engines were taken away. As a matter of fact, we could take all the tape recorders out and “so what?” The tape recorders are out. It’s not a datum of comparable magnitude, so let’s not try to understand communication by this fact. Now, there’s also other ways—supposing you took all of the pogo sticks out of the United States, took all the pogo sticks out and we took all the internal combustion engines out—well now, you couldn’t say that you could understand all the internal combustion engines if you understood a pogo stick. In other words, a datum “pogo stick,” cannot be evaluated by the datum “internal combustion engine,” in this society.

This is the terrible difficulty that people get into when they get in savage countries—I mean trying to communicate with the people. I was trying to teach a class one time of little brown boys and girls of about the third grade I think they were—and they were supposed to be in the process of being taught English. I was about sixteen and was way the hell and gone over territory which had been fairly chewed up in the process of the last war. These little kids were ordered by the government to wear one article of clothing and they wore only shirts. And these shirts came down just above the navel. Some of them got real flashy when they were rich and wore only shoes.

These little kids were pretty cute. And I tried to teach them English and a little bit about arithmetic and a little bit about hygiene and a little bit about the rest of the world. And on the first few, I could get along fine, but as soon as I struck that last one, that was tough. Because I tried to relate every datum I gave them to data which they had to hand. And naturally, they didn’t have to hand data of comparable magnitude to the rest of the world.

Immediately go back to when I was a little kid and was reading— about 1914, 1915, the Germans had done this and the French are retreating and the—bombs and so on, and I tried to get this through. I knew at that moment, as far as my conscious life was concerned, one valley. It was a big valley. It was about fifty miles in diameter. I actually knew more world than most kids did at that time because I could look about seventy-five miles through the clear mountain air of Montana and I could see the Bitterroot Range. Very clear. Very clear. Well, that was a pretty big world. But I was absolutely convinced that just beyond the Bitterroot Range raged the whole war! That was the rest of the world.

My datum was how big was the world, and all I had to compare it with was the valley. And naturally, if I compared the rest of the world with the valley, then the rest of the world must be just about the size of the valley—actually. Very understandable. But trying to relay information to these little kids was on this order, and I tried to tell them about a skyscraper. Finally a little kid figured and he figured and he figured. I was trying to tell him about this—was at that time—I think the biggest one we had was the Woolworth Building—I was trying to tell him about the Woolworth Building and he figured on it for a long time. And I came in one morning early and I thought he had forgotten about this problem long since, but there he stood on a stool at the blackboard and he was drawing nipa huts to the height necessary to make the seventy-four, seventy-three stories of the Woolworth Building. And he got up there to about twenty-five nipa huts. He was building them all with stilts. These were the buildings he had seen— this was the building, right there. Then he got up along the line and he finally decided that these confounded nipa huts piled up this way were going to fall over. And so, obviously, the thing could not be done and I was a liar. And I had an awful lot of trouble with these kids. No datum of a comparable magnitude. So as people have gotten up, in the past, to the entity of the Prime Mover Unmoved, they have promptly said, “Well, that’s it, boys,” and then walked off from the whole problem, giving no one a datum of comparable magnitude with which to evaluate the Prime Mover Unmoved. It wasn’t the fact that the problem kept on going back, it was the fact that nobody set up the comparable datum. For instance, everybody understood that survive was evaluated against not surviving. But they understood it without examining it. I understood it without examining it for a long time, then I found out that survive was sitting there alongside of another one which said succumb. Had to be. Datum of comparable magnitude: live-die. Of course, those happen to be opposite faces on the same thing. But they’re still data of comparable magnitude, so that you could understand what would happen if you didn’t survive. You could also see what happens if you didn’t succumb. One against the other, two checking back against each other and all of a sudden a lot of things seemed plain. Simplicity.

The funny part of it is that the further one goes into data and knowledge, the greater simplicities he discovers because he is going in toward data which evaluates wider and wider bodies of data. He’s searching for and discovering new, valuable information. And of course he always wants to find information a little more valuable than he had before. In order to be more valuable that information has to embrace more of the data of the search. And the data gets simpler and simpler just from that axiom and it always must have alongside of it data of comparable magnitude. So it is as valuable as it evaluates other data—relates to and evaluates other data. And a datum is as understandable as it compares or is compared to data of comparable magnitude.

