View source for Educational Dianetics (500829)

'''Date:''' 29 August 1950

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

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Elsewhere the capability and function of the Dianetic Clear has been covered at some length. It is only necessary to repeat it briefly here.

When a person has been cleared by Dianetics, all his analytical mind is available to him, which is to say, in electronic analogy, that he has several hundred percent more computer for purely mechanical reasons.

Further, his basic personality, which was what he mostly desired himself to be, is in full working operation. Even further, his dynamics have strengthened and become aligned with his highest purposes and he can carry forward projects which before he might not have been able even to begin. Additionally his health has improved so that he has a higher physical efficiency, being hampered by no psychosomatic ills and having a higher resistance to pathology. As important is the fact that everything he has ever learned is now in a complete recall status with the full ability to resense or reexperience with all senses everything he has ever done.

When this combination of increases in efficiency goes into action, it is not adequate to say that the man is simply more intelligent, more efficient or happier. He has all his data to hand and that data is now fully accurate. He can observe himself and his environment fully and again with great accuracy. He can imagine or compute far better and he can put his conclusions into action with a higher dynamic force. This chain of improvements adds into a rather phenomenal increase in the worth of the individual to himself, to his family, to his children, to future generations, to his political or racial groups and, actually, to all mankind. Bettering a handful of men in such a fashion could not but increase the efficiency and dynamic of a whole society. Bettering a whole society in this fashion should inevitably lead to its arbitration over other societies without question. Bettering mankind in such a manner would be to finally and completely conquer any and all of the universe that he physically may reach.

However, just the fact of Dianetic clearing could not account for such a resurgence of a society. It could account for marvelous gains on the part of the individual, and if enough individuals were cleared it would rebound to alter the society. But the society itself acts as a sort of organism and reacts in aberrated ways just as the individual does. There is a whole pattern of cultural aberration in any society. Some peoples are quite mad, actually, living in mystic societies where spirits and demons are common belief. The civilized man lives in a society which, while it is less aberrated—being more scientific and therefore containing less unknowns—is still, at this point, quite far from completely sane.

The Dianetic Clear, with his own aberrations out of the way, finds as his next target the aberrations of his culture. He can think better than those who are not Clear and he is very likely to lose sight of the gulf between himself and his aberrated neighbors until one day he finds himself living in a “thoroughly stupid” area which by his lights is still beating on tom-toms and wearing fur loincloths. His dynamics demand that he remove social obstacles, the aberrations of his society. Cleared, he can be very happy removing these obstacles and, cleared, he is not as ineffective as individuals have been considered when engaged upon the task of disturbing the inertia of the many.

There is a great deal of talk about the inertia of the many. Whoever dreamed that one up did not know of the principle of the better idea. There’s only one thing that goes through sixteen-inch armor plate and that’s an idea. An idea progresses through a society in almost, you might say, logarithmic ratio to the quality of the idea. The quality of an idea is a function of its optimum value in serving the needs of the times. Societies have been most remarkably and rapidly changed not through violence but through the introduction of a new idea. Violence merely stirs up all the old ideas and throws them into the air; then they all come back down again and we find the commissars wearing different colored coats.

The tragedy of the Soviet Union, for instance, is that it was conceived in truly progressive ideas, the high idealism of Lenin, and wound up as another czarist bureaucracy run by a fellow named Stalin. Actually, the original Russian idea wasn’t changed at all. But evidently our idea of democracy is not so contagious to the Asiatic mind as Russia’s. If somebody would just sit down and figure out a better idea than communism, there would be nothing to it.

Educational Dianetics concerns itself with all and any kind of teaching or learning, nonacademic and academic. It is the science of the processes of getting data into the analytical memory banks, weighting and comparing data, computing and placing the computed conclusions into action.

Educational Dianetics should include the handling of “push buttons” when dealing with aberrated individuals or societies but this subject is rather thoroughly covered in Individual Dianetics. It consists as a wholly mechanical process of observing the “buttons” or restimulative stimuli which activate the engrams of another or a society and “pushing” them. Anyone with a good command of Individual Dianetics can play on another individual like a good organist on a Wurlitzer.

As a simple example, one can observe that such and such words make another cough. These words are contained in engrams which also contain the cough. Also such an engram carries with it, always, a greater or lesser automatic shutdown of the analytical mind of the aberree. Utter the word, the aberree coughs, the analyzer of the aberree shuts down and he cannot think efficiently. That is a very simple example of “push buttons.” Knowing by observation the push buttons of another person—or, as in Political Dianetics, a society—the accomplished organist can play whatever piece he likes quite at will. Advertising agencies, governments and various leaders have done this by a sort of intuition all through man’s history. They knew that by such and such stimulus they could achieve such and such response. In Dianetics the matter is reduced not to a fine art but to a very effective science. This science has for any Clear very little validity: the Clear wants the push buttons out of other people for he would rather talk to them in terms of reason which, indeed, is a far more effective method of accomplishing creative and constructive projects.

