"I
have been engaged in a study of applications of technology to
illiteracy and illiterate or semiliterate populations,”
declared L. Ron Hubbard, “and found some simple levels of
approach.” If seemingly a casual statement, it is not. That
study of illiteracy spanned at least thirty-five years, and culminated
in a body of work that has changed the way in which we
perceive language; while as for those “simple levels of
approach,” we are speaking of the answer to
all that comprises a
twentieth-century educational crisis.
Consider the twenty million
functionally
illiterate Americans, and the
unknown illiterate Australians. Approximately 13
percent of all American teenagers (and upwards of 40 percent of all
minority adolescents) are unable to read a newspaper. As many as
forty-four million American adults are unable to read the poison
warning on a pesticide container, while only one in four young men and
women entering the United States military can make sense of safety
instructions on government hardware. Australian youth is not so
different. Notwithstanding the
billions now spent on education – and the commensurate one
teacher for every thirty-five students – the reading, writing
and mathematical skills of schoolchildren continues to
plummet.
When
speaking of L Ron Hubbard tools for learning, one is not speaking of
some new
study aid, a memorization technique or phonetic reading program.
Rather, one is speaking of a complete technology
for study, the means by which any
subject may be grasped. Nor is one speaking of an arbitrary approach,
but rather: These are
the components of study, this is
how we learn. And for all that has been prescribed in the name of
education over the last ninety years (at least), this is wholly new.
Central
to LRH Study
Technology is a delineation of
the three primary barriers to study, never before recognized and yet
constituting the sole reasons for all educational failures. Educators
may glibly speak of Attention Deficit Disorders or Learning
Disabilities, but it is claptrap. Their students are failing to learn,
because no one has ever taught them how to learn – how to
identify the barriers to learning, and how to overcome those barriers.
No
less all-encompassing, and even more fundamental to the process of
education, is the second great LRH contribution, the Hubbard Key to
Life Course. It is aptly named, and the title actually bears upon our
last introductory point: If one truly comprehended what one read and
heard, and was likewise comprehended by others, then the whole of life
would open. Such is the subject of Key to Life – to strip
away the reasons why one cannot comprehend and why, in turn, one cannot
be comprehended. At the heart of the course lies a particularly
equal view of language, not as an high handed subject for academic
study, but a living, breathing vehicle for communication. To exactly
that end, Key to Life further reshapes English grammar, away from a
stultified body of rules to a real tool for meaningful expression. The
result is a student who does not merely read and write as we generally
conceive of it, but a student who is empowered
with the language, adept with it and masterful. Although
technically a remedial program, Key to Life ultimately advances our
concept of literacy to wholly new and startling plateaus.
“Our
intent is not to just salvage a few students,” Ron remarked
some two decades ago. “Our intent is to reverse this whole
decay.” As we shall see, he was absolutely serious, and if
the general decay of twentieth-century education has latterly grown
critical, the LRH solution is all the more potent. In the other pages
we shall examine both the development of those solutions and
their greater impact worldwide.
oOo
