STUDY AND EDUCATION

 

A lecture given on

13 August 1964

 

 

What’s the date?

Audience: 13th of August AD 14.

Thirteen Aug. AD 14, Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. We’ve got another lecture here on study and education.

You probably have realized, going down the line, that we’ve got this pretty well wrapped up. But we didn’t expect some of the bonuses that we got. This was actually quite an astonishing and adventurous thing to do as I’ve already mentioned and so forth, is all of a sudden pick up an analogous field of practice and study, in order to study that, in order to find something about study, so that you’re not interiorized on your own subject, don’t you see? So get an exterior view and study this as a lowly neophyte that is tyroing his way up the line. Both of those mean „beginners.“ And then carry this subject of study out through, not on a dilettante, but on a professional, hammer and tongs basis, you see? There’s a great deal of difference between these two types of study.

And what remains undone of that now, of course, is the professional practice of what one has learned. And that will have to be added into it to help you out in that particular field and sphere. That doesn’t seem to be too much but here is—the whole subject of education has as its end product the accomplishment of certain doingnesses, the accomplishment of certain ends or aims, and education which doesn’t lead toward this, of course, is just sort of doodle—daddle, monkey business, you know, sort of stuff. It’s pure dilettantism, by which could be best defined as „one doesn’t intend to do anything about it except annoy his friends.“

The difference in these two fields of the doodle—daddle type of monkey business sort of and so on—I really wouldn’t call it education. I wouldn’t dignify it with that particular field. I would say it’s acquaintance—it’s acquaintancy. It’s getting a nodding acquaintance with some data or a field to find out what is in it. In other words, it’s just becoming acquainted with it slightly and doing a light skim around its edges and that would not, in my estimation, be education.

Education would be in the direction of accomplishing certain actions professionally. Now, that is my own word introduced into there, „professionally,“ but if one is educated in a subject, one expects him to be able to accomplish certain things with that subject. I don’t care if this is merely a theoretical line of education, one is still expected to come out the other end being a good theoretician.

So education—education I would define as something that is for blood and I would say that many things pass under the heading of education which aren’t. I’m not talking if—this is a good English dictionary Definition, you see? Education means learning or knowing or accomplishing the knowingness of a certain subject, you see? Well, let’s take that as a flat—out Definition. If one is educated in a subject, then he knows that subject, you see? See, you know, exclamation point, he knows the subject. He’s able to accomplish the actions which are taught in that subject, he’s able to accomplish the results which are taught in that subject, don’t you see? That’s education.

Now, to call the modern school system „education,“ then, is quite laughable, because this poor little kid gets in there and they—they keep the kid’s time occupied. Let’s go down to that. Well now, that doesn’t seem to me to have to have anything to do with education whatsoever, to keep the child’s time occupied. And yet a survey of this field demonstrates that the best reason for formal education of youth and so on is to give their mothers a break. That’s the fact. That’s the way they look in that direction.

Well, what is this kid being taught to do? And right away, then, you see what your quarrel with young schooling is. He’s not being taught to do anything, see? Voilà! So it isn’t education. You see, if you just took the word in its pure Definition, with an exclamation point, you know, „educated!“ well, this has come to mean a sort of an esoteric fly—around that he—well, what? So you say, „This fellow was educated.“ You say, „He was educated at Oxford.“ Well, what is it? All right, good, he was educated at Oxford, fine, he’s an Oxford man. Good. We expect certain stamps and social reactions and so forth. All right. If he was educated to be a gentleman—good! So he’s a pro Gentleman. See? Fine. Fine.

But you can’t really disassociate education from an active doingness and a role and a professionalism, you see? It’s not possible to disassociate this, to take this over, so we say, „Well, we wanted to give him a good education, not so that he could do anything, but . . .“ Well, that is immediately a contradiction. That’s saying, „We must pick up all the white peas by leaving all the white peas on the ground.“ You can’t do that, you see? You can’t just „educate“ somebody without any end in view. It—because then he wouldn’t be educated, don’t you see?