Unfortunately, Educational Dianetics must concern itself in the nonacademic field with push buttons. The reason for this does not lie in the fact that populaces as a whole will always be aberrated, for Dianetics conquers that aspect automatically, being as thoroughly contagious as the things it attacks, the engrams; the contagion of Dianetics lies in the fact that an aberree struggling along in the vicinity of a few Clears finds himself relegated to a minor role. Further, the Clears becoming tired of the obstructions he may pose, can (and do!) push his buttons so viciously that he usually has to undertake clearing in self-defense. For button-pushing also turns on somatics, which is to say that anyone versed in the art can sit down calmly and put another person through several varieties of agony such as getting his tonsils out or his teeth pulled and never touch him. The auditor occasionally resorts to this when he has a patient unable to face his engrams. The patient becomes so upset that he would rather give up anything rather than have his buttons pushed in such a fashion as to give him pain.

Hypnotism, by the way, is a variety of button-pushing working efficiently on those who have “go to sleep” engrams. If a man has a strong “wake up” engram command in his reactive bank, the phrase “wake up” will produce a reduction of analyzer, for the engram contains unconsciousness. In such a case the person can be hypnotized, which is to say in this case, rendered unconscious by being told to “wake up” several times.

Any inertia of the “masses” to Dianetics, however, is not the reason why Educational Dianetics must begin on an aberree level Any child has engrams. It can be considered for practical purposes impossible to create a child who has no engrams. One can reduce those engrams to a lowest minimum (and should) but the child, even if he has a few, is still an aberree until such time as he can be cleared. And he cannot be cleared until he is eight or, in bad cases until he is in his teens. Thus all his early nonacademic education and the first three to five years of his academic education is received by a mind which contains engrams. There are ways to prevent these engrams from activating to any bad degree (as outlined in Preventive Dianetics in the handbook) but again these ways still do not entirely obviate restimulation, for the child is not always in his home under the watchful eye of cleared parents.

Hence the education, nonacademic and academic, of children, is poured into a more or less aberrated mind. It is therefore of vital importance that great care be taken with all instruction up to the age where the child can be cleared.

It is a cheerful fact that despite engrams which may tell him he “can’t remember” or “can’t get things straight” or “can’t learn anything” the standard memory banks keep right on recording, Engrams, except when they physically affect the channels of perception as in hysterical blindness, are interposed between the standard bank and the analyzer by means of parasitic circuits. The standard bank therefore can go on filling itself with all data observed even though the individual does not remember having observed the data. When he is cleared, these parasitic circuits no longer interpose curtains or introduce errors tending to create mistakes in reasoning or action, and the data in the standard bank is available to the analyzer.

However, engrams, by making it difficult for the person to progress in some subject, indirectly deny him knowledge simply by turning him away from the source of further information. Thus a man who thought he wanted to be an engineer may, when his grades are poor, turn away from engineering and later, being cleared, have less information in the bank than he would have had, had he simply kept on with engineering. Thinking (reactively) that he was not learning, he ceased to look for the learning. This example can be seen in various forms in all nonacademic as well as academic information.

Thus we must consider, whether we would like to or not, the education of the aberrated. The primary rule guiding this is to forgo all push-buttoning and thus keep reason reigning insofar as possible. If one wishes an individual to learn anything, academic or nonacademic, he must avoid (a) initial restimulation of engrams (as in Preventive Dianetics) and (b) momentary reduction of analytical power.

Initial restimulation is prevented by avoiding the keying in of engrams. Silence around any person who has been hurt, who is ill, or who is being operated upon prevents key-in and the engram may slumber unrestimulated for years, never affecting a person physically or mentally in any way. Conversation around or to a person with reduced analytical power (by reason of weariness, illness, injury or drugs) is not simply bad, it is criminal, a fact which has been tested and proven over and over and over in Dianetic research. Anything said at such a time may find a counterpart in the engram bank and may key in an engram so that afterwards the individual may be restimulated by the slightest restimulator, is less awake and alert and is made, to some degree, less well physically.

An infant of two weeks has sufficient analytical mind to react to engramic stimuli—a matter of the most carefully observed experimentation, whatever yesterday’s ideas of structure have to say about it. Despite all caution some of a child’s engrams will inevitably be keyed in and can thereafter be push-buttoned. If enough of these engrams are keyed in and push-buttoned the “usual course of childhood illnesses” (as medicine blandly measures up the things which slaughter children) may be fatal or may inhibit or increase organic growth to such an extent that the body can never fully recover the optimum it was meant to have—although it will valiantly try, when cleared.

In Educational Dianetics this matter must be observed, for though it may not lie on the direct line of Educational Dianetics it enormously affects the ability of the analytical mind to absorb data and use it in the early years.

As to the momentary reduction of analytical power, Educational Dianetics is vitally and intimately concerned. This is directly on the track of nonacademic and academic education. All teaching of an academic character has a tendency to be altitude-instruction, which is to say that the facts are handed from a higher plane of learning to the individual on a lower plane of learning. Instructors of the past have been all too prone to teach rather in the fashion that one feeds a boa constrictor—with a stuffing machine. The child is fixated by parental threat of disapproval or punishment if he does not learn. He passes his early preschool years, usually, in being “educated” into “social habits” from a level of high authority. He is given manifestoes rather than data. Most of his “social habits,” which would come naturally as he progressed, become something on the order of hypnotic suggestions. Indeed, the hypnotic suggestion is only an intensified form of altitude-teaching; the analyzer of the subject is shut down, the operator then proceeds to pour in a lot of material which the subject, awake, accepts verbatim, literally—and, whatever the hypnotist of the past contended, harmfully. The data, in short, is placed in the reactive bank by being given to the individual on a bypass circuit. Fortunately this altitude-teaching lies also in the standard banks and, further, springs out of the reactive bank as a light lock automatically and without therapeutic attention when the individual is cleared.

