EDUCATION AND DIANETICS

A lecture given on 11 November 1950

A Science of Knowledge

Educational Dianetics is the oldest branch of Dianetics. Its actual name should be Advanced Epistemology. It was with epistemology that this whole study began, and probably after the aberrations are swamped up, it is the thing which will continue on forever and aye, because epistemology means nothing more nor less than the philosophic study of knowledge. There is the crux of the entire situation, the entire basic integration of Dianetics— knowledge .

When one started to study thought, he of course had knowledge as his closest approach to an examination of thought. Knowledge is still very important to thought, although thought itself is evidently on a somewhat higher echelon than just knowledge because knowledge is a sort of crystallized thought.

So epistemology is a subject which may have a very fancy name, but it is also a very simple subject. When you peel Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Hume, Locke, and earlier, Plato and Aristotle off this word, you find out that basically everyone is talking about merely knowing things, and that man knows things and that there is something called knowledge.

"I see a cat" is knowledge. Someone does the act of seeing a cat, and it becomes knowledge to somebody else that this person has seen a cat.

This is not a terrifically complex subject, but until it was stripped down, epistemology had managed to surround itself thickly with chevaux- de- frise, the outer bastions and the donjon keep in order to prevent anybody from knowing anything about knowledge.

What was knowledge? How did it function? Following along this track, one first tried to find out if there was an energy and came up against the fact that thought as an energy is a lot different than any of the electromagneticgravitic group energies of which we know. It doesn’t behave in the same way. Thought, traveling more or less as itself, will go before the fact or after the fact almost at random. It doesn’t much care. It will do accurate prediction of events for which there is evidently no present evidence. There are many authenticated cases of clairvoyance. Thought has got backwards time tracks, and it doesn’t think anything of knowing something before it happens in the finite universe. This has happened enough times so that one can say that it is one of the things that thought, probably, can do once in a while. That is in the field of parapsychology.

So thought is pretty strange in a lot of ways, but it can be approached through the field of knowledge. We think, observe and imagine, and out of this comes knowledge, which as far as we are concerned is that thing which is stored in man’s mind.

I don’t care how far you extend man’s mind. You could extend it back via radio direction to a central intelligence or anything you wanted to, but it would still be man’s mind. This is a very wide definition of mind. But when we deal with knowledge, what we are dealing with is evidently thought which is impinged on, activated by and contained in the mind. Therefore, in order to know very much about knowledge we have to find out how the mind operates so that we can know something about knowledge itself.

It is on that actual detour that Dianetic processing came into being, because the more one examined knowledge for man, the more one was struck with the fact that he had to examine the vessel of, or the computer of, or the imaginer of knowledge. So he had to deal with man’s mind if he wanted to know something about knowledge.

By that time the German transcendentalists had gone over the hills and far away, and if you got out a set of binoculars and looked very hard, there they were out on the horizon still chasing their tails, with no concept of what they were trying to look for. To them knowledge was something that was going to transcend all human experience. In other words, man could never contact this and it would never influence man. Well, if this was so, then why worry about it?

The only knowledge which is of any slightest value to man is that knowledge which man can sense, measure or experience— in other words, the knowledge which influences him and with which he influences. That knowledge, of course, if it comes into the bracket of being sensed, measured or experienced, immediately says that it isn’t beyond the bounds of human experience. What we have confronting us right at that moment is the great simplicity that if it’s never going to be in a sense, measure or experience bracket for mankind, then as far as man is concerned it doesn’t exist. And the moment you look at it this way and say it doesn’t exist, you are taking Immanuel Kant and very sadly consigning him to the curiosa of yesterday. Any time you get knowledge which transcends the bounds of all human experience, this immediately puts the gag on anybody who wishes to criticize the person who is putting forth such a thing, because that person is saying "I am the authority and you don’t know." If somebody were to point out to this fellow that he too is human, of course his argument would fall down. 1

Nobody ever bothered to point out to Kant that he too was human, so what he was writing about was obviously way beyond the bounds of his own experience— so of course he couldn’t know anything about it. This reductio ad absurdum of his own argumentation— if somebody had had brains or nerve enough to have done it 162 years ago— would not have left the whole subject of epistemology rotten for 162 years.

Actually the reason Dianetics has suddenly come into this society depends on that pivot point. It is the fact that 162 years ago Hume, Locke and Kant decided that they were going to delineate the basic laws of all philosophy and particularly epistemology. And when they got through, it was so resounding, and everybody was so frightened, that nobody thought for 162 years in this field.