And that is the modern quarrel. We have the largest budget, next to armaments, in the world, is child education. That’s a big budget. And I don’t care if the teachers all say they’re underpaid and everything—which they are. It is, nevertheless, a fabulous piece of money which is spent in this particular direction. When you look at it all the way up the line and when you include under that heading of expense all the training, all the educational actions that are done in this world, you see that there’s a terrific investment.

Now, practically everyone in the Western world has had a considerable sum invested in them to become educated. That’s a considerable sum. It runs into the thousands of pounds; whichever way you want to look at it. It runs into the many, many thousands of dollars. By the time a young man has gotten through college, for instance, he stands, educationally, at something on the order of the ten—thousand dollar mark, or did ten years ago; that’s an old figure. And he probably stands at a higher figure today. That’s a lot of money to invest in a man—for maybe no result.

All right, so a lot has been spent upon his education but has he become educated?

Male voice: No.

Yeah, and that’s the quarrel. See, there was—a lot is spent on his education but he didn’t get educated.

I was rather shocked to find, the other day, that my young‘uns couldn’t write their name. They’re being „educated“ (quote) (unquote) at a remarkable rate of speed, but they couldn’t sign their name. I wouldn’t say that then they were being taught to write. They were not ed—being educated in how to write. No matter what they were doing, no matter how many „traveling ovals“ they were making, if it didn’t wind up with the end product of being able to sign their names—well, I should think that would be one of the first things that some teacher would think about. They’d say, „Well, you know, a kid should be able to sign his name.“ Because, frankly, that is almost the basic test of literacy.

The fellow that stumps aboard ship and has to make an „K’ on the articles is instantly and immediately considered to be illiterate. Well, maybe he could write in a flowing, copperplate hand everything else, but if he couldn’t sign his name he’d have a hard time convincing people he wasn’t illiterate.

So it would seem to me to be first things first, and when I found this out I caused quite a storm by insisting that they learn how to sign their names. They—even the children got quite upset. It hadn’t occurred to them that if they knew how to write they should be able to sign their names. They couldn’t do it. So there’s a lot of holes left along the line.

Now, you take arithmetic. Well, this is sort of taught as a handy, handy thing that is—you need so that you won’t get shortchanged. I think that’s just about the wildest short look at any subject I ever had anything to do with. And yet I’m sure that that is the basic reason why it is taught, because I’ve had children explain to me, patiently, this one point. So this has been taught to them as the reason they were learning arithmetic is so they wouldn’t be shortchanged. Nobody ever tells them that there’s another way not to have to worry about that, is also make enough money. Well, look at it. If you—if you made enough money, you wouldn’t have to know arithmetic, because it wouldn’t worry you if you were shortchanged. See, there are other ways to get around this. I mean—so therefore, there is some other route on this business of being shortchanged, although I offer that one as simply a ridiculous one, it’s nevertheless quite a factual one. Midas never worried about being shortchanged.

So, what have we got here in terms of arithmetical education? Well, I defy the bulk of the teachers who are teaching arithmetic to give you much of an end product for knowing arithmetic. They’d say, „Well, uh—uh—uh—un—well, of course, he has to have it because it’s a fundamental in so many other subjects.“

Well, all right. Now we’re talking about teaching other subjects. Well, we’re not interested in other subjects, we are talking about arithmetic. How about this thing called arithmetic? Well, we wonder why people don’t know arithmetic. Well, he can’t be educated in it because it has no end product. The fellow says, „I don’t want to be an accountant. I don’t want to be a bookkeeper. I can learn to count on my fingers so I don’t get shortchanged.“ Elementary. Why learn arithmetic?

„Well,“ you say, „well, you have to have it to learn other su . .

„No, no, no, no. Let’s talk about education and arithmetic. Let’s not go worrying about other subjects.“

„Yeah, well, if you put a restriction like that on the argument,“ they would say, „of course nobody can argue with you.“

And you say, „That’s the point. Who wants to be argued with?“

The point I’m making here is that arithmetic, having no finite end in itself—of course, it has—it has finite ends, and it could be described—but having no described, finite end in itself is therefore almost impossible to teach. And you have nearly everybody doing very badly in their grammar schools on arithmetic because it itself is not a subject, so therefore no one can become educated.