Now, there are very few things which can be used by the analytical mind as stet data. The multiplication table, without much harm, can be placed in the reactive bank and can activate from there as a habit rather than as a training pattern. Spelling can be placed in the reactive bank, and some other data—very limited—can be held as reactive habits without harm to the analytical ability. But a datum such as “cats are black,” held reactively, is a thorough insanity, if a very tiny one, for all cats are not black. And yet if that datum is in the reactive bank, the reactive mind will hand forth a computation about cats in this fashion: when the consciously awake individual is given the whimsy that “black cats are bad luck,” cats are black, black cats equal bad luck, cats are bad luck. This irrationality is stet data upon which the individual will operate. He will justify a hatred of cats in various ways but he will never know that the reactive data is responsible until, in Diane tic therapy, the engram is erased; only at this time can he be considered to be rational about cats or, stated in another way, only at this time is his analytical mind free to do a thorough computation on the subject of cats.

The word cats is a push button. He hears the word cats, off goes some portion of his analyzer, in goes the datum. Thereafter it is literal reactive data and as such, about as safe to have around as a man-eating Bengal tiger; for the individual, as these data compound, is less and less able to reason: he can be told for instance that his wife is a cat and he will translate this to the effect that his wife is a cat, cats are bad luck, his wife is bad luck. The statement to him that his wife is a cat, meant as an idiomatic comment on her tendency to tear down the girls behind their backs, registers with him as a comment that his wife brings him bad luck and all this on a level of recording and “thinking” which he does not inspect. Many a guiltless lady has died under the butcher knife (see your local yellow journalistic sheet) for no better reason than this, providing of course, that the bank also contains a command to kill anything which is unlucky In the First World War in the field of nonacademic education, several nations were launched into an action which destroyed millions of their peoples simply by this push-button “reasoning/5 “Gott” was with the Germans. And God was with everybody else. And the world had to be safe for Germany and democracy. A populace thoroughly “educated” in this country about the “devil” had only to be shown that the Kaiser was the devil before it proceeded to attack the Kaiser. Whether the United States was right or wrong about going to war is beside the point, for the whole war was wrong, as wrong as this piece of reactive thinking.

Such bits of stet data are sown through the reactive banks of aberrees and through their cultures and render them prone to irrational stampedes. Now, if a nation can be stampeded because it has push buttons, what of the individual man? And if the individual man can be so thoroughly wrong, what of the child who lacks, even when unaberrated, sufficient experience to steer a clear path through his small world?

Thus we must take very definitely into account this matter of talking to “shut-down analyzers.” Shut down a person’s analyzer and what follows goes in as positive suggestion just as though he were hypnotized. He cannot reason on this data, he can only react. He reacts as dictated by the engram.

Take a thoroughly reactive capitalist (an accidental pun there), and talk to him about socialism. Try to talk to him about some idea which will abolish socialism. Reasonably he should be very interested. If you make the experiment you are liable to find that somewhere in the course of your dissertation he begins to grow “unreasonable.” If the capitalist cannot solve socialism, then the capitalist as a class is finished. But if he has engrams which make him a thoroughly standard cartoon capitalist he cannot be sufficiently rational on the subject to make himself secure in capitalism. The socialist can happily get all tangled up with fifty other isms and still believe he is a socialist. He may have all manner of reaction against the capitalist.

Reason itself lies somewhere between capitalism and socialism, not because Aristotle had a golden mean but because a government-owned nation is a flop and always has been just as a robber-baron-owned nation has always fallen on its face eventually. The capitalist has the tenet that a man should be able to enjoy the rewards of his labors and if he labors harder he should get more reward. The socialist believes that the poor and downtrodden should not be victimized and should be cared for. Both capitalism and socialism in actual practice, managed by aberrees, shoot so wildly far from their marks that they both become unworkable. The reason for this is that the capitalist, reacting from stet data, cannot be educated gracefully into the needs of the land; and the socialist, reacting from stet data, cannot be educated gracefully into the economic freedom of the individual Hence we are here confronted not with isms so much as education, for both capitalism and socialism have some remarkably workable tenets.

This is no discursion into politics but an example of what happens when stet data gets into the reactive mind. The struggle of man in the past has developed more and more into a struggle of push buttons against push buttons rather than reason against reason. Define freedom as something good to schoolchildren, then redefine it as state control when they are adults and they still cheer for freedom although they may have slave-chain galls an inch deep around their ankles and spend their time blessing the very chains that gall them.

Semantics is a vital subject when one considers the push-button mechanism, for when one deals with stet data he is not dealing with reason, he is dealing with reaction.

Education, then, to be effective, no matter if it is the education Mother gives the infant or the professor gives the collegiate, must avoid becoming positive suggestion if it is to produce anything like an effective being.

