Science of Survival - book 2

Producing results in processing and it's relation to education.

page 9-10 

  The second process which is valid in producing results is
education. Education, if defined as the process of making new
data available to the individual and causing his mind to attend to
and use that data, itself brings reason into the case. Education
usually provides new areas of concentration in the environment
of the individual and translates many of his unknowns into
knowns. Unreason could be classed in two categories: too wide a
zone of attention, and too fixed a zone of attention. In the first,
the mind wanders over large areas unable to select pertinent data.
In the second, where the mind is fixed, it cannot wander far
enough to find pertinent data. In neither case can the mind
resolve the problem about which it is concerned, due to the
absence of data. Superstition is an effort, for lack of education, to
find pertinent data in too wide a zone or to fix the attention upon
irrelevant data. Personal experience in one's environment gives
one what might be called personal education. A man has become
embroiled with MEST, has freed himself, solved problems, has
become embroiled again, has drawn back and solved problems
anew, so that he has accumulated a fund of personal data about
his task of living. Education might be said to be the process by
which the individual is given the accumulated data of a long
span of culture. It can, no less validly than personal experience,
solve many of his problems. Free theta, confronted by too many
problems, can, just by this, become enturbulated. Good education
can in this way convert some of the entheta of an individual into
theta, with a consequent rise on the tone

scale. A very sharp proviso, however, must here be entered.
Authoritarian teaching, by which the facts are impressed upon
the individual and his self-determinism in his utilization of those
facts is suppressed, can reduce the free theta in the individual by
involving it in a fixed state in the memory bank. Theta is reason.
Fixed theta is entheta. Many a man with a college education
hammered home by authoritarian professors has been reduced so
far down the tone scale that he behaves in life more or less like
an automaton. His self-determinism, and hence his persistence
and ability to handle responsibility are so reduced as to unfit
him for his role in life. Further, concentrating on educational
processes past the mid-teens, after which a person should be
solving problems of living, has an inhibitive effect upon the
mind. An artist specifically is hindered by authoritarian
education, since his must be the highest self-determinism if his
work is to have any value. Authoritarian education has more or
less the same effect upon the individual as hypnotism, depressing
him down the tone scale, and indeed, at this time most education
is levelled as hypnotic commands rather than an invitation to
reason. An education which invites reason and the comparison of
taught data with the real world can raise the individual on the
tone scale.