Therefore we have 162 years of accumulated data which has never been sorted out. You pick up 162 years of accumulated data, integrate it and give it a good solid testing, and you can’t help but come up with something that will practically shake the society, because you have 162 years of backlog of smart people. Yet not one of them had ever thrown away formalized epistemology. They were still in the state of mind of "the laws have all been drawn up on this so we’re not going to touch it anymore."

It took, then, somebody from a field such as engineering, indoctrinated into the belief that problems are solvable and all answers are basically simple, and that those things which don’t work and can’t be applied, or sensed, measured or experienced, probably don’t exist so can be thrown away. The moment you do that, you look over the field of epistemology and, open sesame! You realize that man’s mind is that thing which contains the knowledge, computes the knowledge and imagines the knowledge which man uses and needs. Then all you have to do is solve the problems of the human mind and you have the whole business of epistemology figured out.

first let’s classify knowledge. The only things man is really interested Win are those things which influence his survival and are workable data in his battle to survive. He is interested in data, then, which he can use, or data in the field of the aesthetics, which he evidently does use but without which, again, he wouldn’t survive very long. He has a complete periphery of knowledge; no matter where it goes or how it goes through, he is solving the center line on one problem. It is survival knowledge.

The more closely a datum influences or can be used in or opposes the survival of man, the more valuable is that datum. In other words, those things which are in opposition to, or which are influencing or forwarding, man’s survival become the most important data. Data which is not considered important, by which we mean data that hasn’t anything to do with what we are trying to do, is just moved aside. So we categorize knowledge in this fashion. It does have a center line and there is a way to measure it. How valuable is it?

We look at the problems man is trying to solve and we find out that he has made quite a bit of progress on the solving of problems. Mathematics, for instance, is a whole body of formalized knowledge, most of it abstract, and every single scrap of it has to do with survival.

We look over the field of education and we find out that the knowledge which people are really trying to put into the brains of children and young people is survival knowledge.

We look at what Mama and the family are trying to do for the baby in general, and they are trying to teach this child to live, more than anything else. And they are trying to teach him to live in such a way that other people can live with him. Occasionally, by aberration, they take some strange routes, but the whole urgency is first to teach a child how to eat. Did you ever see Papa and Mama sitting there trying to teach the child how to eat with a spoon? This is very interesting.

I was in a restaurant and there was a very sedate couple— they evidently had their daughter and grandchild with them. The grandmother finally got very disgusted with the way the daughter was poking a spoon at the child, so she pulled the high chair over and started to feed the child. The child wouldn’t open its mouth at the right time, so Grandma opened her mouth and then the child opened its mouth. She was unconsciously giving the child a mimicry object, and the sequence was following through with practically everybody in the restaurant opening their mouths too! There was the effort to relay knowlew

Some shortsighted blunderer back in the past someplace unpopularized imagination. He said, "Aesthetics and imagination can have absolutely no bearing on survival, so we can just cut these things off and move them aside, out of man’s ken." And boy, did he hurt, right there, because imagination is sort of intuitive computing. Without imagination nobody could get a very good look at the future, because one composes his own future out of imagination. In other words, it is a sort of big freewheeling computation more or less autocontrolled and as such it is a pretty marvelous mechanism. So we shouldn’t decry imagination. It is a part of knowledge.

Children’s so- called hallucinations and delusions are concepts of how or what they ought to do about something, and they are beautifully founded because children have very fine computers but no data in them. They have a great time trying to measure up the real world with what an unimpeded computer can do about it, and they can end up way out into the blue with no trouble whatsoever. I wish I could see in this country a few thousand artists whose imaginations were as unimpeded at 25 as they were at 3, and with all the data too. We would really start seeing things. But imagination shouldn’t be decried and neither should any of these other things. This society, for instance, has a fine time telling people they can’t figure and so on. It is built into the structure of the language. "You’re dumb, you’re stupid, you can’t figure this, you can’t do that," and so on. Start looking around and you wonder how in the devil we ever think of anything anyhow with all the conflict and contest against knowing anything.

Part of what we should have known a long time ago is that this thing with the resounding word is in essence a great simplicity. It is knowing what one needs to know to go on knowing. Otherwise he as an entity, at least here on earth at this moment, ceases to know. It is as simple as that.