This sort of a situation may be found almost anywhere: Bill is a steam engineer; he knows quite a bit about steam engines and steam plants. One day his company shifts to diesel. Exit Bill. The excuse, perhaps, is that he is too old to learn something new and certainly he could not learn about diesels. Tracing one such case one finds at each step of Bill’s life, altitude-teaching. First, he had to mind his parents and older people and do what he was told. Second he had to learn what he was taught in school or get flunked and have the school fall in on him, or his parents send him into the cold world—or at least that was the impression given. Third, we find he was educated into believing that a secure man had a specialized job. Fourth, he was never given any change on that job so that he could become adaptable. Fifth, like the maker of buggy whips he sees a careless world pass him by.

The errors here are standard. There is no slightest reason why a child must accept his parents literally and be punished with physical pain for not so accepting mandates, which are perhaps workable in childhood but are a terrible liability to adults. This is so flagrant that a student of the mind, Sigmund Freud, based an entire scheme of therapy solely upon childhood; and if that scheme was in error as to its fundamentals, it is at least a comment on childhood nonacademic education.

On the second point, any school which teaches with threat and altitude by the examination and grade system is teaching by positive suggestion and has about as much appeal to reason as the penal code of Devils Island,1 and any instruction it gives forth is of minor value for reasons which will follow The third point is an example of propaganda, always a thing of stet data. A specialist has reduced his security by narrowing his gaze to one channel and reducing his adaptability. There is nothing wrong with being the worlds greatest remover of the liver so long as one can also play the fiddle well enough to live or perform some other remunerative task, preferably less dependent upon hands. Palsy and accident may make one the person who was once the world s greatest remover of the liver, and that pays for no chow Further, the social aberration says that a job is the thing, that a job is security, and that one is a good citizen when one has a regular job.

Actually that person who, to eat, depends upon another to furnish a job is very, very insecure. For, oh, the ease with which that pink slip can turn up some Saturday and, oh, the ease, in a totalitarianism, with which one can become non persona grata through disliking the strawberries the administration insists that all should eat. The only security is an ability to take care of oneself, family and friends no matter what economics turn up and that is a generality which is not answered by a job.

The fourth point is that the analytical mind is alert only so long as it is learning. In a Clear it can be realerted at will. In the aberree the reactive bank becomes more and more crowded, the somatic mind contains all necessary training patterns to the tasks at hand and the analytical mind literally goes to sleep.

Educational Dianetics is not then the study of how to get A in a classroom of some authoritarian university, although it can include that too. It is the science of how to learn and how to teach in such a way as to preserve the alertness of the analytical mind and to make it possible for the individual to place into action a maximum of solutions based on a minimum of data.

As to getting the A from some pompous encyclopedia lecturing from the rostrum of some vastly dignified school, the answer is simple. Push his buttons.

As to learning, one should take precautions against having altitude-teaching thrown at him in such a way as to form stet data. Just because Professor Blimp is one of the eight men in the country who has memorized the collected works of Sir Thomas Browne, is no reason why anyone should respect Professor Blimp. A Clear could read those collected works in a couple of weeks and have them at call, anytime required, which would be never Just because Instructor Snoozer says one s prose style is bad is no reason to believe him. Snoozer couldn’t sell a want ad to the Whoosis Gazette; he wouldn’t be an instructor if he knew enough about prose to write it. Just because Dean Sturgis can look stern is no reason to believe what he says about nuclear physics. It will all be old hat and utterly wrong by the time you graduate anyway; and if you are being flunked out, be consoled: the only independent characters who have created anything worthwhile in the past five centuries were all flunked out, every one. Further, one s parents do not die of grief if one gets a B. They may say so, but scientific investigations have established the fact that no parents have ever expired from this cause. In learning, study what you want to know, think what you want to think about it, recognize institutionalism for the bogus straw man it is and keep the analyzer whirring.

As to teaching, that is a more responsible and a more serious matter. In order to understand what is necessary in instructing, no matter if one is instructing a baby of two or a man of twenty-one, it is necessary to know something about the modus operandi of the human mind and to know particularly that all forcefully impressed data (whether by a spanking or a threat of a low grade) does the following: (1) makes the data unavailable to the analyzer, (2) reduces the force and therefore the efficiency and ability of the student, (3) may cause him fatal trouble later in life, and (4) because man is a very complex animal and furiously tries to measure up to his proper level of self-determinism, produces effects which cannot be calculated in advance and which may include rebellion, apathy, illness or even derangement—the latter since one never can judge what is in the engram bank until the person is Clear, when the matter is of no consequence.

The blunders which are made in contemporary academic education are too many to be tallied in a long book. Let it suffice that the system employed in grade school, high school and college is so incorrect and so far from reason that it should be junked quickly and painlessly before it gives us another generation of wartime ensigns, another generation of sterile college women, another generation of worshipers at the feet of the Great God, Authority.

One error however must be remarked. The examination system employed is not much different from a certain hypnotic technique. One induces a state of confusion in the subject by raising his anxieties of what may happen if he does not “pass.” One then “teaches” at a mind which is anxious and confused. That mind does not then rationalize; it merely records and makes a pattern. If the pattern is sufficiently strong to be regurgitated verbatim on an examination paper, the student is then given a good grade and passed.