It’s become more and more—this is very manifest in the university—I’m not talking over your heads here, this is something that’s very, very bang! It’s very obvious. You get into a university, you’re all the time having problems being shoved under your nose in engineering schools that you’re supposed to do by algebra; you’re always having problems shoved under your nose that you’re supposed to do with calculus, any one of which is solvable by sight arithmetic. That’s something to think about.

Now, what has happened here? Well, arithmetic, not being a subject in itself, and being a somewhat degraced and degraded subject, has gradually shrunk and is ceasing to be a subject, but is simply an auxiliary subject which moves up into higher mathematics. And if you don’t know arithmetic, you can’t do higher mathematics. That’s the way it’s represented, more or less, to the engineer.

Well, I was quite interested in old McGuffeys Readers at one time to find out how adept at arithmetic somebody was expected to be in 1888. The problems which they were expected to solve in arithmetic were the problems, of algebra. And they were expected to solve these with arithmetic. And what do you know? It was a great revelation to me that it was very possible to solve these algebraic problems with their „X’s“ and „Ys“ and all that sort of thing by common, ordinary, garden—variety arithmetic. And it made a lot better sense—made a lot better sense. I looked at this and I’ve run into some old—timers who could take a column of figures about five figures wide and about ten figures tall and add them up in a peculiar way, which was very peculiar to me, of some kind of a crisscross addition that I would be quite at a loss to explain to you how it was done, but arrive with almost an immediate answer. And you say, „How did they do that?“

„Well,“ they say, „it’s very simple. You see, nine added to something gives you itself, so all you do is go down the column and find all the combinations which make nine and forget those, and you add the remainder and you get the total.“

What do you know, you know? Well, of course, that’s just tricky stuff, but all this at one time was part and parcel to arithmetic and it’s not here anymore in arithmetic. Where did it go? Well, you must have a dying subject. Why is it dying. Nobody is delineating its purpose to the student of it. No matter if some—no matter if some purpose does exist in it, that’s beside the point. Yes, you could figure out lots of purposes of it, but all you have to know is, is nobody is delineating, marking out, showing the purpose of that subject to the student so one doesn’t consider that he becomes educated in arithmetic. Arithmetic is just some auxiliary subject that keeps you from being shortchanged.

So that as the purpose of a subject deteriorates in its advertisement or rendition—as the purpose of a subject deteriorates—the subject itself also falls away. Sounds like a very—a very strange sort of a thing to give you, but as the purpose of a subject falls away, why, so does the subject disappear from the ken of man. Manufacture of buggy whips? Go around and try to find somebody today who knows all about the manufacture of buggy whips. There’s probably a couple of boys sitting around in England who know the subject backwards and forwards and who make all the circus whips. See, there are practically no more whips made. Dying, because it has no purpose. Nobody’s got any horses to flip buggy whips over, see? So becoming educated in how to manufacture whips today would sort of be an end—a dead end. It would not be a very productive career.

Now, that doesn’t sound very amplified, but let’s take it in reverse and at once it will make a great deal of sense. Then, a subject for which the purpose is not delineated will die away, not only in the society but in the individual. Both of those two—those statements are true. The first one is so true that it’s almost nonsense. But the other one is not nonsense and it’s not been detected. If the individual to whom you are teaching this subject has not got the purpose of this subject, then that subject will die away in that individual. It might have a tremendous purpose, but if the purpose of the subject is not being taught to the individual, he’s had it. Do you see?

So you can get the difference between a live study and a dead study. A live study is one which has purpose, has a use; and a dead study is one that hasn’t any use. And the way you make a live study into a dead study is dual: Its use dies away as in buggy whips or one simply omits it as part of the educational process. And it will make the subject die away, not only in the individual but the society; not only in the society but the individual. Do you see that?