The study of the mind leads us into Dianetic processing and an understanding of its various mechanical principles.

We shouldn’t fall into the fault, though, of suddenly conceiving that we know all there is to know about the human mind and what it can compute, because we don’t. But we now know how to patch it up and unburden it so it can do its computations. In other words, we know enough to take away the things which are interfering with it and to then leave it pretty well alone.

That is a lesson that every ship commander in the last war had to teach his radio operators. The radio operators would come aboard with all this standard equipment from the navy yard in beautiful cases and in working order. Then these boys would talk to somebody else around the shop and they would figure out how to make the radios work a little better. So they would start putting in a gimmick here and a wire there and leading an antenna someplace else, and the first thing you know, you would open up one of these cabinets and it would practically fly in your face like a jack- in- thebox, it was so crammed with stuff it didn’t need! Repairs were almost fatal. They always had the idea that it could be made to work better by monkeying with it, and about nine- tenths of the time you were completely out of communication! The FM walkie- talkies were operational because you couldn’t do much to them. They had about two thousand connections, and it required a morning to check one of them out. Nobody quite understood what they were so they didn’t monkey with these.

But people have been doing that about the human mind in the process of education, and here is where we enter the main point of this lecture. They have been fooling around with the human mind without knowing too much about it but always figuring that they could make it better, which is a gorgeous misconception. They didn’t know anything about it but they figured they could make it better. For instance, they have been trying with all their might to train the standard memory bank, which needs absolutely no training. That is the backbone of education; so it is quite a denunciation of educational methods as used.

About the best thing that you could do for the standard memory bank would be to get the engrams off it that keep "I" from pulling back out of it the things which have already been recorded in it. It records and goes right on recording, except where you get hysterical deafness and inattention, and the material goes into the standard bank. The problem is to get "I" and the bank unburdened enough as far as circuits are concerned so that "I" can get the information out of the bank.

Instead of that, an enormous amount of effort has been applied by all educational outfits in the past toward getting these standard memory banks trained so they could remember. One couldn’t go further wrong in education.

What you want in education is to teach a person how to procure, absorb, use, evolve and relay knowledge. Those would be all the steps involved, and that is what should be done if one is trying to educate somebody. All the gimmicks which have been put into the educational system and impede this along any one of its lines should be taken out, and one would have to know something about the mind in order to do this.

What you have to know about the mind is the fact that it can be impeded, and about the only way it can be seriously impeded is via moments of pain and anaten. Material laid in during those periods will put the mind into such shape that it doesn’t perform these functions well. But if you take that material out you still have the problem of straightening up educational misconceptions. You have to find that out first.

The next thing you have to know is, how, in education, would you go about relaying information? Here we have got a complete problem of communication from beginning to end where, as far as education is concerned, it is not possible to relay data to people, which they are going to use, on any other level than a parity of level.

One could try to narrow the whole field of education down to educating people in schools, but education doesn’t narrow down to that. It starts out with babies learning by mimicry and so on, and by the time a child gets to school he is actually about half- educated. The tremendous amount of knowledge he has already gotten rather outweighs a lot of the information he will get later.

Most people are educated by altitude and authoritarian teaching. The teacher says he knows, and he says the data is valuable and has to be recorded; he also tells the student he has to think about this data and to figure out from it things that he is told to figure out.

We have gone into the field of giving people knowledge and letting them use knowledge just about as deeply as the tip of a finger into a pool. We have taken such a tremendously limited sector and fixed it so thoroughly with a bunch of rules and nonsense that it is a wonder to me that anybody ever got educated— and I don’t even know if they are!

I look back over all of my schooling and I find out that certainly 95 percent of it was a complete waste of time. It is a rough deal when you take a person’s youth and mangle it in this fashion. So people had certainly better know something more about education than they do at present. l

You will probably be very deeply interested in relaying Knowledge of Dianetics to other people. Since that comes under the heading of educating you had better know something about it.

In the first place you want data to go into people’s heads in such a way that they can get at it again and, if necessary, reevaluate it. In other words, you don’t want data going into their heads that would be hung up on the order of "You’ve got to believe this, and this is the way it is and it is this way because it is this way, and you are never going to be able to change your mind about it being this way, and it’s going to be this way from here on out."

In any 10- year period, you can take the number of data that were considered absolute truths in the society at the beginning of that 10- year period and look at them at the end of the period and you will find out that a large number of them have bitten the dust.

