“'What is this HCO Bulletin's first section?' is about as dull as one can get. 'What are the rules given about …?' is a question I would never bother to ask.”

HCO P/L 24 September 1964
Instruction and Examination, Raising the Standard of
(OEC Vol. 4, p. 327)

“Doesn't matter how complex a study is … it still can be memorized, it can be spat back on the examination paper — if you work hard enough and your memory's good enough. But you can't apply it … because there was no understanding in it with which to apply it.”

Tape: Study and Intention
18 August 1966

“Ability to evaluate is much more important in any formal or informal educational process than ability to memorize … Education has been made into a control of recall in contemporary schools. The data is forced into the student with a value welded to it. It is worth little thereafter …”

Dianometry, Your Ability and State of Mind
January, 1951
(Tech Vol. 1, p. 94 )

“And the situation that arose in the eighth grade was that nobody could get an A mark except two Chinese who were in the school. And they had learned how to study, but so have parrots learned how to study if that is their study. And they would get up and they would reel off the page number and the paragraph and everything else of the history-book assignments, you see, and they'd give it to you verbatim. Most marvelous job of total duplication you ever heard of, but they would not be able to tell you what universe, and if you had varied one comma or asked for an opinion on that material studied in that way, they would have come a cropper at once, and very frequently did.

“… This is a case of perfect, complete perfect duplication without a grain of sense connected with it; and that's absolutely deadly, so that isn't how you study. Deadly! But perhaps you should be able to do that, but I would consider that a mental feat, and I don't think study has anything to do with mental feats. Study has to do with understanding.”

Tape: Studying: Introduction
18 June 1964

“As a society declines … the educational process becomes one of semi-hypnotically receiving doughy masses of data and regurgitating them upon examination papers.”

Science of Survival, Chapter 27