And we have to assume that a person cannot become educated, just by the definition of the word „education“ as I have been stressing it here, in a dead subject because it has no end product.

So you find these things become obsessive. Somebody starts to study „miniatures painted in Holland by blind painters.“ Well now, miniatures painted in Holland, we’ve got some use for that. But „miniatures painted in Holland by blind painters,“ well, we would sort of look around for quite a while before we found any use for this particular subject. Oh, you could find uses for it, but don’t get yourself all cluttered up on—on introducing your ingenuity to supply the lack in an educational system that—because by being reasonable, you cripple yourself It’s a question of „What is there?“ not a question of „What could we dream up to put there?“

Oh, we could dream up some subjects, but let’s just say this boy is studying this esoteric study—strange, weird, useless, nowhere. Do you know that he can easily become obsessed with it? He has no purpose for it, no use for it and so, of course, it’s impossible for him to become educated in it because he can never display his virtuosity. He can never display its use. Who would listen? He can’t even tell his friends. They’d say, „This, guy is a ruddy crank! He goes around talking all the time . . .“ Somewhat like your families and so forth have occasionally regarded you on the subject of Scientology. You’re over their heads, you see? But much worse than that—much worse than that, we would get it on this sort of a basis, see. Nobody knows what he is talking about and nobody knows why he is studying it and it isn’t of any use and it’s not of much interest anyway. Well, this poor bloke can never communicate it. He can never communicate it for the best reason that communication becomes difficult: Nobody will listen.

Did you ever think about communication being difficult because nobody listens? Well, just run this into the field of education. If the subject doesn’t exist and has no use and has no application and has no this and has no that, well, to that degree their listening ceases because it isn’t of any use to them, either. He’s studying miniatures painted by blind painters in Holland. People sort of say, „Well, I could understand his studying miniatures painted in Holland ... I think he’s nuts!“ That would be the immediate conclusion, don’t you see?

Well, your families look at you sometimes, where you have run into this and collided with this head—on, and people wouldn’t listen to you on the subject of Scientology or were impatient with you for studying it, and that was because you weren’t talking to them about the purpose of Scientology. And you didn’t talk to them about the purpose of Scientology within the framework of what it could do for them personally.

Now you are coming right on close to home. Your mother might have been interested if she heard what it had done for you personally because she’s interested in you. But even your mother would conceive it to be a subject only when a purpose was delineated. Now we’ll go a bit—a little bit further: when the purpose that was delineated could be executed to any degree. You know, the purpose you’ve given it could be executed to any degree. Now, your next stage is, is they don’t believe it. See, you could give them the purpose but they don’t believe it. In other words, the purpose isn’t real to them. So you not only have delineated the purpose but you have delineated it to them in such a way that it is—seems to be an attainable purpose. An attainable or doable purpose.

So we walk up to this bird and we say—we say to this bird, „Your—your interest in this subject should be very great because this subject will make you a Clear.“

He immediately says, „What wall?“ because it’s not an understandable purpose, see? The purpose ceases to be understandable when the goal does not seem to him to be attainable or valuable. And it can cease to be attainable or valuable merely because it isn’t understood.

So for an educational subject to exist and continue to be a subject in which one can become educated, or if you ever expect anybody to ever be educated in the subject—let me put it that way—for it to continue to exist, for it to survive, it has to have a purpose which can be seen to be an attainable action. It has to be attainable. The purpose must be attainable.

Now, the value of a subject—the value of a subject depends, simply and utterly, upon the value of attaining that stated purpose. How valuable is it to attain that particular stated purpose? Is it valuable to be able to accomplish this or is it not valuable to be able to accomplish this? And to that degree a subject appears to be a fringe subject or a vital subject.

So the woof and warp of the culture is made up of educations which are subdivisible—that’s the woof and warp of a culture ... (Woof and warp: rug term. Try not to put too many words on the line, here. The woof goes that way and the warp goes that way, see?) It’s—the make—up of a culture is subdivisible into two general types of education. A culture is held together solely and only by education. Whether that education is accomplished by experience or by teaching, a culture, as a whole, is the summation of its education. And those are two divisions to the educations of a culture, and one of those are the vital ones and the other one is the „nice“ ones.

