Study Tape 6 - Study and Education

So far Study Tech hasn’t covered the professional practice of what one has learned.

The whole subject of education has as its end product the accomplishment of certain doingnesses and ends/aims professionally. It is very different from a dilettantish “walk around the edges”.

To call the modern school system education is quite laughable.

You can’t just “educate” someone with no end in view.

An enormous amount of money is spent on a person’s education without them becoming educated.

Arithmetic is hard to teach because it has no stated end goal of itself. (There is actually a statable purpose to it.)

Arithmetic has therefore become degraded, something you “have to know to do higher maths” when in fact it could be used to solve some problems for which algebra or calculus are used.

There used to be people very skilled in sight arithmetic, able to add up columns of very large numbers.

Nobody is delineating the purpose of arithmetic (not “a purpose doesn’t exist”) so one doesn’t consider he can become educated in it.

As the purpose of a subject falls away, so does the subject itself, no only in the individual but also in the society.

Vice-versa (and more obviously) there is no purpose to studying a dead subject.

The difference between a live study and a dead one is a live subject has a use, a dead subject does not.

A live study becomes a dead study (for the society and the individual) (a) because it really is no longer of any use (e.g. buggy whips) and (b) because one omits it (including its purpose) as part of the educational process.

Therefore a person cannot become educated in a dead subject as it has no end purpose/product.

It’s a question of what purpose is there, not what purpose could we dream up to put there.

A person studying a dead subject can easily become obsessed with it—he can’t demonstrate his virtuosity and nobody will listen (he seems like a crank).

If somebody doesn’t listen to you talking about Scientology, it’s because you didn’t explain the purpose it might have or them personally. It also has to be, to them, an attainable, doable purpose that they can believe.

For an educational subject to exist, it must have an attainable, valuable purpose that can be made real to the student.

The value of the subject depends simply and utterly on the value of obtaining the stated purpose.

A culture is held together solely by education (taught or experienced).

There are two types of subject: “vital” and “nice”.

Education achieved is remunerated to the degree its service is understood to be valuable by the public.

Two of the most highly values services are stockbrokers and undertakers.

If a subject continues to be needed it will be preserved and relayed.

You can destroy a subject by destroying its purpose or its relay, or by tacking lots of things on to its technology that don't belong there.

The number of opportunities to fail are directly proportional to the length of the approach.

This is balanced by the need for a gradient.

Preparatory action or length of course of study should not be so long that it needlessly multiplies opportunities for failure and not so short that it takes a person up too steep.

An educational subject is simply that something that winds up in a doingness and is approached by the process of getting educated in it. That’s a hell of a thing to have to say, but hardly anybody really knows this.

People are constantly engaged in activities which they do very badly and fail at like crazy and it never occurs to them that they’ve never been educated in the subject.

Teachers who are themselves failures at a subject dramatise their failures and cause their students to fail.

“No writer really knows whether he has a style or not until he has sat down and written a couple of hundred thousand words.” I.e. you should do the thing you’re learning to do.

A subject has to be accepted by the society in which it exists for it to be a professional subject.

True knowledge will give a correct emphasis and merely theoretical knowledge will give a wrong emphasis.

Unrealities enter when an educational activity teaches solutions to problems that don’t exist or fails to solve problems that do exist. Experience allows you to determine which is which.

All subjects (even “pure” maths, etc.) wind up in a specific doingness if they’re subjects in which a person can become educated.

A subject that doesn’t wind up with a specific doingness is significance without the mass.

You could understand that you were studying nothing and therefore expect no mass and not get upset by its absence.

Lack of mass phenomena are described at this point in the tape.

Understand this in its purity: educating a person in a mass which he doesn’t have and which isn’t available produces physiological reactions. It’s just a fact.

You would expect the greatest incidence of suicide or illness in that field of education most devoted to studying absent masses (e.g. the French educational system).

You can get the urge to apply something you are studying; to the degree that you don’t, you get upset.

Physical phenomena for too steep a gradient and bypassed definition are described here.

These are distinct phenomena which tell you which barrier to study you have encountered. There may be a fourth and a fifth.

Lack of mass is the least “upset” of these.

Differentiate gradients from definitions as they sound similar. Gradients apply to doingness but hangs over into understandingness. Plotted course of forward motion is what interests us.

Phenomenon of assigning difficulty to wrong place applies to gradients.

The restoration of doingness depends only upon the restoration of the misunderstood word, the misunderstood definition.