A good grade is supposed to be synonymous with a bright mind. It is actually, under the present system, only a measure of one of two things: (a) ability to receive stet data without caviling at conclusions drawn by the instructor and (b) sonic and visio recall. In (a) one finds the characteristic of the hypnotic subject, and no measure of the student’s ability to do anything with his knowledge if he is ever transplanted into another environment (a factor of less and less importance as college graduation age rises toward the evident optimum of fifty-five years); the student might as well be a zombie. In (b) we find a condition which is no measure whatever of either intelligence or ability but only demonstrates the absence of a certain class of engrams which block audio and visio recall. The student with audio and visio merely has to recall by rote what he has heard and set it down or recall by rote what he has seen and set it down. Of course in technical subjects a certain computational ability is necessary, but schools demand computation by rote and actually for any method given there may be fifty more, half of them superior to the one taught.

By training students for years beyond the moment when nature decrees they jump out of the nest, another factor is entered—that of impeding adjustment to the environment of work. The environment which one should occupy for life should be entered as early as possible so that facts can begin to align with actuality. For facts unaligned with actuality are again so much excess baggage, so much stet data, and actually impede the ability of the student to work efficiently when he finally does have a field where theory becomes, all of a sudden, actuality.

Further, a man should begin to make his friendship connections, his loyalties and ties well before he is twenty. He is a lonely man who leaves the old university at an age when he can less ably adjust himself to a circle of friends. And as for his loyalties, there is nothing sillier than old school tie rah-rah when one, the remaining two thirds of his very active life, will be in there pitching for Westinghouse.

What one can laughingly call modern education is about as modern, even in its most advanced fronts, as a school of Egyptian priests. There was a modern educational system once, and a portion of it survives in England though much watered. The Greek academy system is superior to the best thing our financially minded seats of “learning” can offer. Our system in its general form is more than five hundred years old and has not worked for five hundred years any better than anything else the Scholastics put forth. The only thing liberal about a modern liberal education is the number of students per class and the amount of authoritarianism per instructor.

An invective, however, is very far from effective and one must remark in fairness that many students have struggled through and done something in life from the most stultified of our schools, and that schools exist which actually teach something besides how to make A. This is not a lecture on the faults of modern education and has only been brought forth as a revenge against the institutions which educated the ensigns one had in the war.

The first vital principle in teaching the aberree is to do everything possible to keep his analyzer turned on and aligned with the subject on a rational plane. This instantly rules out rostrum pomposity and manifestoes, grades, examinations, mass teaching—all tricks of altitude whereby the data, forced in, becomes stet data—and any and all recourse to any authority.

Shakespeare has to become a playwright, not a god, and if the student doesn’t like him that’s Shakespeare’s fault. Calculus has to become a bunch of tricks by which one accomplishes, by abstractions, certain useful results, not a tangle of dy/dx summate and excruciate and if the minus sign is wrong one flunks calculus (not algebra, where the student should have learned minus signs). Biology becomes the study of life, not the study of somebody’s book who will be as outmoded as Aristotle’s pendulum. Civics becomes the study of how one runs a country, not how one parrots a politician. History becomes the story of a lot of fellows who did things, not a string of dates attached to some improbable heroes who weren’t that way at all. And chemistry becomes “that changing science with which you can do some very fine things if you carefully disbelieve our present theories,” and philosophy becomes a study of how to be a philosopher, which is to think and synthesize, not a dull memorization of a lot of fellows who wrote a lot more than they knew about. The first thing one should establish when teaching, particularly the very young children, is whether or not they have sonic and visio recall If they have not, do not be amazed to find them poor at spelling and many other things and do not adjudge them dull, for they are not. The sonic-visio children should be separated out for their own type of instruction; the nonsonic, nonvisio should be given another type of instruction and should in particular be guarded from restimulative circumstances, as these probably have the largest number of engrams and are the least secure in their homes. The two groups should not be left together because of contagion of aberration. Educationally the nonsonic recall group are susceptible to errors which the sonics will not make, but the sonics will pick up the purely educational blunders of the nonsonics. Further, the sonic group should never have that backwards type of thing posed at them which requires them to select something right from one right and one wrong answer, for they image both the right answer and the wrong answer and have to recall, then, that one is wrong—an unnecessary step. They can be asked if something is wrong or right but the display of wrong data to them impedes them.

Education has been much concerned, it is discovered, with something about which it should not have been concerned, and this was the training of the standard memory bank. This bank needs about as much training as a roll of movie film to which it can be imperfectly likened. It records everything perceived anyway, if the attention is drawn to it. Thus the act of putting something into the standard bank and then seeing if the child can get it out is no test of education but is a test of recall and sanity which lies in the field of dianometry, not education.

A child with all recalls (as images) shut off, may be many times as intelligent and may have many times the dynamic of some child with full recall and low dynamic. The child with the high dynamic, further, will rebel against authoritarianism, instinctively seeking to be self-determined, for along that route is survival. The other child may take tamely everything given out. The recall-less child may be graded with a D, the one with recall, an A. The relative potential worth may determine that the D child will someday be of great value to the society and that the A child might as well have been omitted from the birth records.