So, if a person being educated in the field of engineering this year, for instance, were unable to reevaluate all of his information on the subject of engineering 10 years from now, it would simply mean that 10 years from now he would be using information which was already old hat, and that 15 years from now he would be lucky to hold up against the young whippersnappers that would be coming in. And there is the tremendous rub between the old hand in the field and the new one coming in. The new one coming in has got more and newer data. There is no difference in their ability to compute on their data. With his stet fixed education the young person just happens to be educated at a different, more advanced point on the time track, and of course he is using it very facilely because it applies to his environment.

The old man starts to slow down on this thing and he begins to consider he must be pretty stupid. So he thinks slower. He doesn’t compute as well on this material, and as a result he starts to get scared, he entrenches, he becomes conservative, and he says, "No, it shall not advance." But the young men keep coming up and the old men keep getting ridden down in the fray.

That is not a type of function which is native to man in a rational state. That is incident to the type of education which is done. Older people are not necessarily more conservative than younger people and they very necessarily don’t think slower. A little testing along this line generally proves it, but there is an aberration in the society which says that old people are more conservative and that they think slower than young ones. I have found it in the bank lots of times. So some poor person gets up to 40 years of age and he’s done. It says so right in the engram bank. Now, we pick up that computation and is he done? No.

So our problem, then, is to get information into the standard bank, make the information available to the computers, teach the person to derive from that information the future information he needs, keep that information in a state where it can be reevaluated at any time, and keep uninhibited the dynamics of the individual about that information so that he can execute it and expedite with it. All those are necessary steps.

If a person hasn’t a force of will to execute what he knows, somebody has done him a very bad turn somewhere along the track. And modern education rather constantly does this bad turn to people. When a person is given enough undigested information, he gets in bad shape after a while.

Take someone who has had a packaged education drummed at him; he has been made very nervous about the whole thing, he has got to get this material, he has got to remember it, he has got to be ableto put it back on the paper and he has got to be able to figure about it in a certain way. The first thing you know, he walks into a job and doesn’t know what is going on. Yet he has studied all about these things.

So, we add another factor: The education which a person is receiving must have been consistently compared, step by step, to the known world. You can’t step into an abstract in education. That is to say, you just can’t keep on the glorious, pure line of the abstract and never compare it to things which can be actually sensed, measured or experienced. You have got to keep one foot on the ground, no matter how delightful it may seem to talk about the purity and glory of pure mathematics. Unless you can teach someone how to figure out his grocery bill, it is not going to be much use to him.

Therefore, every datum which a person receives should have some comparison with the real world. There has to be a comparative level. In other words, education would not be best conducted in a school where the real world was very far away.

An engineering education would probably be best conducted by engineers in the process of engineering. If you want to teach a man to build bridges he has certainly got to have the basic fundamentals of those textbooks. They contain a lot of fine information. But let’s see him reading the textbook between 2: 00 and 4: 00 in the afternoon or between 8: 00 and 10: 00 at night, and let’s see him out there walking around with people who build bridges the rest of the time. You could probably educate someone who could build beautiful bridges in a couple of years instead of six, and when he got there his bridges would hold up, which is something quite normally overlooked in some quarters.

To do these things in this society at this time would require rather definite reforms. However, now that we know these things about education they should of course be practiced in the Foundation as much as they can be, and actually they are. For instance, you don’t go very far along one of these theories without seeing something about it in action. Engrams are very easy to locate in people. You can observe behavior and you can observe the real world, so you are not far out of touch.

But supposing we were teaching you Egyptology, and supposing we just went on talking about Egyptology and the Ethiopians and the various rites that they used to practice back in Egypt, and we went on and on along this line being 100 percent esoteric. By the time you got through, you would probably walk up to a scarab and say, "What’s that funny looking bug?" Somebody would say, "That’s a scarab," and then you would immediately know. It would have been compared to the known universe.

But it would be a lot better to dig around a few old tombs, look up a few civilisations, take a look at some Ethiopians and mull the whole situation over; and by the time we got through, all the information we’d have picked up would be oriented information oriented against the real world. That is a very necessary step.