In other words, to really get a good look at the Prime Mover Unmoved situation, you’d probably have to have five or ten data along there instead of just two.

Actually you’ve got two. And we go back into early mysticism and we find out what the second one is. It’s always been there just like succumb. There are lots of explanations for the devil. They say he’s the little god, and the new god coming in always supplants the old religion’s god and calls him the devil. There’s been a lot of talk about it. Actually, it’s just as simple as that. You’ve got to have the proposition set up understandably or people won’t use it. And so you set up—here’s god and there’s the devil. And they happen to be, unfortunately, data of comparable magnitude.

We go back into the early days of the magician and we look over his data and by the way, he had lots of valuable data kicking around; he didn’t quite know what to do with a lot of it but it sure is interesting. This is not the stage prestidigitator. The stage prestidigitator is the debased successor of these old boys. They were philosophers.

They said every angel has two faces. He has a white face and a black face. And the white face is good and the black face is evil. And anytime a god or a man is set upon an eminence, he always has two faces—a white face and a black face. And it’s all right to say God is good but then somebody says immediately, “I am the God of Vengeance.” A white face and a black face. So there’s “God is good,” and then there’s the devil. Just because they say hell is below, is no reason to say it’s not a datum of comparable magnitude. It isn’t a creative magnitude, it’s a destructive magnitude. And we get the principle on which these things have been operating satisfactorily for man for a long time and we find out they’re construction and destruction. They are good and evil. They are right and wrong. God is the symbol of survival forever. The devil is the symbol of succumb.

We’ve got these two data now and we can understand one to the other. If we had about five more data in the same rank, we would be able to understand it a lot better. So the best thing to do is to go up the level two or three steps and then come down the level again and predict down the level with about three more data and then we’d be able to understand this. We won’t be able to understand this new pair we’ve set up here very well, except against each other. But with them we may be able to predict a wider spread down below and so we’ll get our five on the good-bad, God-devil quotient.

You, in other words, have to keep climbing upstairs in twos, not in ones.

It should be interesting to you the fact that man has been going up—each time he goes, he tries to go up in ones. And then he finds out he can’t get any further; he doesn’t get any further because he hasn’t put two there. And then he has to get a higher postulate in order to put four or five more there. So he gets more data of comparable magnitude.

This, on an educational line, is very interesting. Very, very few teachers in the past have ever gone along the line of thought that they had to find the data of the greatest magnitude in their subject from which all else derived. That is, the whole subject had to be precisely aligned along this line. In other words, we had to have at least two data of comparable magnitude at the beginning of this thing—at least. And then we have to have interrelated and predicted data falling into the lower and lower echelons and the greater period of complexities of the subject. It has to proceed from a simplicity to a complexity, it can’t proceed from a complexity to a simplicity.

The trouble which you have with cases is because the case proceeds up the ladder instead of down it. It’s awfully easy to run a Clear. There’s nothing to it. It’s rather complicated to run a Release. And it gets quite arduous when you run a person who has never had any processing, usually.

There you’re entering the whole problem from the level of complexity and trying to proceed towards simplicity. And it’s a tough run, but in view of the fact that you know what the simplicity is and you know what makes it a complexity, you’re a lot better off than you would be.

Now, if we just turned this thing around and arranged to have nothing but Clears at the beginning, why, it would be a very simple problem.

Now, fortunately, educational lines don’t run in this line. One never has to proceed from a complexity to a simplicity unless it is for the purposes of demonstration.