A child with full recall and high dynamic may, further, be rebellious and so receive a low grade and yet this child is potentially the most valuable of the three. Any society which remains indifferent to this, now that it is known, by seeking to elevate the person of low creative-constructive worth above that of high worth will find itself on the dwindling spiral, in competition with societies which do not remain indifferent to it. For those practices in vogue give to those who least can use it the most education, and to those who would be of greatest value to the society, the least. This creates an artificial and dull strata of the “educated” and invites totalitarianism by raising those who are most affected by authority just because it is authority.

The analytical mind must be trained. The reactive mind must be left as empty as possible and must remain as unrestimulated as possible. The training of the analytical mind is not a difficult or touchy subject; nor is it a subject at which much strain must be leveled, for it is a self-training mechanism and best thrives when it is least “molded.” The self-determinism of the individual must, above all things, be left as intact as possible. He should not be asked to work or study because somebody other than himself decrees it. The moment exterior force is applied to the analytical mind, it combats that force as sentiently as possible and is distracted from its principal purpose, in education, of learning. The moment threats and pain are used, the data goes in at a reactive level in the aberree, child or man, and is not education but a species of hypnotism and worse.

If the individual is unwilling to follow a vital course of study, the error does not lie with his analytical mind. A child or a man is thirsty for knowledge. He drinks it at great gulps. His unwillingness stems from (a) his failure to observe the necessity or use of the course or (b) aberrations against studying that thing or that course. The moment the necessity of the learning is realized by the analytical mind, it will pour in wattage on the subject. In a very young child little can be done about the aberration, but much can be done in changing the method of address to the subject so that it is not restimulative. I.e., if a child will not “set the table” try “lay out the plates”; if a man will not “learn to splice” have him “connect cables.” The analytical mind learns in several ways. First of those—and earliest—is mimicry, by which it learns by aping what it observes. A child is so very good at this that, left with a dog as his only playmate he will soon demonstrate dog tricks and mannerisms; but as these are training patterns, not habits, they do no harm. A child learns his manners best by watching well-mannered parents whom he cares to imitate. Any training done on a mimicry basis where the attention is volunteered will be successful All training must have first a goal. Unless the student understands the purpose thoroughly and the intended use of the information, the data is unaligned and therefore relatively useless. True, the analytical mind reevaluates all data in its banks when a new purpose is at hand and will align data after it has received it. But the delivery of data without first giving the data a magnitude and a vector of purpose fails because the recipient of the information, having no assigned use for it, is much less interested in it than he would be and does not compute with it, only records it. Thus the data is poured into the standard banks and the process is one of memory, and the analytical mind is not exercised into deriving new data of its own from the information it receives.

The actual training of the analytical mind is an automatic process so long as purpose and use precede information. The analytical mind is busied in weighting values and doing computations to derive new data and when it fails by one method of computation it will learn or discover another one to make up the lack.

The analytical mind must be busy. It has this in common with muscles. At any stage of life, from the youngest infancy to death, the analytical mind should be active. It can be relapsed into a contentment of inactivity only through engrams. It is active so long as it has goals, not so long as it has problems. Being an efficient computer it will soon begin to set up training patterns to solve any routine problems. Lacking then any new goal, its activity lowers. In such a way, the surest method of guaranteeing inefficiency on the part of an employee is to set up a thorough routine and never change it; the analytical mind will relegate the affairs to the training pattern banks and, if cleared, will find goals somewhere outside the confines of the labor.

Any airline, for instance, if it wishes the highest efficiency on the part of its pilots and the greatest alertness, will shift their routes irregularly so that new areas must be learned. Adaptability is to this extent a matter of practicing the art of becoming adapted. Creativeness is, in part, dependent for its value of product on shifts into new channels of creation.

The analytical mind runs on a new goal plan. It accomplishes something in the desire to enjoy it and then contemplates the accomplishment for a breath of space and, unless it has an immediate new goal, becomes dissatisfied. Happiness is the act of accomplishing, over not unknowable obstacles, new goals. Happiness is not the goal. It is the act of reaching toward and progressing toward the goal. It lies, in the briefest instant, in contemplating the accomplished. It lies for a brief time in contemplating what is to be accomplished before beginning upon it. The main body of it lies in the field of active endeavor.

In the case of a child, he already has a natural goal. He wants to grow up. If he is badly aberrated, living with badly aberrated parents, he may want most desperately with his reactive mind to remain a child. Any psychology which gives the child utter leeway in all his actions as a child and coddles him in childhood is a sick psychology.

A child can be spoiled, but not by affection. A psychology which finds danger in affection is the product of aberration built up of puerile neuroses of highly abnormal persons. A child is “spoiled” by quite another process. In the first place the child has to be badly aberrated before he can be “spoiled.” In the second place the act of spoiling consists mainly in giving to him but never letting him own for himself anything, in ordering him continually against his own decisions and then crossing the orders on him so that he has no certainty of the law under which he is operating.