The first thing one should do when he starts teaching a subject is to tell people what is done with the subject. One doesn’t just start out in high gear teaching people a subject, and when somebody asks "Well, what do you do with this stuff?" say "Quiet, bud," and go on teaching the subject. One would not be teaching a subject; he would merely be putting some recordings into the standard bank which are unintelligible and which may or may not be fished up later by the student for his use.

I found somebody one time teaching calculus in this fashion. It didn’t say in the textbook what you used calculus for, the instructor didn’t say what calculus was or what it was for, and I noticed that everybody in this class (it was my calculus class) was just studying away and writing things down, and they were differentiating and integrating and having a fine time. I spent about two weeks trying to figure out what you did with calculus before I let myself open to a barrage of calculus. I asked the instructor two or three times and he looked embarrassed and looked away hurriedly, at which point it suddenly occurred to me that he didn’t know too well either. He was a mathematician but he had never been through engineering. So how does an engineer use calculus? This I had to know before I would monkey with calculus any further.

I finally found a book by a man named Thompson whose method of writing was probably very disgraceful. It didn’t start out on a level that no student could understand, so naturally the book was considered no good. It started out with Jonathan Swift’s "Fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, ’’l and so forth, and this was his example of what you did with calculus.

I looked this over with some interest and read a little bit further into the book, and I found out that in calculus you measure rates of change. It gave some examples of how rates of change could be very confusing mathematically, and after I looked this over for a while, together with some other things, I was perfectly willing to get down and study calculus.

Yet it seems reasonable that a student should be able to ask and have a right to ask at any moment "What do I do with it?"

If you asked a little kid learning arithmetic "What do you use arithmetic for?" he would probably answer, "To get A’s."

During the war we were having some veatch standing on one ship, yet we were riddled with officers. There were 60 officers on that ship but there were only two people who could stand a top- deck watch— the four- striper in command of it and myself. The old man was standing 12 hours on and 12 hours off and I was standing the other 12 hours on and 12 hours off. Of course, being the captain he pretty soon got tired, so I was standing 24 hours on!

I became very desperate about how to encourage these young men to learn how to stand a watch and steer a zig- zag course and so forth. All these poor people were straight out of college, after which they had had 90 days indoctrination and were then told, "Here is a stripe and there are your orders. Good- bye and God bless you," and what was really meant was "God help you"!

Then someone said to me rather snidely, "I bet if you graded them they would measure up." I thought that was very interesting. So I graded an officer D and put it up on the bulletin board, and they snapped right into it. Their indoctrination was not toward doing a good job but toward getting A! I pointed this fact out to them, and a couple of them, who were very smart boys, thought this over and got kind of mad when they started figuring out where they had triggered along the line and gone off course. And they made good watch officers. Those that couldn’t be reformed we continued to rate watch by watch with an A or a G or something, and the others we reformed by making them work for the ship and not for a grade.

But these people had had about 18 years of indoctrination, which is a long time to indoctrinate a person toward just one thing— getting a grade. If you indoctrinated a person all those years on the fact that the great god Voodoo was the only god, he would probably fight and die for the great god Voodoo. Well, don’t think it is very peculiar that a person will fight and die for grades after 18 years of indoctrination.

And so what does the modern educational institution offer as an invitation to a person? It offers an A.

The defined purpose, then, becomes a very important fact in education: "What is this information going to do for me in my business of survival, for the future race, for the group and for mankind? How is it related into the scheme of epistemology? What sector does it cover? How important is it?" And the student has a right to look it all over, and when he has looked it all over be able to say "That doesn’t look important to me," and after that leave it alone. There is no reason to try to force pieces of information into heads that are not going to do anything with them. And if they don’t know what the information is for, they are not going to do anything with it.

So, the principle of altitude examination teaching is 180 degrees wrong. In altitude teaching, somebody is a "great authority," and he holds his position by being a "great authority." He is probably teaching some subject that is far more complex than it should be. He has become defensive down through the years, and this is a sort of protective coating that he puts up, along with the idea that the subject will always be a little bit better known by him than by anybody else and that there are things to know in this subject which he really wouldn’t let anybody else in on. This is altitude instruction. And in order to get people to sit very alertly and do exactly what Us, he has another trick: he gives them examinations.

Society gives examinations via doctors and teachers, and there is hardly anybody who doesn’t have the word examination or test in his reactive bank and who sooner or later doesn’t get it push- buttoned. Furthermore, there is an anxiety created around this examination because the person is indoctrinated in the belief— very early in life— that if you fail school, the world will fall in, the sun will go completely out of its firmament, you will be left to starve and die in the streets, and everybody will hate you. Actually little kids sometimes look at it and have this much of a break on it. If they get flunked they go to pieces in a hurry.

