Refund and Reparation

Learning rate. This is one of the more important things with which we have to do. Scientology has always been the science of knowing how to know. With some diffidence, I tell you that it is also the basic science of education. This, of course, may give you some idea that we should all dive overboard at once and become educators and so forth. Some new ideas have come up along this line.

Education happens to be just one part of a large whole. Education is seldom creative and is, therefore, just a middle ground of activity. Getting people to know something rather than getting people to invent something to know, you see, are quite different.

Just getting people to know something, and getting people to invent something to know: This is quite different. Well, in Scientology itself we engage in a great many educational activities, and just for that reason alone you should understand education.

But education really takes off from a series of basics which we have a good grip on. And nobody ever knew where education took off before. Well, it takes off from Scientology. That's what it takes off from. That's factually true; nobody ever had these basics.

It's quite amazing. You ask an educator about these things and if you didn't impart any information to him, you just tried to get information back out of him about how you taught people and so forth, you would get flabbergasted. Some of his ideas are interesting. Some of his methods are complicated enough to be fascinating, but they're not effective.

In order to educate somebody you had to know what the mind was all about. And unless you knew the nearly total anatomy of the mind you could not hope, then, to do very much education. And the educational world did not know the anatomy of the mind and so they didn't do very much education. Simple. Simple background.

But the funny part of it is, if you tell an educator some of the basics of education, you'll find he's agreeing with you all the time; he knew all these things, he knew it all... And he hasn't got this selected out yet at all. He hasn't got it evaluated with importances. He would say, "Well, you have to take a class roster..." That is just as important, you see, as establishing which of the people in class have a high learning rate and which have a low learning rate. I mean, it's just as important to take a class roster as it is to establish the characteristics of those who are in class. As a matter of fact, they might consider the secondary datum unnecessary. Might be much more important to take a class roster than to establish the learning rates of people there.

You see, they could not evaluate for you the data you have fed them. But they are in such total agreement with the basics that you feed them, that they are rather apt to go anaten,¹ stagger, yawn. They'd be very fascinated with what you were saying and so on.

They have obviously met somebody that could tell them something about their business. Now, therefore, let's not get too overboard; at the same time, let's not get education too isolated and so on. If you know about the mind, you can educate a mind. This is for certain. This is certain. Quite true. If you don't know about the mind you'll run Columbia or Yale or something. You get the idea? It's just that great a difference.