Now, an education achieved is remunerated to the degree that its service is understood to be valuable. An education is remunerated to the degree that its service is understood to be valuable. And it frankly is not remunerated one penny more. Sometimes they falsely remunerate, but not often. And that tells you that there must be some mighty funny, funny things, because there are some things in the society—because this rule I’ve just given you is true and the society at large then must be misunderstood to some degree because there’s several educations in the subject at large which are remunerated to an enormous extent which are not held by certain educational authorities to be valuable.

Public must like to be fooled. They’re always paying con men of some kind or another. There must be some real value in having hope shot up to the moon in the stock market because those birds are very often paid off heavily. You could reevaluate the society on the basis of what I’ve given you. Yes, you could say, „Well, the society makes mistakes in this direction. Yes, the society is lied to.“ Well, I don’t think the society makes mistakes in this direction. That’s a new thought, isn’t it? Do you know that the most valuable prof—single technical profession in the United States is burying people? Hm very highly paid! They’ve managed to convince everybody that the loved one should be in sealed bronze caskets and in concrete and steel vaults outside the caskets so that seepage won’t trouble your loved ones. And they had the whole country absolutely convinced that this was Congressional law, that it was local law. And a recent Congressional investigation disclosed this fact and they found out that there isn’t any statutes in the United States that compels anybody in the United States to be buried even in a board coffin. There are statutes that require them to be buried, but there is not even a statute that requires them to be embalmed. So you roll Aunt Agnes up in a blanket and dump her in a hole. As long as you’ve got a death certificate, man, that’s all you need.

So, this particular profession—this particular profession was selling what? They were sort of selling some weird life after death, weren’t they? They were akin to some religious cult or something like that. And it was obvious that people did buy life after death. And we find out that one of the most expensive things you could do in Egypt was to die. That was a very expensive thing and that’s gotten that way in the United States today. It’s very costly to die. By the time they get through with you, man, well, you’ve got no estate left.

But this is very peculiar. The society remunerates this and rewards it. Well, it’s just about the most educated art you ever had anything to do with in your life. Undertaking is a supereducated art and the society of undertakers themselves—“morticians,“ they like to refer to themselves—these birds run their own schools and their own technology and that sort of thing and they really hammer—pound it in. And the final end product is very visible. But these guys are quite sharpies. I know, because back in the days when I was having a ball around New York as a writer, why, the medical examiner—that’s what they’ve begun to call the coroner around New York now—they changed their names, too—the medical examiner of New York was a particular pal of mine. He was the coroner of the city of New York and one of the nicest blokes you ever had anything to do with. He’d embalmed personally, with his own paws, 15,000 corpses.

I got interested in this particular field by being sent in his direction to do a series of stories about undetectable crime and of course I wound up in the lap of the medical examiner of the city of New York and he started my crime education on the subject. And of course, this was in the field of what they call forensic or legal medicine. And this boy, he had it all at his finger tips and so forth. But the casualness with which he could roll off all of these various things showed a great familiarity with the subject.

This was not an esoteric subject. This had to do with lots of dead bodies which had been strewn all over the place in various states of dishabille, various states of knocked—about. They were untidy at times. This was quite a boy. And oddly enough, he conceived that he was not acceptable socially. And I was very acceptable socially, so he and I formed a very good partnership, because he always liked to—if I was going anyplace and asked him if he’d like to come along and so forth, he was there on a rocket plane, you see? Right away, quick! But there wasn’t anything—there wasn’t anything that was wrong with this bird. He had perfect manners, he was a perfect gentleman and so forth. But part of his education was that his subject was looked down on and therefore he felt he was socially unacceptable and so forth.

Well, I don’t know. A lot of people—lot of people look down on—street sweepers think they’re looked down on and so forth, but street sweepers keep the streets swept clean, don’t they? Hm? Well, this guy obviously was keeping the streets of New York from being littered with decomposing corpses. And oh, I used to see him every once in a while. When I was president of one of the writing societies there and so forth, why, he used to come over there quite regularly and he’d give detective writers talks if I’d ask him to and so forth. And they would go away from the luncheon or something like that the weirdest shades of green.