A badly aberrated child, to educate him into possession of himself, must unfortunately be punished. He should be given the stability of a penal code so that he knows exactly where he stands. The code and the consequences of behavior must be invariable. This gives him a certainty and a security. There is such a thing as a necessity level. In an actual emergency the analytical mind will take over wholly from the engram bank. One has seen examples of this in aberrated persons who bemoaned their fate and health at all times except when emergency dictated that action must be taken, at which time they carried, so to speak, grand pianos without a blink.

A child who has been confused by conflicting orders and whose engrams are in sorry restimulation can actually be brought into a state of calmness by the establishment of a certainty such as a penal code. It is needless to add, to anyone who knows Dianetics, that the child should not be threatened angrily, and if punished that he should not be spoken to during or for some little time after the punishment. He can be given certain tasks and full responsibility within those tasks and punished only if the task is not done. Eventually he raises his own necessity level to a point where he can handle his own body and being and should become calmer without becoming apathetic. The way to make him apathetic is to tear him up every time he begins to dramatize his engrams, as in tantrums; to block all roads which, if he followed them, would give him pride in himself. Reward him when he is good, give him specific rights and specific wrongs, and he can live until he gets to a point where he can be cleared.

The cleared or only slightly aberrated person, so long as his analyzer is not turned off by restimulation, will try to form and reach goals continually. In a child, the goal of most importance should be being grown up. Aligned in that fashion he will try to practice being grown up, and he will mimic and learn with a great thirst. Being grown up, then, should be demonstrated to him as quite an estate to be gained. Grown-ups have privileges children do not. The state of being grown up can be enjoyed. A society which makes the state of being a child a highly privileged one is taking away some of the value of the big goal, the natural goal of being an adult. Adults should enjoy themselves as adults in the sight of children. Adults should have privileges in the sight of children. An adult should be something to be.

The aberration does not come from that outmoded idea, conditioning. Conditioning was a concept which supposed that when a person had done or seen something often enough it became good, solid hypnotic data. This is very far from the truth. Repeated action, if a habit stemming from the engram bank, can have been done by a person ten thousand times—but the moment the engram is erased the habit ceases instantly. Repeated action, if a training pattern laid down by the analytical mind, can be done over and over thousands of times and then, if no longer useful as such, it can be altered or abandoned at will. The aberree is so much liable to training becoming a lock on an engram that he may not be able to shift readily from one training pattern to the next. In a Clear, the response is very rapid between observation of the need for a change in the pattern and the change itself.

Thus all data must have a goal around which to align itself. The child, to be educated into manners and skills, must have a wish to have them and that wish is principally the desire to grow up. In addition he has minor goals such as awards for being a “good boy” and the admiration of his fellows or adults or, on a good, thorough analytical route, any goal he supposes valuable.

Whether one is teaching a child to eat with a fork or training him in calculus, the principles are the same. There must be a good reason, first, before the child will use the fork and he must understand that reason. There must be an equally good reason and use for calculus, as calculus, not a grade or degree, before he can be expected to derive much from it.

In addition to this goal, there are various other axioms about education.

In Educational Dianetics, a datum is as important as it contributes to the solution of problems.

A problem is as important as it is related to survival A solution is as important as it assists the urge along any or all of the dynamics.

A datum is valid only when it can be sensed, measured or experienced.

A foremost part of all education is the evaluating of the importance of data.

A datum is important only in relationship to other data.

A datum is as valuable as it has been evaluated.

These axioms are mainly those of the weighting of data, problems, solutions and conclusions. The most serious hole in all contemporary education is its failure to recognize the importance of data weight. The instructor cannot weight data for the pupil. The pupil must have a sufficient goal so that he will weight the data himself.

Environment is another grossly overlooked factor in contemporary education, since environment is the one thing which can give data a proper weight. Many a navigator can sail the devil out of a ship in a classroom and get lost trying to find the end of a pier. Education which is done against strictly academic background is stultifying and most of its importance is lost because it has not exercised the analyzer in weighting and deriving. A classroom is no proper place to learn to run a steam locomotive. The proper method would be to throw the student, as yet wholly uninformed, aboard a Malley and give him the throttle on a clear piece of track. Baffled and balked by all the bright brass around him, he would be sufficiently challenged to buckle down and learn and he would have a feel of what he was learning. Or he would decide that he wanted to be a cabinetmaker after all and a lot of training hours would have been saved himself and some badgered instructor.

A man can be given rudimentary instruction in reading, writing, history, literature, music, manners and mathematics. Anyone keeping him in school, as just school, after he learns these is wasting his manhood. A man should be in the environment of his chosen profession from the age of at least fifteen. He should be educated after that in short spurts in school as he desires to know more. And he should be educated by professionals in his own business. If this happened to more men and women there would be many more engineers to whom one could say with confidence, “Build me a bridge,” or housewives about whom one could say, “She’s a swell cook and her man’s happy. And you ought to see her kids.” Of course at this somewhat retarded stage of social usage, human beings are more or less robots, as seen by employers and planners. Totalitarianisms such as communism and Nazism and socialism and such consider the individual much less important than the mass since such isms depend for their very lives upon the robotizing of men. Identity thinking typical of the isms which are, after all, low-grade insanities in practice (no matter how good they looked in the text of some philosopher), confuses the roar of the machine with the voice of its attendant. But, ah well, the cracks in their ceilings have just now begun to open and the great houses of the slavemasters are about to come down. The workers of the world are not going to arise. They are, we hope, going to their feet for once. Better education, not more education, should accomplish this. Indeed, if men have to spend more years at being educated than they do, the graduates will have only one voyage out into the world—the journey to the old folks’ home over the hill.

