How did L. Ron Hubbard come to develop Study Technology?

L. Ron Hubbard firmly believed that true education was not a matter of memorization and the learning of abstract theory, but rather of learning how to acquire and use knowledge in the pursuit of one’s goals.  This view of education lay at the center of many of his lectures and essays, as in this excerpt from a 1950 lecture:

“The end and goal of any society, as it addresses the problem of education, is to raise the ability, the initiative and the cultural level, and with all these, the survival level of that society. And when a society forgets any one of these things it is destroying itself by its own educational mediums.”

His deep and abiding interest in education extended to, among other things, authoring articles about teaching. In one such piece delineating axioms of education, he stated, “Stress the right of the individual to select only what he desires to know, to use any knowledge as he wishes, that he himself owns what he has learned.”

Through instruction and lectures to thousands of his students through the 1950s and early 1960s, he found among them the same educational maladies afflicting the rest of the world—declining literacy standards, an inability to grasp and apply material being studied and a decreasing retention of knowledge.

He set about to research what the primary barriers to learning are and to develop remedies to these barriers as the key to unlocking education for students from all walks of life.

Mr. Hubbard found that the lack of an effective technology of study and learning was preventing an understanding of the subject material by the individual. On the larger stage, it was also becoming apparent that the deficiencies in contemporary educational practices were leading to increasing rates of functional illiteracy and generating mounting social problems. With an interest in addressing both situations, he embarked on a program of personal research into the subjects of learning, study and education. Coupled with his earlier discoveries spanning some three decades, the product of that research effort is Study Technology.

Since Mr. Hubbard’s original discoveries, Study Technology has been embraced and disseminated by educators and students throughout the world, sparking a new movement in education—one that equips any student with the tools to learn anything he or she may choose to and thereby achieve those educational and personal goals hitherto unobtainable.

Is Study Technology secular so that it can be used in public schools?

Yes. Study Technology, as delivered by Applied Scholastics and its licensed organizations, is entirely secular and is used and taught by individuals of all religious beliefs, races and ethnicities.

Educators from public schools around the world have trained in Study Technology and implemented it in their own institutions and communities. Many government-affiliated educational organizations have also implemented Study Technology.

How effective is Study Technology?

Numerous studies have demonstrated that students who learn and apply Study Technology consistently achieve substantial improvements in their scholastic progress.

In a community literacy program in Los Angeles, California, 100 Study Technology participants (74 percent school age and 26 percent adults) were randomly selected. After routine pre-testing and post-testing using the standardized Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), an analysis showed that 73 percent increased their reading levels by a minimum of 3.5 grade levels, only 10 percent failed to increase by at least two grade levels, and 11 percent achieved an increase of 7.5 grade levels or better.

A pilot project using Study Technology implemented in a Memphis city school in ninth grade remedial classes showed that after six weeks of tutoring, the grade point averages (GPA) of the project participants was 1.0 to 3.0 with an average of 1.9, compared to the GPA range for students who did not participate, which was 0.0 to 1.4 with an average of 0.7.

In Mexico City, Study Technology was introduced into a private high school in which one class had a 95 percent failure rate. After the students learned to use Study Technology, the same class achieved a 90 percent passing rate.

A study undertaken in England found that students improved their reading levels by 1.3 years after only ten hours of study using Mr. Hubbard’s educational methodology.

A literacy program in South Africa produced an average gain in reading level of 2.25 years. In the same country, the pass rate of students enrolled in nineteen government schools increased from 43 to 78 percent after Study Technology had been in use for only six months.

Also in South Africa, Education Alive, an Applied Scholastics affiliated organization, introduced Study Technology into a teacher’s college. The dropout rate for teacher trainees fell dramatically, to only 2 percent, as a direct and immediate result of the program.

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