The first thing stated in any subject should be its purpose. What is it for? That would be its simplicity. “This is the subject of dancing. One studies it because people like to see people dance and you would probably like to dance and we all like dancing. There’s nothing wrong with dancing that we can find out so far, but even if there is we’re going ahead and teach the guy to dance.” In other words, a statement like that at the beginning. Now, in dancing one uses the body. Immediately, by the way, this—I just flicked one through—I was examining this just as an illustration and I did an examination of if from the field of aesthetics. People don’t just dance with the feet. There is muscle dancing, hand dancing, body dancing and expression dancing. I’ve seen all these kinds of dancing in various kinds of society. All of a sudden I’m struck with the fact that “Gee! This subject can get complicated, so I better get off of it.” Now, all subjects educational-wise should start out then with purpose. And this purpose should be very carefully delineated against the real world of the person who is doing the studying. In other words, what we’re trying to teach the person couldn’t be taught to him thoroughly unless he could evaluate it against his own real world. So the first study in any teaching should be: what is the real world of the student we are teaching? And I’m afraid that very, very few professors know this. It’s an interesting fact. They have not made a good, thorough study of the real world of a child. They’ve had some ideas on the subject but once they have studied it then they have said immediately, “It’s delusion.” Of course it’s delusion to the instructor because he doesn’t see the child’s real world. But he has to take solidly into account that real world of a child if he wants to teach the child. And the instructor actually has to accept this as a real world if he expects this child to learn a thing. For instance, I had to accept the real world of these little Chamorro kids, the ones who built up the enormous pile of nipa shacks to make the Woolworth Building. I had to accept their real world before I could explain to them anything about anything. And as soon as I did and evaluated everything from that quarter, why, the whole problem finally resolved. I got these kids finally convinced that there were trains and various things by just building it up out of oxcart wheels and out of all sorts of things. I just took their society apart, found the components of comparable parts in it, tried to build these component parts up to a comparable magnitude and let it run. These kids got a pretty good idea of what the world was like. They brightened up on it quite a bit. So they’d open a book and they’d see a picture of a skyscraper and all of a sudden had it right there.

By the way, the level of understanding of these children did not include the recognition of an outline to be a picture of a real object. And boy, how you have to get down and study the ants—it’s right along in that level—to find out what they’re doing.

You would never suspect, living in this society—for instance if you showed somebody a photograph they would say, “Yep, there’s Bill Doakes.” Not these kids. Square of white paper. You show them a picture of themselves and they’d say, “Uh-huh. It’s a fish, isn’t it?” You’re trying to educate them into it, yet you could show them a mirror and why, they knew that right away. For instance, we don’t recognize that in this society we have built up a terrific artificiality on the subject of outline. We have an enormous code of communication. We do—on the subject. Why, it’s fantastic, the thing—that they have all manner of ramifications. You look over cartoons. Speaking of cartoons, it’s a total interjection—I was reading a cartoon last night, Homer Hoopee. And Homer Hoopee was going to leave home and he was going to take his liver pills and his vitamin extract and his book on Dianetic therapy. We finally made the grade in the comic strips. But these kids would not have been able to have understood a comic strip.

All right, you sure have to know what you’re looking at. When you look at little kids and see them slugging away, you can recognize clearly where people have failed to evaluate the real world of a child. And you certainly couldn’t enter any information into this child that he could use unless you know the real world you have to work with there.

This real world includes a hundred Indians lying dead on the front lawn, the possibility that at one fell swoop one can become Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy or Captain Starbuck or Captain Midnight. That one can take an old apple box and have there a roaring fire, a beautiful dinner all ready to serve, perfectly edible dinner which can be tasted. Boy, you’re dealing with a real, broad, real world there. Why, heck, these kids have got tremendous factors with which to evaluate, but what one doesn’t evaluate with normally with them are their emotional values. Their emotional values are also very important. And when one doesn’t look it over, find out what they are, he isn’t able to communicate with them very well. For instance, the last place in the world that you’d put a kid if you want to teach him anything is in a closed room. The one place that you must not put a child is in confinement. Just run a little experiment of having a child sit on your lap and just put your arms around him loosely. Don’t lock them on him. He’ll sit there for maybe half an hour—I told you about this the other day—he’ll sit there for about a half an hour maybe, and then just lock your hands around his tummy. Barrier. Life is not to be trapped by space or limited in position in time. It’s not to be, that’s all, and children are very alive. So you put a kid in a room under confinement, under restraint and you expect him to learn anything? It’s no wonder these kids get to be fifteen years of age and can’t even write intelligible letters. That’s no kidding. The level of education is fantastically bad. I think that if properly instructed, I think practically any child along the line could probably learn everything he learns in school probably by the age of ten. It doesn’t require any great amount of brains. You’d just have to keep showing him what it is.