There is no such thing as being overeducated. There is such a thing as being badly educated. The length of time in a school is no criteria of either one.

Education should not be associated with scholasticism. There are men who have never seen the inside of a university who are superior to those and worth more to society than those who carried away the highest honors. Herbert Spencer spent three years at school in all his life. Spinoza spent a very few years and then was expelled. Francis Bacon, the man who gave us all the fundamentals of what we call now the scientific method, went to school three years, revolted against Aristotle and left the halls of learning in a huff. Actually, as one walks down the halls of learning and looks at the busts of the great, therein, he is struck by the fact that almost none were formally educated but took the world for their texts and professors. One might almost say that a professional educator is one who worships a dead illiterate. And one, with some research, might validly conclude that the surest way to succeed in any profession is to study something else at school.

There is excellent reason for this and most educational centers would richly profit by some soul-searching about it in the light of this new data. All through these centers men of spirit and wit have been telling one another that something was wrong and trying to improve what they could and escape as much as possible the stigmata of scholasticism. So there is no question of blame, but only a hope of progress.

There are some pertinent definitions here. Educational Dianetics can be defined as that science which formulates reasonability and conduct in the face of natural laws and advances techniques to inculcate natural principles and laws into the mind. Its goal is maximal training in minimal time in the activity of living, preserving maximal freedom of use of the lessons gained.

Other axioms of Educational Dianetics are here defined: Arbitrary law is anything formulated and promulgated by reason of mans will, to be enforced by threat or punishment or merely disapprobation.

Natural law is enforced by nature. Logic adapts decision and conduct to nature or adapts nature.

The amount of arbitrary law existing in a society is a direct index to the inability of that society to be rational and to the irrationality of the members of that society.

Only in the face of irrationality is force necessary.

All things or entities which are irrational are handled by force in ratio to their irrationality. Inanimate matter and free energy are handled only by force. Life forms are used with force less and less as they ascend up the scale from irrationality to rationality. A fully logical entity not only should not be handled by force, but excepting only cataclysms, cannot be handled by force.

Any subject should be called and treated as an art until its natural laws, or some of them, are known. The formulation of rules before the natural laws are known introduces arbitrary factors which inhibit action and destroy reason. As much flexibility and variability must be employed in any educational subject as the subject contains, which is to say that so long as the natural laws are unknown, the subject must be taught with the fullest possible awareness that they are unknown and the fact that they are unknown must be a part of the teaching.

Authoritarianism is the introduction of arbitrary law where no natural law is known, yet maintaining that the arbitrary law is the natural law.

Education must raise the level of rationality and increase and reinforce the basic purpose and dynamics of the individual if it is to result in a betterment of the individual or of society.

It is a prime purpose of education to increase the self-determinism of the individual.

It is a goal of education to sort the arbitrary from the natural.

It is a principle of education to properly label that which is arbitrary and that which is natural.

It is directly opposed to the best interests of education and a society to give force to any opinion of whatever kind and to force that opinion upon any student or individual.

The maintenance of a high level of self-determinism is more important in educating than the maintenance of order.

As the aberration of the individual forces itself against others, so must force be applied against the individual, but in such a way as to decrease the exhibition of the aberration and with due regard to the health and self-determinism of the individual The story of the growth of knowledge is the story of individuals, not the story of societies. Individuals make societies, societies only modify and moderate or warp individuals. All education is the education of individuals, not the education of the masses. Pertinent to this last, in the days since Jefferson the theory has grown largely held that philosophers and conquerors came into being as products of an age and a society and if one had not occupied their boots another would have done so. An examination of history disproves utterly such a tenet. Man goes on from the milestone of one man to the milestone of the next. Human history is the track along which men, here and there, have been strong or brilliant and have changed the complexion of the road. This tenet has colored all modern education which then found an excuse to assembly-line individuals, making them conform like so many dolls.

Actually this piece of error, raising up a false standard of groupism, has through the policies of education spoiled perhaps thousands of individuals who would have been of considerable worth to the society. A careful check through scores of cases revealed that by careless opinionation, aberrated parents and instructors and forced instruction, talent has been inhibited which when released by Dianetics displayed itself to be of no mean caliber- The paintings, plays, compositions of music, cathedrals and states which might have been, had not bad education stepped in the way, are a real and not imaginary loss to mankind-Aristotle was a great man, but scholasticism has bled our minds and drained our energies through the collapse of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages, through the American university and to the H-bomb. An educational system which slaughters genuine capability has a wide effect- Social leveling to the arithmetic mean and to the mediocre sets up the sheep society as the model, and sheep can be stampeded because they are easily frightened and are not particularly rational- Only highly rational individuals who are the product of excellent individual educations can stay a stampede.

An educational program which begins with the child’s parents, progresses through kindergarten and grade school, through high school and into college and preserves at every step the individuality, the native ambitions, intelligence, abilities and dynamics of the individual, is the best bastion against not only mediocrity but any and all enemies of mankind.

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]