That’s not the way it was early on. Staff were accountable, and apologetic if they made a mistake.

You seem like a very bitter person, M_Kid, and that’s understandable if you had negative experiences. However, when it colors truth, you must be called out on it.

Study Tech taken on its own has nothing to do with indoctrination. It is simple common sense put down on paper.

Oddly, the article above talks about three barriers to study. For the record, when I took the Student Hat course back in 1977, there were four barriers to study. The one left out above was that the student had to conceive that he had something to learn about the subject at hand.

So what we have, in essence, is:
1. A student must believe there is something he can learn about the subject, which also relates to an interest in the subject or confidence that they can learn the subject at all.
2. The student should learn correctly the terminology associated with the subject as necessary.
3. The student should progress at a pace where (a) concepts don’t come too quickly to digest or (b) so slowly that the student loses interest. For example, you don’t teach addition for four years, but you also don’t go straight from addition to calculus.
4. The student needs practical experience as they learn so that the material is meaningful. For example, in the math example, you work out problems appropriate to the material you are currently studying. If it’s wood shop, you don’t just read about building a cabinet, you look at pictures of a cabinet, then you build one.

That is simple and powerful. Every course you’ve ever taken in any subject tries to do that, and with various levels of success depending on the skill of the teacher and the developer of the course.

I’ve had courses which did not follow those principles well, which were very difficult to follow.

Divorce it from your antagonism toward the source, and there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with it, and in fact a great deal right with it. I’ve used that all my life in training employees for new positions, for courses where I’ve developed a course and taught students on a volunteer basis, and in how I myself approached learning a new set of skills.

Now. I don’t know what might have since been layered on top of that 1977 Student Hat. But at that point in time there was nothing nefarious about the material, and it was no sort of “indoctrination”. I’ve discussed the FOUR barriers to study with many people over the years, leaving out the source, and they brighten up immediately and always say something like, “Yeah, that’s right! I just never thought about it in those simply defined terms.”

As another person commented, the Conditions are also a brilliant piece of management technique that I’ve used successfully in pretty much every business project I’ve ever been involved with. Every time I’ve approached a new project with a client in those terms, they’ve always been impressed with how “wise” was my proposed course of action.

I’ve also found the Tone Scale to be an extremely valuable tool, as was the Comm Course. As a teenager I was a painfully shy person in some respects, though not in others. I could “talk back” to an adult, but couldn’t ask a girl out on a date. After I took the Comm Course, I had virtually no trouble mustering the confidence to approach anyone I needed to about any subject that I needed to handle with them.

But I’m starting to think I was lucky. I took these simple courses with very valuable tools, but I never progressed into auditing. My mother did, and I believe was much the worse for that experience. If nothing else, she became certain that she was “always right” because she “had the tech” — even when she was very, tragically wrong. It caused several bad situations and relationship breaks in our family.

Hubbard in ways was a very savvy guy. I don’t know if he decided to see just to which ridiculous extremes he could push it, or if he lost his mind in later years. If he’d stuck with things like the Student Hat and the Comm Course as a set of seminars to sell to business, he’d be a well respected household name. The route he took made him a joke to most people.

The learning techniques that lrh advocated were outdated when he put them down. You are free to follow them, but I had two separate courses on study techniques, one at university, and the other in OCS. That was well over 40 years ago. Both were far superior to study tech even then.

lrh focused on the words rather than the ideas that were embedded in the overall structure of written, spoken, and visual knowledge.

In essence, you can see what I used here: http://www.wikihow.com/Study-Using-the-Preview,-Question,-Read,-Summary,-Test-or-PQRST-Method While it’s on
the internet, and free, it has been utilized for many decades and found to be effective and efficient by people far more knowledgeable than lrh.

The problem with “word clearing” is that, especially in English, word meaning is heavily influenced by context. Using a dictionary to “word clear” is extremely limiting, and a part of the brainwashing that lrh devised. Be using his own unique definitions, or skewing the definitions towards his point of view, it isolates the person’s understanding of material.

His technique actually inhibits communication because one only understands words, concepts and ideas from his frame of reference. It’s a fucking waste of time because in the real world, new or different uses of words are introduced, not only to the language in general, but to anyone’s knowledge as they learn new things. Learning tech doesn’t have the flexibility of the English language, which is always evolving. Indeed, dictionaries add new words or meanings to words every year.

If I were you, I would be extremely wary of a person who flunked physics and had a hard time with mathematics, so he declared it unimportant. Likewise, his understanding of physiology, chemistry, history, and just about every other subject he touched on in his blathering
are
usually wrong in very important areas. He often added just enough truth or high sounding phrases to make his ideas sound legitimate. They weren’t.

Why would you trust a person who was himself a lousy student to come up with an efficient way of studying, when it’s obvious that he didn’t study very well himself? If he ever applied his own techniques, it does not show, while his ignorance does.

You are free to be a textbook squirrel, but why keep a textbook with bad information? It’s not a matter of discarding something because someone evil also used it. After all, the Nazis made the connection between smoking and lung cancer during their reign in Germany. It was based on sound statistical studies. The
purpose was to keep their warriors healthy so they could continue to
subjugate non-Aryans, but their research was valid.

Discarding study tech is a matter of discarding false information and inadequate and incomplete study techniques put forth by a person who obviously didn’t use them himself. It’s
also more efficient to discard it because one does not have spend the time to
unlearn false information.