Now, there’s another factor that you must not avoid in looking this over and that is that the path of learning must not be particularly smooth. The analytical mind is so composed as to overcome obstacles toward known goals. Now, that should be interesting to you. The individual is not aided at all if you do all of his leading for him. You can’t lead him, you can’t drive him. The business of being led or driven is native in himself and if you keep your hands off of it he’ll continue along the line. Anytime anyone tries to lead him excessively or drive him excessively, the ability within himself to surge toward goals is interrupted either way.

Now, when one tries very much and very hard to encourage a child as to the value of some study, tries to oversell him an idea, you will see that it’s quite destructive because he’s liable to get there and find out it wasn’t that good. So you can’t oversell him. The only thing you can do is tell him the truth as near as you know it and fit it into the framework of his own understanding. And this applies to the university student as well as the kindergarten child. It’s the same thing. You tell him exactly as near as you know, by their own frame of reference, what it is they are going toward as far as you investigated the thing and you strictly leave it up to them whether or not they are going to go there. And if somebody walks out of German class at the end of two weeks and decides that he is not going to study German anymore, somebody says, “Well, if you don’t study German you’re going to—son, you’re not going to get your degree. Of course, I wouldn’t influence you in any way!” I wrote an essay one time, under command in a university, that said to this effect—the name of the essay was “My Actual Opinion of University Education.” Unfortunately they were dealing with a fellow who hadn’t gone to high school. I’d gotten into university on a Board of Regents. This was a strange new world to me—the academic world. I got a completely fresh look. I had come out of rather considerable traveling, being on my own. People had generally addressed me as “Mister,” not as “Hubbard” or “you,” And I rather objected to being suddenly massed up here in a sheep pen. It looked to me like there were bars around here.

At the end of this first year I was asked to write this essay and it was the grade essay of the English course. Rhetoric was the name of the course. So I wrote it. The dean had taught this course personally. And he’d made the remark that the longest sentence in the English language was 264 words—that this was a very, very fine piece of writing and so on. So I went and looked it up. What a fraud! The thing is full of semicolons, colons, there are several and’s in it, there are many but’s, and it’s a very, very poor example of English. I mean, it doesn’t flow. Academic language: It goes along brmmm, brmmm, znnk, brmmm. And so I said, “Well, a fellow ought to be able to do better than this.” So I wrote a five hundred word sentence and it had one and, one but in it and no semicolons and no colons. Five hundred word sentence. Scanned it all back again, parsed it; yes, it made sense; handed it in. The only trouble with it was its subject was what I actually thought about a university.

So, I was called up at the end of the final lecture and I was told that unless I completely rewrote this theme I would not be credited with the course. Now, I said what I thought, and what I said in the thing was that a student was not permitted to think what he thought in a university, that his self-determinism was insufficient in order to enable him to get from the university the information which he would need in the continuance of his own life. Just roughly that, for 500 words. Of course you write a 500-word sentence it starts to build up with impact. And this impact—boom! So I had to write another sentence. I mean, I had to write another theme. So I wrote a little short thing that went about two paragraphs and it says, “I like universities. I think they are wonderful. I think people who teach in universities are very fine people. I see the cat. The cat is black.” Handed it in, they gave me “A.” Boy, if I never wanted my point proved! So I tried to get back the first theme. I didn’t have a copy of it and I found out that it had probably been destroyed. I considered this a jump of my author rights and wondered what had happened to it. William Allen Wilbur had been the dean, there at George Washington University, of the Columbian College, who had received that theme. And I heard from William Allen Wilbur four or five years later—five years later. He had been retired. He had seen my name in a magazine and wrote me a letter and he said, “About the only thing in my entire university career of which I was ashamed was having to call you up because of that theme.” And he goes on and he writes me about five pages, close single space, and tells me all about it, unburdening his conscience, that things had to be that way in the university. Boy, was I enlightened! I wrote him a long letter.