But man, here was—here was data. Here was data. And it had a very definite end product, if only in the field of detection. A guy like that could take one look at a corpse and he’d say „Carbon monoxide, been dead about three hours...... Cyanide.“ „Arsenic.“ This, that, the other thing. Brrrrrr, boom! „Oh, I’d say that was botulinus poisoning, Joe. Yeah, yeah. Well, put him on the slab and we’ll run a—we’ll run a test on it, do an autopsy. Well, I’m pretty sure that’s just botulinus, you know some—eating green beans in the wrong time of the year that had been in the icebox too long. That’s—looks like that’s what that is to me.“ Almost always just dead on the button, you see?

This was art, the art of observation, the world of death. But even in the days of Egypt this art was not accorded any social status. The boys who embalmed the bodies down in the deadhouse and so forth were actually never even permitted to leave the deadhouse. They were held in. But here’s this terrific, terrific amount of art, terrific amount of detail, terrific amount of technicality, terrific amount of stuff and it’s come right straight down through these cultures from the days of ancient Egypt, and it is totally uninterrupted. It’s interesting that such a bird as this could sit down and discuss the relative preservation qualities of modern embalming and Egyptian embalming. And he was certain he was doing better these days than the Egyptians were. It’s the first time I’d ever heard that, because we’ve seen these Egyptian mummies in univer—in university museums and that sort of thing, and we’ve seen these things around and they’re still there, all wrapped up and so forth. But his attitude toward it was the attitude of a true professional: „Well, their features hadn’t been preserved and their coloring was bad.“ That’s what he said to me one day, so forth. „Yeah, the next time you’re down in the museum, Ron,“ he said, „if you don’t believe it, if you don’t believe that we’re way ahead of them these days, you just take a look at one of those mummies. Features haven’t been preserved and coloring is bad.“ And I said, „But man! Those guys—those guys have been dead for thousands of years!“

And he said, „Well, in a few thousand years one of mine will have been, too.“ And he said, „His features won’t be bad, and his coloring will be good.“

He said, „We can do a better job than“—almost—“we used to do.“

Well now, here’s a steady—I’m talking to you about a relatively debased profession, but a highly remunerated one. And keeping the bodies off the streets and prettying up the loved ones and so forth is very highly paid. Preservation of memory and so forth is a very highly paid profession. And it has been continuous—it has been continuous for a very long time without its know—how dying away. Wherever there’s been a civilization, they seem to have known the data of the last civilization on this, no matter how many wars have swept across the top of it and they deal it off the cuff and so forth. Why, even the ancient tribal rites, they would go find a dry cave that would automatically embalm the corpses of their loved ones.

So here’s this—here’s this very interesting technical line. That’s a technical line, man. What you have to do in order to keep a corpse from going bad and what you have to do to and know about what killed this person and what he died of, so that you won’t get all mixed up in your embalming activities and what you have to do in order to straighten all this out, or so forth. And how you’re supposed to bury them and exactly how you’re supposed to handle the grieving family and exactly how you were supposed to sell them the most for the—for the most, you know? These are technologies, no matter which way you look at it. They are very broad and they are very prec—exact and boy, do they wind up with a finite result! You know? You’ve got the body, you embalm it, you bury it, you collect your money. Thud! Very easily understood.

So that we would say that the subject is—a subject is not only remunerated to the degree of its need but also to the degree that it is understood by the public at large. It’s remunerated to the degree that it is understood.

All right now. How about this longevity’? How about this longevity? The continuing need of a purpose can then preserve a subject. The continuing need of the subject can preserve the subject. If the subject continues to be needed, it will be preserved; that’s a corollary of what I just gave you a few minutes ago. But the length of time that it gets preserved is entirely dependent upon the need of and the relay of its technology. You see, you must have the technology continue to be needed and the technology must also be relayed. If it continues to be needed it will be also relayed, which is all very—very fascinating; rather obvious.

