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LRH notes on the causes return us directly to that Dewey-Thorndike proposition. In a blunt word, he wrote, the modern school room is a psychological factory for social reform, and has nothing whatsoever to do with education. Curricula tends towards “eradicating faults instead of acquiring skills,” while testing encourages memorization, “instead of the use of the data to think.” In the same sinking boat are instructors convinced their students are incapable of learning and, actually, encouraged to dismiss the problem as “Disorder of Written Expression” or “Reading Disorder 315.” Whereupon the psychiatrist steps in with Ritalin or Cylert or any of another dozen psychotropics, and the child is now not only “Educationally Dysfunctional,” but may suffer headaches, insomnia, abdominal pain, and that so-called “major complication” from withdrawal – suicide.
There is more, including television and video games – not only obliterating the printed page, but effectively hypnotizing two generations – and both psychiatric and illicit drug use to the same dead ends. Next comes what psychology has wrought as the dominant twentieth-century creed, including a view of the child as something to be molded, while his teacher stands armed to the teeth with tools derived from animal experimentation. Finally, and bearing in mind all that ensues from the misunderstood word, there are the typical textbooks themselves with one undefined term after another to further stultify, bewilder and confuse.
Thus Ron developed The Key to Life Course – to methodically strip away impediments to comprehension and provide the tools for communication. As a first critical step, he speaks of resolving an especially baffling, “chicken and egg” question, i.e., How does one convey the meaning of a word to students who do not understand the words used to teach them? For a sense of the problem, consider opening a standard English dictionary to the first entry. The linguist may be satisfied, but the average reader is not, particularly as he ponders unexplained phonetic codes, derivation symbols and the like. Worse still, even the simpler children’s dictionaries can hardly avoid complex terminology. Consequently, the question remained: How does one convey the language – its construction, words and usage – without exposing students to yet more misunderstood words?
The LRH solution was the illustration, or actually thousands of illustrations enabling students to grasp what they might not understand with merely the written word. For example, students are initially taught the procedure of Word Clearing with illustrations only – illustrations of readers referring to dictionaries, selecting appropriate definitions and more. In the same way, students are provided with the foundation of an English vocabulary, the means to use a dictionary and the essentials of English grammar – in precisely that order, and all through illustrations.
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