Here this man had a mind that could actually by itself fly free as a bird. This fellow was a pretty good writer. He was a good thinker. He was quite a man of the world actually, but fitted into this framework he had to act along certain lines. He didn’t act as William Allen Wilbur, he was filling a slot. I was appalled. I have looked since at universities and so forth and I haven’t found that this is terribly uncommon. I have found that some western universities and one in Chicago, have begun to adopt new and more flexible means of educating people. But the university is actually far too late to reform education. Education should be reformed not even in kindergarten or the first grade. Education should be reformed as the baby begins to learn. It’s clear back that early. By the time he goes to kindergarten he has already attained an enormous body of knowledge. He can speak the language. He can handle his body. The primary tenets of body handling are already there. What he needs, of course, is basic education, basic education given to him actually along the axioms which I’ve been giving to you today. What is the purpose? Why does one do this? It has to be oriented for him against his frame of reference. His frame of reference is a pretty hard one to match.

He learns mainly by mimicry. Mimicry is number one on the learning agenda. Man’s ability to mimic teaches him more than any other single factor. You ask somebody how to fire an arrow out of a bow and he says, “Well,” he says, “you take the arrow in your right hand and you take the bow in your left hand and you present it before you in a horizontal position and then you plant your feet one slightly advanced of the other and the right foot at a forty-five degree angle from the left foot at a distance of eighteen inches . . .” Won’t work. You just don’t quite mesh on this one right away. So what he does is say, “Well, that’s very simple, you just take it back like this. You take the bow and you go back like that . . .” You give a guy a good model, by the way—an archer—a good model and have somebody firing. A model, you know, bang— and let him watch for a little while, let him go over it. He’s a bad mimic, he’s going to have a hard time. But if he’s a good mimic and he’s not otherwise impeded, he will not only be able to hold the bow properly but he’ll be able to hit the mark, just like that. (snap, snap, snap, snap, snap) We have introduced enough aberrations into the progress of learning so that we have interrupted natural mimicry. We have undermined people’s self-confidence in many ways. That self-confidence must not continue to be interrupted and the first place it is interrupted is in the home. The child, the child’s efforts to mimic; they’ll mimic anything. Well, they’d certainly better have something to mimic. The conduct of people around the child, so on—terrifically important—the models the child has. The child should be shown. People should take time out, understanding the child is learning by mimicry, in order to give the child something to mimic. You’ll find the education of the child just increasing by leaps and bounds if you do this, because it’s his frame of reference. His only frame of reference is to mimic. He wants to be a grown-up and he’s going to try to act like grown-ups. Well, you have to start giving him a grown-up to act like. And then when he starts getting into formal education—formalized education—you again have to set things to his frame of reference and you have to give him a good and adequate purpose for it and you have to show him what lies before him. Not leading him into it or driving him toward it. If he will carry along and work on this level, you will have at the end of that run of the university a thoroughly educated person—a real educated person. And I’m afraid the difference in education which people can get is very, very wide and broad. And I am also afraid that in this year of 1950, the education which is given in grade school, high school and the university is very thoroughly destructive toward the initiative and abilities of human beings.

We graduated 280,000 Bachelors of Art year before last— 280,000 people is a lot of people. And the effect upon the society is going to be — oh, it’s all right, it’s better than nothing. That’s all right, these people are going to get in there and pitch, most of them, on what native skills and so forth they get. But supposing we had graduated 280,000—not Bachelors of Art but accomplished artists in their own field. This society, within the generation, would change its whole face and complexion to something far better than we have now.

The end and goal of any society, as it addresses the problem of education, is to raise the ability, the initiative and the cultural level, and with all these the survival level of that society. And when a society forgets any one of these things it is destroying itself by its own educational mediums.

Thank you.

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]