So there is this anxiety around a person’s grades, and this comes forward until he finally gets up to a point in education where when somebody says the word examination to him it not only push- buttons him but it also threatens Mama, Papa, love and general survival. It is a terrific whip. It keeps people in a state of confusion, and when their minds are slightly confused they are in a hypnotic trance.

Any time anybody gets enough altitude he can be called a hypnotic operator, and what he says will act as hypnotic suggestion. Hypnotism is a difference of levels in altitude.

There are ways to create and lower the altitude of the subject, but if the operator can heighten his own altitude with regard to the subject the same way, he doesn’t have to put the subject to sleep. What he says will still react as a hypnotic suggestion. It isn’t a sudden little trick or a mechanism in the mind that is very unusual; it is just this difference of altitude.

With parity, such as occurs between acquaintances, friends, fellow students and so on, there is no hypnotic suggestion. But you start to get up into the professorial class and it begins to tip a little bit; the student starts getting bemused, or as it is in the modern university, the poor student sits there and gets knocked out like a light on this material. He isn’t going to get that information back, except as positive suggestion. The material will lie in the bank more or less literally. The student may have the atomic element chart down pat but he would not be able to tell you what an element is.

Altitude teaching simply suppresses the information in the standard bank so that it cannot be reattained by "I." This is the effect of a positive suggestion. In other words, "I" has not been permitted to reevaluate this information, so the information stays stet. And ten years from now, when it is no longer valid information and people know a lot more, this person will still be saying doggedly that this information is absolutely true and this is all anybody knows about it. That does a student a terrible disservice right there.

Furthermore, the information isn’t recallable or useable in the central computers of the mind by "I," so he can’t think with it.

One thing that must be completely safeguarded in the human being in the process of education is that he must be permitted to think. He can be taught the basic fundamentals of any subject if they are known, and from that he can actually be taught to derive all the future information he needs on the subject. He must also be taught that he can execute and expedite— in other words, lend his dynamics to— this knowledge. He has got a right to use this information, to think about it, to figure out new things about it, and to execute with relationship to it. If those things are safeguarded you could then, and only then, call the person well educated.

But how many fields have existed, particularly in the humanities, where it was assumed very broadly that the basic fundamentals were known? People have been told that they are known when they are not known.

So we get another point in education which is very important: Those things which are not known exactly must be labeled as such in the process of education. We don’t then get big, wide statements made to the effect that "every kleptomaniac when he cannot steal anything burns down the house"— a direct quote from a textbook on an inexactly known subject. If it’s an inexactly known subject, let’s tell the student that we are teaching it as such; and all of a sudden the student will pick up that this is its possible use in the real world, that this is what we know about it and what we know about it is not exact, and then he’ll take off from there. That would be educational honesty, and it is something which should be part of the educational ethic.

All of these points I am stressing as desirable would form, when amalgamated, an educational ethic. It is astonishing that today there is practically no educational ethic in existence.

What is the responsibility of the teacher and the institution to the person who is being educated? I am afraid that the kingpin around an institution is the person who is being educated, not the person who is doing the educating.

Now, regarding the reduction of altitude, people shouldn’t feel they have to take data just because somebody said so. If it makes sense to them, if they can compare it to the real world, if it makes their thinking clearer, or if it makes the subject better for them, then they should take it, but nothing should be forced off on the student. Furthermore, if he has some misconcepts, clear them up for him. Don’t penalize him because he has misconcepts or because he has the wrong answer. Try to help him so he can get right answers. That is a complete reversal on the examination system.

The educational ethic should also make absolutely certain not only that the ability of the person to execute or expedite with the information which he has been given is not at any point impeded but that every effort is made to help him execute and expedite with that information. To do otherwise is to seriously threaten his survival.

So there is such a thing as an educational ethic and it should be written up, promulgated and practiced. If this were done, the general alertness of the whole nation would probably be raised within a couple of generations to a point undreamed of. What they call education today is practically without ethics. A person is permitted to come in and study. He is tolerated while he is there, he is given the information, he is examined to see if he knows the information, and then when everybody is sure that his standard banks now contain some of this information, they dust their hands and crow proudly over their great task done. That is not the way to do it.