|
|
|
owever spectacular the revelatory L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology, no discussion of his overall educational contribution is complete without mention of his Key to Life course. The background to that course says much about both Mr. Hubbard’s approach to problems and the greater educational decline through the 1960s and 1970s.
As he rightly pointed out, three cultural factors through the latter decades of this century have combined to seriously diminish our ability to communicate. First, general education standards fell as new systems ignored such fundamentals as reading, writing and grammar. That decline, in turn, was hastened along with the advent of television, and more particularly the mothers who plunked down their children in front of the TV to let a continuous inflow of images serve as both leash and babysitter. Finally, and particularly through the 1960s, came the drug scourge to further dull the minds of a television generation. In consequence, whole generations were no longer able to comprehend or convey information. Moreover—and herein lay Mr. Hubbard’s entrance to the problem—those classes of the 60s and 70s were unable to utilize his earlier educational tools, simply because they could not define words necessary to grasp key instructions. It was not for nothing, then, that Mr. Hubbard began to speak of such students as “out of communication with life.”
|