But where you get a subject coming on down the line—where you get a subject coming on down the line across the millennia and so forth, it is only because its purpose is carried with it. Its purpose has gone along with it and its purpose is understood. Now, one could destroy that subject by destroying its purpose—no longer needed, you see—or by destroying the relay of its technology in some fashion or another or in being too insistent or too—too forceful in relaying its technology and tacking lots of other things to its technology which didn’t belong on it. In other words, „Before you can study engineering, you must have had a grammar school education, a high school education, gone to finishing school and learned how to knit.“ I can expect that will be about the next one, see?

You’re not going to have any engineers after a while; all the bridges will start to fall down. Well, one of the reasons why you won’t have any engineers after a while is very elementary, and it’s contained in our own technology, but only in our own technology, the reason for this. And that is, you’ve given him too much takeoff. He’s had too much of a run on takeoff and—and the longer in an—in education—let’s get back on education now—the longer it takes to approach the education, the more opportunity there is for tacks on the runway. We could probably state that in a much more easily expressed way, but that’s about the way it is. If this character is taking off, taking off, taking off, taking off, he’s running on the runway, he’s trying to get up speed, everybody is saying, „Well, you mustn’t pull back on the stick yet. You must stay there on the runway and keep running on the runway, ready to take off, ready to take off, ready to take off, ready to take off „ Well, by the time he’s done this for about forty—five years and finds out he isn’t off the ground, he doesn’t take off.

The reason for that is, is the number of opportunities to fail are directly proportional to the length of the approach. That’s a law: Number of opportunities to fail are directly proportional to the length of approach, or length of time that it is going to take to get up to where you’re going to study this thing.

Now, that law is balanced by the fact that if you don’t study something by gradients, a person can get into a mess by going into too high a gradient as I was talking about the other day. He went too steep, too quick. So there’s—somewhere there is a proper length runway for any subject. It’s a runway of the right length for the subject.

A runway of the right length for the subject, then, would not be so long that it needlessly multiplies the opportunities for failure and it had better not be so short that a person jumps a gradient and gets himself into a confusion. And what is the right length of a runway for any given subject? How much preparatory action should there be or how long should a course of study be and all of those things, those questions, are answered in this: Well, it should not be so long that it needlessly oppor—multiplies opportunities for failure and it should not be so short that it takes a person up too steep.

He’ll fall off on his nose, like we used to do when I was in flying clubs in college. There’s many a sad young man would pull back on the stick too quick. The evolution there was a „whipstall.“ Called a „whipstall“—technical term, aviation—you come up the line and you—there isn’t enough forward speed to sustain the vacuum on the top of the wings, and you have just never seen an aircraft do anything quite as sickeningly funny as it does in a whipstall. It’s flying along very, very nicely, and all of a sudden it’s flying too slow, there’s no longer any vacuum above the wing and it goes „Whooof!“ It is fast! It’s not for nothing it was called a whipstall. And of course, when you’re only about 100 feet above the runway or something like that, and the edge of the field and so on, why, it—you don’t develop enough speed in the process of falling to then be able to pull back on the stick and pull out of it. What they do is send a notice to your folks and get in touch with my old friend the medical examiner of New York.

Anyway, that’s what happens to a student, see? He gets himself into a state of overconfidence or something like this and he pulls back on the stick and he hasn’t had a long enough runway, he hasn’t developed his speed, don’t you see? In other words, he goes into too steep a gradient.

Now, Mary Sue did it the other night. She’s studying typewriting, of all things. She typewrites pretty well, but she’s decided—started to do touch—typing. And she’s going to make the grade on the subject of touch—typing, hammer—pound—bang! And it’s quite interesting. I ran an educational process on her for a very, very short period of time on this subject and busted the dam on this. I don’t know that she’s noticed it and—she isn’t here just now; she wound up with lawyers, so—but she probably hadn’t noticed that there is a coordination between her sudden interest in learning to touch—type and breaking the barrier on one of the old „too long a runway“ propositions and „too short a gradient,“ too. I broke that with a process and now she’s very interested in learning touch—typing and she’s spending about an hour a night, with everything else she’s got to do, sitting there hammer—pounding on a machine on a touch—typing basis. This is very difficult, because at the same time she uses the typewriter during the remaining hours to hunt and punch out notes, you see? So on the one hand she’s busy touch—typing, you see, and the next, why, she’s hunting and punching it out, you see, doing her work. And then she’ll get back and she’ll be touch—typing away.

