6408C04 SHSpec-33 A Summary of Study

There has not been a technology of education or study. There was a
school technology, but it didn't have much to do with education. Education
seldom has much to do with school. Education, as opposed to schooling, takes
into account the relative importance, i.e. the applicability, of the data
being taught. Schooling has no real thought of applicability. For instance,
there are people in art who think that knowing names and dates is knowing
something about art, when they couldn't tell you what a picture was painted
with.

In education, mass and significance must be balanced. Don't get too much
significance for the mass. When you get into significance vs. mass, you get
into action. Action could be defined as significance versus mass of some
kind. The reason why one engages in action is that one has a purpose of
achieving or avoiding something. In education, when the significance is never
added to the mass, you get a jammed curriculum. There is no doingness. A
significance that has nothing to do with the mass that you are now confronting
is a disrelated datum. All it does is to throw you a curve. School is expert
at doing this. You could have a school system that would teach, but that
wouldn't educate anyone or train anyone for anything, because it failed to add
any mass or doingness to the significance. The data in such a school system
is all curiosa. It is not of any use. That is why you almost never turn an
artist out of a university. Universities separate significance from action,
so that the student gets introverted, with no confront of the subject. You
can't have education if you detach doingness from significance. If you do
this, you get a highly impractical person who never leaves school: a
professor.

For someone to teach who cannot do is a terrible mistake. Instructors in
scientology should be able to audit. Any trouble an instructor has in
teaching has at least a little to do with inability in the area.

A person merely writing reports of people who can do is too far removed
from the mass to write a good textbook.

When you have thoroughly learned something, you can use your textbook
knowledge to think, and you will get a better result than the pure textbook
approach would give. LRH also found that the pure darkroom training that he
had had wasn't enough in itself to make a good photographer. There is ample
evidence of this fact in the daily newspaper pictures, which are mostly by
untrained photographers. Photography has the common denominator of the public
taste. It is a new subject -- only a little over a century old. It hasn't
had time to get snobbish.

When a subject is all mass and no significance, it also fails.
Professionalism has to do with significance, doingness, and mass. You need
all three to get a final result. Education would treat these three things
equally. This isn't a new thought, but the photography course confirmed it
for LRH. Professionalism is sweated for. Professionals work hard.
Dilettantes don't.

You don't have to have done everything that has been done to be a pro.
You don't have to have made a human mind to fix one up, or to have built an
E-meter to know how to operate one. This would be an overstress on
doingness.

The way to keep things in balance is to design the course such that if
someone isn't going to do something, you strip the significance out of it.
Doingnesses become converted to significances if one isn't going to perform
them. You should never thus convert doingnesses to only significances, i.e.
never take something that is never more to be performed and describe it far
beyond necessity. You can work it in the other direction and convert a
significance to a doingness, if you take something that has been done but
isn't currently being done and teach someone to do it, e.g. Bromoil prints.
The doingness and mass of a subject that should be taught are the currently
applicable doingnesses and masses of the subject. The significances that
should be taught are enough background so that the individual doesn't get
stuck in the doingness, so that the doingness has a framework, and the
principles behind it are clear and understood. This is a little more
significance than you would expect. That is why you show the student how the
subject evolved, what other doingnesses there have been, and the principles
behind the doingnesses. Then he can think, as well as perform a mechanical
act. That is the difference between a pro and a practical man. When a
doingness changes, the guy who has grounding in the subject can understand why
and evaluate it properly. A professional, therefore, can advance, where a
practical man without theoretical grounding would become antiquated or
obsolete.

A [mere] theoretician could be well-taught, but he is seldom educated,
since his doingness would be missing. He might have some other doingness that
would be useful. E.g. he could be an art expert who knows nothing about art
but whose doingness is the detection of the age of canvasses. Or whatever.

Most of the protest of the young is that they are being schooled, not
educated. An instructor could think someone was doing simply because he was
in motion. But if the motion has nothing to do with what the student will be
doing, it reacts like a significance, and the student will feel bored and
stuck, as though he was up against something that he couldn't move through.

Education should be the activity of relaying an idea or an action from
one being to another in such a way as not to stultify or inhibit the use
thereof. It permits the recipient to think on and develop the subject and not
to become antiquated on the subject. The information is loose and flexible in
his head, not fixed in such a way that it relates to only one thing. The
basic thing wrong with education has been that it never defined what it was
trying to do. It got confused with schooling. Education got in trouble the
second it started to do something that it didn't define.

By starting with the thetan as the basis of our theory, we exceed the
reach of other subjects. We have to process someone to get him to understand,
because the thetan is relatively incapable of understanding in a degraded
state. There appears to be a close relationship between mis-education and
aberration. You could get resurgences in many areas of a case just by getting
someone to find and define misunderstood words from life.