As early as 1950, L. Ron Hubbard warned that any lapse in the quality of education would negatively impact on the quality of life as a whole. In particular and most incisively: “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.”

Decades later, Mr. Hubbard’s observation has proven nightmarishly accurate and the continued disintegration of many of our institutions may prove inevitable unless the deterioration of our educational systems is arrested. 

To cite but a few disturbing facts: Some 45 percent of all students leaving or graduating high school lack the necessary reading and writing skills demanded in daily living; the American high-school dropout rate hovers at approximately 30 to 50 percent in inner-city areas; according to the president of a teachers association, up to 50 percent of all new teachers quit the profession within the first five years; and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of American students have sunk to levels considerably lower than those achieved by students in the early 1970s. 

Elsewhere throughout the Western world, the facts are hardly more encouraging. A British government study reported that a third of the English workforce was unable to add the menu prices of a typical lunch. Moreover, one out of five British students could not correctly locate Great Britain on a world map. 

All told, these dismal figures translate into a depressing economic scenario with annual costs to businesses in lost production and re-education now past the $240 billion mark. And when one factors in the grim links between illiteracy and criminality, world educational failures become too bleak to tally.

Study Technology

It is into the face of an academic crisis that
L. Ron Hubbard presented his educational methods. Drawn from some four decades of experience as an educator, these methods represent the first comprehensive understanding of the actual barriers to effective learning. Mr. Hubbard further developed a precise technology to overcome those barriers, and thus how to learn and apply any body of knowledge.

In total, his contribution to the field is known as Study Technology and provides the first fully workable approach to teaching students how to learn. It offers methods for recognizing and resolving all difficulties in absorbing material, including a previously unacknowledged barrier that ultimately lies at the bottom of all failures to pursue a given course of study. In short, then, this Study Technology helps anyone learn anything and has proven to achieve uniform, consistent results wherever it has been applied. Because it is based on fundamentals common to everyone, it cuts across economic, cultural or racial lines and can be used by all, regardless of age. Indeed, the three definitive texts on the subject, The Basic Study Manual, Study Skills for Life and Learning How to Learn essentially differ only in their treatment of the material. The first is designed for teenagers and above, while the second is aimed at younger readers, with the third offering the basics of Study Technology to children between the ages of eight and twelve. The point being, Mr. Hubbard’s study techniques have proven as effective in the elementary school as they have in the executive suites of multinational corporations.

Through the efforts of Applied Scholastics International, a nonprofit public benefit corporation dedicated to the improvement of education worldwide, L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology is currently applied in some 74 countries on all six continents. To date, more than 28 million students have participated in some 900 Applied Scholastics literacy and education projects worldwide.