I threw her. I gave her a metronome the other night and she suddenly conceived that her rhythm was off, which it was, and so forth. And she couldn’t do anything with that metronome running. She said she had to shut that off right now. It was too high a gradient.

But she went onto the gradient of two rows of keys before she had licked one row of keys. Now, you see what I mean by too tight a gradient? This was too tough, see? And boy, did she whipstall! She whipstalled right now. And she just went into a total Confusion. But knowing, now—yesteryear she simply would have quit; that would have been that—but knowing, now, the technology that we—that I’ve managed to get together here on the subject of education, she sits back and says, „Now, let’s see, now, what did I do? Oh, yeah. Well, this is just too tough a gradient. I just went up on too high a gradient.“ She went back to one row, patter, ta—patter, ta—patter, ta—patter and then went over onto two rows and she had it, see? See, she—in other words, she moved up over that gradient smoothly.

So a person knowing this can actually guide his own traffic through very nicely. Nobody had to tell her that, don’t you see?

All right. Then an educational subject is simply that something that winds up in a doingness and is approached by the process of getting educated in it. Now, that’s a hell of a thing to have to say! But you know, hardly anybody really knows this. They don’t really know it. They give it lip service all the time, but they’re always engaging in activities which they do very badly and fail at like crazy and it never occurs to them they’ve never been educated in the subject.

I’ll tell you something used to drive me stark, staring mad, down in Hollywood. Every director, every supervisor and as far as that’s concerned, every actor on the set, they all knew how to be a writer. They knew—knew how to—they knew writing. They could all write stories. The place was just lousy with writers. You want to know why Hollywood never got out of kindergarten on stories; that’s just because of it. They never recognized that it’s a technology; it’s a professional technology which is studied like crazy. It has more ins and outs and ramifications; actually it has quite a terminology. But all these birds knew they knew how to write. It wasn’t anything you ever had to study, so of course if they did get a pro in their midst—and Hollywood developed very few professional writers, in fact it developed no professional writers. They come in from elsewhere and go to pieces. Well, the process is done by everybody there knowing the profession of the fellow who just arrived. See, he’s a writer, he’s a professional, he arrives, everybody else knows his profession.

Well, now, he won’t give the movies the beingness necessary to realize that maybe movie writing has a few tricks of the trade too, so of course he looks a little bit stupid to these people, whereas he’s not stupid at all. He just hasn’t learned that particular specialty of his own subject, which he could learn rather rapidly. And Hollywood, not realizing this, never bothers to teach him how to write for Hollywood. And they have never found out that it’s necessary to be educated to know how to write.

So here’s this wild profession which is sometimes remunerated to a fantastic degree and in which you can very easily starve to death and in which people grant you fantastic quantities of beingness and in which people ignore you utterly. So it is through all kinds of contradictions. What is a professional writer? Well, by test he’s somebody who is successful and is getting his stuff published or at least read or viewed. But of all the subjects of the arts, this is the wildest one to have anything to do with because nobody grants it the beingness of having any technology.

And yet the boy who succeeds—you would be very interested—the boy who succeeds is not just somebody who wandered in with an idea. You go up to the Screen Writers Guild and you for—you find out that the reason education in writing has gotten a bad name is because it’s taught in American universities. They have gone out and hired a bunch of failed writers. And failed writers either become editors or professors. And they dramatize their failure, by the way, and they try to make a writer fail. And I’ve never seen one do anything else. I beg your pardon, there have been a few that worked like mad, they were tremendously successful, whatever they had to do wit