This is true within Scn. I acquired the study manual for my own, personal use only, and it worked in the specific context in which I used it. Yes, LRH was a con man, but you don’t stop putting sugar in your coffee because Hitler liked it too.

I was never an Scn member. I used Clearbird’s version of the Study Tech (which he called the Study Manual) for a bit, and then wrote up my own. Both, naturally, were obtained for the price of zero. Furthermore, some of the LRH bulletins were similarly obtained for the price of zero.

Of course I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid. I’m a textbook squirrel—if you looked the definition up in the Scn dictionary, odds are it would have my name and photograph. I use a very small number of Scn theories sparingly for certain situations, but only because they work. Sure, I might find something more accurate on the Internet or in a book, but to be honest, I’m more concerned about what works and what doesn’t.

What LRH said and what he did were two different things and of course I have to remark on that, but wipe his name off the front cover and all mentions of Dn/Scn, you might have something decent going in the Study Manual.

Boy, did you drink the Kool Aid.

If you’d had a class in logic, debate, rhetoric, reasoning, or related fields, you’d know that those items are much better covered by others than LRH.

“Study Tech” is a term used only by $cientologists. If you wrote a handbook on it, you are probably lacking in the wider knowledge available in the rest of the world. You must be the kind of person who would spend his time trying to turn a 1975 Trabant into a grand prix racer. You spent all that time gilding shit.

Google “study techniques” or “how to study” and you’ll see, first, that there are many different approaches to learning, backed up by research. Do the same for logic, debate, reasoning and rhetoric, and buy or go to the library and check out some of those books, or even buy some, and you’ll get a much better education a lot cheaper than you did in clamworld.

LRH was a liar who stole, borrowed, distorted and made stuff up, never gave credit for any ideas to anyone else, then declared himself as “source” for information, and the little Ronbots took everything he said and wrote as gospel. He discouraged learning outside of his cloistered world by declaring any debate or questioning outside of his word as entheta, so his followers wouldn’t discover that there is a whole bunch of knowledge that he imparted on them is incomplete, wrong, or just batshit crazy.

If he was a real scientist, he’d welcome debate about his theories, as well as follow-up studies. Bookstores at real colleges have many texts, written by many different authors, and outside reading is often assigned for opinions expressed by other authors who may well disagree with the instructor. The Socratic method is not something LRH used.

At the Hubbard College of useless knowledge, there is only one author whose books are peddled: LRH’s. It’s for good reason that it is not accredited by any reputable academic agency: it’s all bullshit.

Ah, but then I feel that Scientology itself, as a whole, is an unworkable discipline (NOT a religion), but parts of it are actually worth using in modified form. A lot of Ron’s “weird” vocabulary is actually British vocabulary, so I was surprised that it was somehow controversial (dope off, natter, etc). Looking at Ron’s research materials, I did notice a bit of psychiatry-bashing, and I do think he was very wrong there, but I also noticed a lot of emphasis on Critical Thinking. Ron said not to take things on authority, but rather to make one’s own decisions regarding usefulness or not of study material. Also, “if it works for you, it works for you.”

If you use the Study Tech to quicken your mind in relation to courses that aren’t controversial/bullshit, such as maths and law, and your marks rise and stay up, what’s the problem? Same for management by stats, but that has to be modified a bit. I think that unfortunately, the name L Ron Hubbard has been tainted by the Dianetics/Scn, and the work that’s actually decent is judged much too harshly, simply due to the author’s name.

Out of boredom, I actually wrote a Study Tech handbook. I chose Study Tech because of Hubbard’s tainted name, and because the Scientology organisation, headed by an axe-crazy midget named David Miscarriage, does not deserve money, especially for a work that was supposed to be free. Now there IS a free ST handbook on the net, written pseudonymously as Clearbird’s Basic Study Manual, but it’s written at an elementary school grade level and filled with pictures; I used that and Hubbard’s original stuff to write mine.

I asked various people, none of which had done the Scn thing and most of which were rightly critical about it, in regards to the workability of my study guide. I actually got compliments about how the book helped. My personal opinion is that you can talk about how controversial or wrong a discipline or book is, but the true test has to be empirical. I got jaw drops when I said it was from Scientology; the fact remained, though, that the book was empirically shown to work for several people. Some people aren’t helped by it at all, but that doesn’t change the fact that some people are. I think that after empirical testing, Study Tech, isolated from its Scientological context, can be shown to have at least some merit.

Please smoke more. Just not around me.

I was talked into taking Latin in high school because it was supposedly the language of law, medicine, and science. What I found out was that all of those disciplines used Latin, but the meanings had all acquired definitions specific to each discipline over the years. I would have been better off taking Spanish or French, IMO.

What’s my point? In every course, particularly in the social sciences, vocabulary is the first part of the course, and that vocabulary has a particular academic use that it is put to, and it
establishes a common language. Even in the physical sciences

There are courses in how to study. I had them both at university and in the military. They are only aids to systematize the acquisition of knowledge.

I’m thrilled that you were able to call an instructor out on a definition. It sure shows the superiority of study tech. Not. IMO, you just listened closely to someone who got lazy.

It’s my opinion that LRHs study tech was just another means to imbue people with his own weird vocabulary and to make them more susceptible to the rest of his mouth droppings.

Clay helped me understand chemistry and maths. So it is useful for at least one thing.